A lot of huge gaming genres came to be from modding, level editors etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_derived_...

ARTS (Dota, LoL) to battle royale (PUBG, Fortnite, Apex), Tactical shooters (CS), team/hero shooters (TF, OW) and more…

All of these genres came from making modding accessible and are some of the most successful genres to date.

The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.)

Free software might be an appropriate answer to this.

I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and would have likely been blocked even if they tried.

It's true though that live service games are quite antithetical to modding because of their need to control player progression and sell it.

Still, I would say the divide between games which supported modding and games that didn't has always existed, with much fewer games in the first category, and there are still huge games coming out today that do. It's even become possible to create mods for console games, so it's not all doom and gloom.

Games much, much older than GoG used to have various ways of doing DRM, though to be fair some were laughably easy to bypass (codes printed in the manual and such).

Warcraft 3 (2002, 2003) was infamously lax on IP, leading to e.g. several big DotA clones that employed the modders (Dota2 for Icefrog, LoL for Guinsoo) and legal disputes on who owned which properties [1][2]. Blizzard revised their EULA in 2020 to prevent similar cases. [3]

[1] https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91202572&pty=OPP&eno...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/05/does-valve-really-own...

[3] https://dotesports.com/general/news/warcraft-iii-reforgeds-u...

Note that I don't think anything in the W3: reforged terms of service would prevent a new game being created based on a W3 mod, it would just prevent it from using the same name and art as the mod. This is exactly what happened to all other successful mods, with Dota2 being pretty much the sole exception.

Also, Riot mostly proved that you don't actually need the artwork or names to be massively successful - you just need to recognize a good idea and be the first to market with a polished implementation of it.

Had Blizzard owned DotA IP, I believe Valve would've had to steer much further away from the map, character and item design. IP extends beyond just art and naming, see e.g. Tetris vs Mino [1]. The case wouldn't have been a guaranteed win for Blizzard, but the early releases of Dota 2 were really closely copied from late releases of DotA, so the argument is there.

> Note that I don't think anything in the W3: reforged terms of service would prevent a new game being created based on a W3 mod, it would just prevent it from using the same name and art as the mod. This is exactly what happened to all other successful mods, with Dota2 being pretty much the sole exception.

Keyword being successful. Many maps have standalone ports that kept their predecessor's name [2][3][4][5], but only Dota 2 is really successful. And again, I believe these wouldn't exist or would've made large changes if Blizzard owned the IP of Warcraft 3 mods.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/defining-tetris-how-c...

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/578350/Element_TD/

[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/537680/Sheep_Tag_2/

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/469600/Legion_TD_2__Multi...

[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/676580/NEO_Impossible_Bos...

Not to mention that Dota 2 also copied the exact skillsets of heroes and items. Not just likeness, but even most silly bugs that were due to the Warcraft engine.

Edit: Anyways, this is getting sidetracked. My point is that Warcraft 3 was lax with intellectual property for the longest time, and mods like DotA most certainly leveraged that.

I would say those things are all hard.

Any example of a highly successful video game developed from start as open source by the community as opposed to a company releasing their source code for free after launching a game?

It technically started closed source, but has been open source with countless forks existing in parallel for at least 90% of its lifetime.

[0] https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry

The video "The History of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead" (35 minutes) desmonstrates how an open source community can make great games! In this case, a post-apocalyptic roguelike game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nHtcmnQQvU

For an, exoctic, 11 minute review of the game watch "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead Review | Don't Drink Toilet Water" by SsethTzeentach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyoj4-niEPc