Make It A Trend Part 2: EA (!!!) Releases Source Code For Four ‘Command & Conquer’ Games
from the b-EA-utiful dept
In our recent discussion about Valve releasing the source code for Team Fortress 2, you should have noticed that that post was headlined as a “Part 1.” This post is Part 2 and is arguably way more impressive and important for a couple of reasons we’ll get into. But as a reminder, the entire reason we’re having this discussion about gaming companies releasing the source code for their games, even if that takes more time than we’d like, is that it goes a long, long way to solving the preservation question. The bargain that is copyright law in America is perhaps uniquely broken when it comes to the video game space. That is because many, many games rely on storefronts to keep them available, updates so that these games can run on modern hardware, and sometimes backend infrastructure to keep them either running at all, or capable of providing the full original experience. If any of those requirements go unaddressed, you have a preservation problem, especially when those same games are not legitimately available elsewhere.
Valve is a big company, sure, but it’s revenue is not derived mainly from producing games, but selling them. What we really need to start seeing, if this trend is going to be fruitful for preservation purposes, is major developers and publishers, whose revenue chiefly comes from selling games, getting on board. And to that end, it’s quite significant to see that Electronic Arts, a company that only occasionally receives praise on our pages, has released the source code for four Command & Conquer games.
You may, as someone possibly young enough to have been untroubled by the Command & Conquer games in their heyday, see this as a relatively minor act. It’s really, really not. And if we’re going to be fiercely critical of EA when it does horrible things, it’s also crucial that we celebrate when the publisher does something this important.
Any game being made publicly available for free (as in: yours to keep, copy, share forever) is to be celebrated, in an industry that usually so spitefully clings on to long-dead IPs that it refuses to sell, but still employs lawyers to prevent being accessible. But releasing a game’s source code is next level. This is not the game itself, as in a thing to boot up and play, but rather the flesh and bones that makes the game exist. It’s all the secrets. It offers developers the ability to see exactly how a game was put together, read all the hilariously botched bits of code the devs strung together in desperation to get a game out the door, and learn how the best in the business constructed their games.
This is actually bigger than just releasing the source code, as Kotaku goes on to note. Valve’s release was done under an SDK license, specifically limiting any new output using the code to free projects, rather than commercial projects. EA, however, went way further. The company released the source code for these games under a GNU General Public License, also referred to as a copyleft license. There are still some restrictions put on anyone who makes new content using the code in terms of ensuring that buyers receive the same freedoms the content-maker has, but it does not restrict selling that content. In other words, this is EA saying, “Hey, here’s how we made these games. Here’s the code. Use it if you want. Sell what you make of it, or give it away for free.”
That E-freaking-A is doing this is big.
What makes this Command & Conquer move quite so striking is that it’s EA doing it. They’re not exactly a company known for, let’s say, loving acts of kindness. In more recent years, the publisher has become synonymous with the lowest aspects of video gaming, from forcing its games to be played with an internet connection before the era of widely-available broadband, to gacha awfulness with its gambling-adjacent loot boxes. In fact, the C&C name itself was run into the ground until it was all but worthless after EA forced in always-on DRM to hastily made sequels and released terrible free-to-play mobile versions.
But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? Is this a crack in their tough, outer veneer? A sign of a future EA that is interested in games preservation, and the open and free sharing of intellectual property from which it no longer has a means to meaningfully profit? Because dear God, I hope so.
Again, that EA is doing this is important for two primary reasons. The most obvious is that it’s a milestone of sorts to see a AAA game publisher be willing to bypass its copyrights on its own work this way. I’m not sure if there is a good comp for this in between today and id Software doing something similar with the Doom franchise (prior to Microsoft gobbling up the rights to later games and not following id Software’s lead, of course). EA has a reputation well earned as an IP protectionist, after all, so this move is fairly striking for the company.
But perhaps just as important is that its stature within the industry is such that perhaps other AAA publishers, and others, will pay attention to the move and duplicate it.
And I hope other publishers sit up and take notice about how we’re all now making cooing noises and scratching EA under its chin, rather than simply scowling at it. This should be normal! It’s essentially free to a publisher—you just stick the source code on Github and eat your lumps. Somehow one of the most controversial things I ever wrote was suggesting that games should go into the public domain a full 20 years after their first release, despite this seeming like the most sensible, industry-boosting action possible, at a point when publishers are no longer making real money from the original versions. OK, so in the case of most the games being made available here, we’re talking closer to 30 years. But I’ll take it!
Turning the industry away from longstanding practices is a bit like steering the Titanic, of course, so I’m not sure at what velocity we’ll see this trend expand. But the gaming industry is also one that can pivot quickly, so perhaps I’ll be surprised. Regardless, however fast or not this goes, the trend is a good one and should be encouraged, if for no other reason than for the preservation of games as cultural output.
Filed Under: command and conquer, gpl, open source, source code, video games
Companies: ea
Comments on “Make It A Trend Part 2: EA (!!!) Releases Source Code For Four ‘Command & Conquer’ Games”
Pedantic note: this is EA saying “hey, here’s how Westwood Studios made these games, which we later bought the rights to”.
