Score one for the good guys and the gamers and the genre today: Clockwork Labs has announced that it’s open-sourcing its upcoming MMORPG sandbox BitCraft. The studio says it’s doing so to make the genre more accessible, to give back to the open-source community that has helped it, and to benefit BitCraft itself.
“We believe deeply in the genre of massively-multiplayer games and the unforgettable social experiences that these games can create, but the barrier to entry is simply too high to allow indie developers to experiment in the space,” Clockwork says. “Building a single, scalable, editable world like BitCraft’s presents perhaps one of the most difficult technical challenges in server-side backends. We believe that the BitCraft source code will provide both an example of how to build an MMO and an example of how to use SpacetimeDB to do so. That’s both a win for the developer community and for our platform.”
Moreover, Clockwork argues that collaboration with other open-source groups will benefit BitCraft, whether it’s in the form of tools or even forked player-run versions of the game.
The company believes BitCraft will represent the “first venture backed/commercially developed MMORPG open sourced under an open source license” and says that its plan is “uncharted territory,” though we could surely point to a few other MMOs that could chip away at that title, including EVE Online’s platform, Ryzom, PlaneShift, Meridian 59, Eternal Lands, and Myst Online. MOP’s Justin did a run-down of still more open-source-ish titles a few years ago. The more, the merrier, we say.
“This is uncharted territory and we are essentially running an experiment. For this reason we’re not licensing or open sourcing the game’s assets – the art, music, and IP will still be protected for the time being. But all of the code that makes the game run will be made public. We have not chosen the exact license under which we will be open sourcing the game’s code, but it will be one of the OSI’s approved open source licenses.”
The devs do clarify they’re going to launch the game into early access before beginning the open-source transition.
