Developer Frictional Games announced the publication of the famous horror games Amnesia: Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs into open source. In honor of the 10th anniversary of the release of the first game in the series, the company has published the source code of the games, so that users can freely create various modifications to games and maintain their “lifecycle”.
Studio director Thomas Grip notes that more than a thousand fan modifications have been created for the Amnesia games on various sites. In response to such strong fun support, the company decided to give the creators a “gift” of the games’ source code.
Now fans will be able to modify the game code in any way they like, create in-game mods or independent separate programs. Under the GPL 3 license, such products even may be distributed commercially, but only if the source code is open just like in original games.
This innovation will be useful both for creative fans and for the company itself because the transition of games to open-source doesn’t mean that Frictional Games will stop selling them. The wave of new modifications will fuel interest in games, and even Amnesia: The Dark Descent, released in 2010, could bring profit to the company again.