Oh hell yes! I recall that Generals supposedly still has a pretty active playerbase, so this should be great for them.
Renegade I played once, really loved the concept of it. Would be amazing to see it revived in one form or the other by a dedicated community, especially now that there’s basically free reign for it.
I’d say that’s still too long. Even today, the best games that aren’t “live services” come and go with nary an afterthought. Not every game gets years of updates like, say, big-name fighting games such as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I’d say that ten years after the last actual update should be long enough for a videogame copyright term. And yes, if applied today, that would mean putting every videogame released before the 1st of January 2015 in the public domain—any system, any publisher, no exceptions.
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One could make a reasonable argument that “games” and “game engines” deserve different copyright policies. Hell, software wasn’t even copyrightable in the U.S.A. till 1964, as it was considered purely functional. Whereas games, as a whole, are creative in a way that’s similar to television and film.
I do have to wonder whether the idea of determining whether a game is being “updated” makes sense. I suppose, in some sense, it would be like a copyright renewal (and I think copyright should require registration, perhaps including renewal, plus source code escrow). But why not let the original game go into the public domain when its copyright period ends? If the updated version, with non-trivial additions still under copyright, is so much better, people will want it—which would be an incentive for the original developer to keep maintaining it. (And if fans can do the same improvements with the now de-escrowed code, so be it. There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition.)
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If I had to contextualize that notion, it would probably go like this: A game that receives post-release updates should go public domain ten years after its last post-release update, which would include content/DLC additions, but not bugfixes or other insignificant changes to the game. This way, you don’t get companies putting out an update with some insignificant tweak every nine years to extend the copyright into eternity. WWE 2K15, for example, received its last DLC pack in March 2015, so by the standard I’ve set here, that game would go into the public domain on the 1st of January 2026.
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I phrased my comment a little poorly. I shouldn’t have asked whether it “makes sense”; I do see an internal logic in it, but it’s only solving a problem created in your same proposal (we don’t need a way to extend existing copyrights). So, the appropriate question is whether it’s good public policy.
For example, someone releases a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation pretty much every year. It doesn’t really matter that the original’s been public domain for decades. The derivatives get their own, new copyrights, and people who’d rather read the originals can do so. It seems to work fine, some minor legal squabbling aside.
So, what’s wrong with the original WWE 2K15 going public-domain based on its original release date, and the DLC packs based on their own dates?
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The DLC was released in 2015 and the base game was released in 2014. Under your proposal, we’d be waiting a whole-ass year for specific parts of the game to go into the public domain. Under my proposal, the game and all its DLC would enter PD at the same time.
I see the last DLC package as an “end of support” moment where the game is effectively “finished”. That moment should start the countdown clock on when the game, in its “finished” form, enters PD.
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Sure, with the specific example you named. We could use EverQuest as an alternate example. First released March 1999, with the most recent expansion released December 2024. They’ll probably release another around the end of 2025. I don’t see why that should affect the copyright of the 1999 version.
Or there are several circa-2005 engines, including Source, Cry, and IW, which have been updated in the last 5 years.
I think we’re in agreement abouth the “finished form” entering PD at the same time. I just don’t see why that should be extending the copyright of “unfinished” versions. If it was finished enough for the game maker to release it, why should they get the private benefit of copyright while denying the public their corresponding benefit?
There’s also the purely practical matter of courts having to decide which changes are “not bugfixes or other insignificant changes”. I’d rather avoid that complexity, and the inevitable abuse of companies finding and doing the absolute court-accepted minimum to “milk” their copyrights. We could be on the 30th iteration of Street Fighter II by now (provided they could find unused combinations of superlatives; they’ve already done “Turbo”, “Super”, “Super Turbo”, “Hyper”, and “Ultra”).
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Yes, I admit that live service games are trickier to handle under my proposal. After all, how would one determine when a specific “version” of a live service game should fall into PD if the game is continuously updated for years—and in the case of Everquest, decades? Would it require putting the original base code from the moment of original publication into PD ten years after that publication, or would it require waiting for the actual end-of-service date and putting the full source code for the game and its updates into PD ten years later?
That said: These questions still come into play with current copyright term lengths. Answering them will be tricky no matter how long we have to wait for a game to fall into PD.
Wanting to preserve the “final” game should be the top priority of games preservation. We should want to preserve games in as playable a state as possible and in ways that ensure the most content is available in the future. That isn’t to say “unfinished” versions couldn’t be preserved or fall into PD earlier. I also understand the arguments for preserving those versions—and I consider them valid, to boot. But if I had to make a decision on how the law would work in these situations, I’d pick the “end of support” date as the marker for when a game will enter PD.
Funny thing: Under my proposal (including the “end of support” marker for DLC), every Street Fighter game up to Street Fighter IV, all of Capcom’s licensed Marvel games up to Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, both Capcom vs. SNK games, and every Darkstalkers game would have fallen into PD by now.
