The problem with that is IP.

Take a game like Star Wars Galaxies, for instance. Sony didn't own the rights to Star Wars; it was licensing them. When it shut down the game, turning the code over to the public would have been a violation of their license and would have gotten them sued.

Now let's take an example of a game based on original IP. Even then, the publisher presumably wants to maintain its control over that IP. It wants to preserve the option to sell new iterations on that IP at some point in the future.

Even in the case of a publisher's going bankrupt or shutting down, it will attempt to liquidate its assets (IP being a key asset) in order to pay off its creditors. (For example: this is how the Terminator franchise keeps surviving in various iterations, despite the bankruptcy of its original IP holder. The rights were auctioned off at fire sale prices, rather than simply committed to the public domain.)

Intellectual property is the entire basis of the entertainment industry, be it movies or games. It is, accordingly, very fiercely guarded.

[Note: this is not a comment about the ethics or the morals of IP, nor a comment on what game companies should do. It is merely an observation.]

I wonder if some kind of trust arrangement in the original IP license could accommodate this.

ie: At the end of this licensure period, $publisher may make technical game material available for use. These materials do not extend a license etc etc. $publisher may not charge for, etc etc.

Most of the time, these old games will have small user bases, and if not, the licensor should be able to exploit that in some way.

It's an interesting thought. And I've actually seen games in the wild where something kinda-sorta like this seems to have happened. Not, MMOs. But in some cases old PC or Mac games, now being rereleased, decades later, as nostalgia plays. In cases where there was an IP license involved in the original game, the rereleases are sometimes (but rarely) genericized. Your hypothetical Chewbacca the Wookiee becomes Grordor the Tree Troll, and his Chewbacca sprite is replaced by a bit-riddled rendition of an orangutan with a crossbow. Or what have you.

Of course, every license is slightly to significantly different from the rest. So no telling which games involved more liberal or more restrictive terms within their original agreements.

I've been thinking about this before, but more in the sense of ever-increasing copy protection: I would propose that, in order to qualify for extended-term copyright, an unencumbered version is put in escrow, outside of the copyright owner's control. This would then ensure that when the copyright term is over, the work is still available and in a suitable format for adaptation.

Not sure how that would translate to MMO games though... should we put only the code and design in escrow, or also (parts of) the generated worlds? Player characters? Design tools?

A good case where this happened was with the Flash 2D "Crafting" MMO named "Glitch" created by the former Flickr founders. After the game terminated, they released all the art and source code to the public domain: https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

Because of it, two revival projects exist: Eleven (http://elevengiants.com/) and Children of Ur (http://childrenofur.com/).

I only played this game briefly when it was around and it didn't hold my interest for long, but it was a really unusual and quirky game. I'm sure the devs go into more detail somewhere why it failed, but it was likely because of bad timing-- it was a post-Farmville Flash game during the time when mobile gaming and HTML5 were really starting to kick off.

Glitch pivoted into Slack. :)

It's funny that the photo-sharing part of the "Game Neverending" MMO became Flickr, and the chat tool they created to communicate while working on Glitch became Slack. It's a double coincidence of side-project success.

I would like to see a binding license that commits the source to public domain (or GPL) after a set number of years or a certain event (like closing of service).

Hopefully if it got popular game companies and crowd sourced games would be "forced" to use it.

Lot's of dependencies are used that they do not own the rights to do this with. Not practical.

What about documenting the requirements to rebuild it from scratch? Not trivially done, but these are exactly the types of games that attract the people willing to put in the work.

Publishers may wind up spending money and diverting resources just to give their IP away to people who might otherwise be customers for new properties.

Typically not so much on the servers. And in nearly all cases a "no third party proprietary code" server requirement is very feasible.

Not always, Star Wars has been reverse engineered and brought back online. http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php

Useful commented server stuff would be nice, but the least they could do just drop the server blob and let the community figure it out.

Needing to reverse engineer the servers is the hard part.

I've spend far too much time on this project than I care to admit.

It was a incredible adventure, we had to reverse everything from server to client. We made our own tools, reversed each packet byte by byte, maintained a wiki. It took years. I personally learned alot and would love to do something like that again. If only I had time.

One of the best way to learn if you ask me.

I've always wondered what happens to all the art assets; you'd think there would be just tons of 3d models from defunct games that could all go to some open repository.

In the US, copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the creator, even if the copyright holder doesn't actively do anything with the IP.

Those art assets probably just languish on some backup server. If they're not just completely lost.

Likely works for hire so I guess that's 95 years. I assume for a lot of companies they go thru some liquidation and hopefully aren't just wasted.

Isn't it 95 years now?

You're thinking of works made for hire or anonymous/pseudonymous works, which is the lesser of 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation:

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf

WTF? And just when I thought it couldn't get any crazier.

More dollars that could be spent on other more profitable activities.

Toontown, one of the games mentioned in the article, also got a pretty popular reverse engineered server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toontown_Online#Closure

Better to just embrace creative destruction and let them go. One thing dies that a new thing might live.