I've been contemplating the idea of releasing the source code for my game to the public with the intent of allowing the player base to view and contribute to it.

I know that this has worked quite well with other software projects, but I haven't really heard of many games that actually had their source open to the public.

What would your opinion be on a project like this?

What do you think would be the pros and cons?

Side note: If I did decide to release my games source, it would be under a license that would require people to release any derived projects with the same or an equivalent license.

Thanks,

General Awesome

Be interesting to know the game genre? Details?

You know about Battle for Wesnoth ? Also Glest and UFO: Alien Invasion? Not an expert, but aren't those open source?

Wesnoth is a great game by any standards, although the difficulty levels are tough! To me that's inspirational, a game of such quality and depth is open source. I believe it took a while to get to that stage!

PRO: If your game becomes popular the modding community would love the source.

CON: Very easy to repackage your game and sell ( boot-leg ).

Actually, there are many thousands of open source games, it's just that nobody cares about 99.9% of them. Everybody see the top-10 like Wesnoth, and the others are lost in the sea. ...same goes for released games, where it's probably even tougher to find an audience.

At least, with open source, you'd have a little bit more exposure and the communitie's blessing.

I'll have to think about this some more.

I would like to do it, as I personally love open source projects. I just want to make sure that I do it right the first time.

Thanks for the feedback so far guys! It's really helping out.