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Basically yes, although “putting” makes it sound more active than it really is. Society granted them a limited-time monopoly privilege, the time limit expired, and the former copyright holder doesn’t have to do a thing.
If you’re looking for a more specific recipe: anyone wanting software copyright has to deposit a copy of the code with the Library of Congress (meeting various requirements such as compilability), which the library will publish on copyright expiry. They don’t have to care about subsequent patches; if the company claimed copyright on those versions, they’ll be released at the proper time.
I don’t agree, and I think it’s important to release things as the public saw them initially. The original EverQuest is important in the same way the original Star Wars is. It doesn’t matter if their makers see them as unfinished products that should never be experienced by anyone ever again. EverQuest from 2010 and 2020 will be important too, because historians always like to see how things progressed. But the final version will exist in a very different cultural context: the original was a phenomenon, one of the first games of its kind, while the last one will be a niche product like the last Star Trek: TNG novel.
One shouldn’t expect that the later versions will be “more playable” than earlier ones. I suspect very few new players are getting into EverQuest these days, whereas the original version had to introduce players to new concepts. So maybe the original is more playable, and the year-2037 version will only really make sense to people who’d been following it for decades (which is how I feel about recent Star Wars and Marvel stuff). Old versions tend to be easier to emulate, too.
Maybe, but if the law had actually existed in its proposed form since 1990, maybe Capcom would’ve milked the series even harder just to hang onto that copyright.
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Everything else you said is a fair point, so I’mma just address this:
Possible, but unlikely. Although some arcade games did get updates every now and again, those updates weren’t delivered in the same way updates to modern games are delivered. (For starters, they required actual physical labor to install!) Given the costs that would’ve entailed both development of any updates and delivery of said updates to arcade machines, Capcom was legitimately better off with the update methodology they used back then: Make a new version that was effectively treated as a new game (including the cabinet), then sell the “new” game to arcades. They legit milked two different sub-series of the Street Fighter franchise (Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III) that way.
In any case, under my proposal, we can safely assume that Capcom stopped updating the original Street Fighter II when Street Fighter II: Championship Edition dropped, so the original game would’ve entered the PD long before Street Fighter IV was released.
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It might be treated by the market as a new game, but we’d have to carefully consider whether they could arrange to have it treated as an old game by the Copyright Office. I could see such a thing getting as complex as tax “loopholes”, which is why I lean toward simpler ideas.
There are all kinds of fun examples, like whether a Jaffa cake is a biscuit or cake, whether the tomato is a fruit or vegetable, and whether the X-Men are human (Marvel convinced a court they weren’t—meaning their action figures would not be taxed as dolls—and then told the public “our heroes are living, breathing human beings”).
Complexity mostly benefits lawyers, and people who can afford to employ large teams of them; it tends not to benefit the general public.
(I’d looking at Wikipedia’s “Madden NFL” page and noticing they’re unclear about which releases are “new games” and which are just “new versions”, but I don’t know that trying to disentangle that would really help anyone.)
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All fair points.
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Except that McVitie’s vs HMRC wasn’t brought for the purpose of the biscuit company gaining a tax loophole, it was to avoid unfairly paying VAT (sales tax) on a zero-rated product Nice try otherwise, though.
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As much as I wish this would happen, it’d be more likely for the moon to spontainously detonate.
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I’ve little doubt it would ever happen, but it’s fun to dream.
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I don’t know that I disagree but I think one potential unintended consequence is that it might discourage the practice of releasing the source while continuing to sell the assets, in favor of the practice of releasing remasters with slightly better graphics every couple of years.
1980s operating systems, too
Microsoft has, perhaps surprisingly, published the source code to some old MS-DOS versions, including the elusive MS-DOS 4.0 with multi-tasking. Under a free software license, even (the permissive MIT/Expat license).
And Apple’s published the Lisa operating system code, though not under a free license (Apple can terminate the license arbitrarily, at which point everyone is required to destroy their copy).
Double-take
When I first read this, I had to do a double-take: “Wait, EA? Electronic Arts EA?”
What’s more, not only did they release the source for those games, but they also added Steam Workshop support for several other C&C games, like Generals.
My only thought is that the remastered version did something good they saw.
I don’t know what it is, but I welcome it. Please, do more like this, EA!
This is not the game itself, as in a thing to boot up and play,
It isif you compile it and have the assets (which i would think are part ofsource anyway).
Unless the wrote their own language, a toolchain (if not in source) can be reversed and the gamecan be compiled.
Otherwise, it sure helps with modding.
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Game assets are not usually considered part of the source code, and a quick browse of the GitHub repo suggests the assets aren’t there. To play the game you will need to copy the assets from a legally-owned copy of the game. The README includes a link for doing that.
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That’s how it works in the DooM and Quake derivatives. The game maps and assets remain ID Software’s; but with the new game maps and assets, nobody’s complaining.
…Yep, Hell has officially frozen over. EA is doing something pro-preservation and pro-consumer.