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A comment on Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993. Parent comment

Re:Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM ... by andrewstuart2 on Monday February 20, 2017 @11:44PM (#13693335)
It's not like they'd lose sales either. Depending on the game I'll bet it's pretty hard or even impossible to compile the source into a working game. I'd much rather pay the $5 it's going for on Steam than spend 8 hours playing with compiler settings, library versions, etc. Not even close to worth my time, but exploring the code on the other hand would be really interesting.
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Re:Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM ... by kibwen on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @12:01AM (#13693414)
Bethesda (maker of the Elder Scrolls games) provides binaries of the first two games in the series, Arena and Daggerfall, for free on their website (you need to find a DOS emulator to actually run them, they recommend DOSBox). It's not quite the source, but it's enough to suggest to me that financial concerns aren't the reason they don't release the source for these old games.
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Re:Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM ... by cderwin on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @01:05AM (#13693649)
Perhaps it's internal tooling/libraries? I wouldn't be surprised if derivatives of projects from back then were used in more recent games.
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Re:Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM ... by gravypod on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @01:37AM (#13693755)
That's almost definetly it. Tim Cain, the "original" developer of Fallout, talked about a lot of the features of the engine. These are things that are either in use now in the GameByro engine, currently used by The Artist Known as Black Isles, or would be valuable to current day game developers.
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