Devs who open source their games, why?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/gamedev

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  • shapez.io

    shapez is an open source base building game on Steam inspired by factorio!

  • For example, the ones I'm most aware of are Mindustry and shapez.io.

  • Mindustry

    The automation tower defense RTS

  • For example, the ones I'm most aware of are Mindustry and shapez.io.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • ILSpy

    .NET Decompiler with support for PDB generation, ReadyToRun, Metadata (&more) - cross-platform!

  • ILSpy for example can extract all of the C# source code for a Unity game in almost exactly the same form as it was originally.

  • SNKRX

    A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes.

  • I'm the developer of SNKRX and on top of what most other people mentioned, the truth of the matter is that making games is hard and making games while working on someone else's codebase is even harder. Anyone who has the capacity to do anything useful with your game's codebase will likely also have the capacity to make their own game from scratch, so they'll just do that instead.

  • pixel-dungeon-gradle

    A version of the Pixel Dungeon source code using the gradle build system

  • Shovelware companies for sure do this. But I mean it's nothing you would have heard of, just crappy app store games or sketchy download sites. There's a lot of very cheap games built off of the Pixel Dungeon source code: https://github.com/00-Evan/pixel-dungeon-gradle

  • aseprite

    Animated sprite editor & pixel art tool (Windows, macOS, Linux)

  • Go try to sell a copy of aseprite to someone. Just try. It’s open source with a price tag. If it’s so easy, prove me wrong and sell a copy of it to someone.

  • skia-binaries

    Prebuilt binaries generated with GitHub Actions that are downloaded by skia-binding's build.rs script.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • VVVVVV

    The source code to VVVVVV! http://thelettervsixtim.es/

  • Also VVVVVV wasn't actually open sourced. It's source available. In particular, per its license, it explicitly forbids selling copies:

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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