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In a world where you can get a copyright strike for using about three seconds of audio from a TikTok video in a reaction video on YouTube, it is a profound rarity to see a company that has been around for decades, take its most valuable asset and say, “here ya go world, have it and do as you will with it.”
CCP Games, the developer of perhaps the grandest video game of all time, Eve Online, is readying its propriety Carbon Development Platform to go Open Source. That’s right, I can use it, you can use it, anyone can use it – the system that made Eve Online. Of course, if I were to use it it would be largely pointless, but in the right hands, the dream is that Eve Online could be around as long as humanity (so, potentially just a few more weeks then the way it’s going).
In a terrific interview with Gamesindustry.biz CCP’s CEO Hilmar Pétursson says, “We want Eve Online to go on forever. Open sourcing the platform that powers it in my view is greatly increasing the odds of that happening.”
“If you look at the macro trends in software, generally code that is open and shared has a higher chance to be robust over a period of time …You can also see this with Unreal Engine, which is a pretty big deal in the industry. The source for Unreal is readily available to everyone – it’s not an open-source project, but the source code is there. It’s immensely helpful.”
Pétursson Is very much aware the shelf-life of game developers is not infinite, telling Gamesindustry that “Companies generally don’t live very long. CCP is already quite an old company by gaming standards. We’re not Nintendo, we haven’t been here for 200 years, but we’re 27 – that’s already quite long because game companies are just not very likely to live for a long time.”
“I know when you give tools to people in a community, they will make awesome things. This is the story of human life, and they will outdo your creativity way more than you think. Every time you try to put a lid on it, you curb the potential. Make it open, and the sky is the limit.”
You can read the full interview here and it is well worth 10 minutes of your time.
