Extremely rare EA win
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Are they trying to become the not most hated studio? The bar is pretty low these days...
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No matter what you think of EA, this is fantastic news.
Perhaps why this feels like them trying to save face.
This feels more like some o.g. Command and conquer devs who have worked at EA for a long time that are passionate about the franchise. There was no big PR release, no product tie in or announcement, no media campaign.
Recovering and restoring the source code for these titles was made possible through the combined efforts of EA technical director Brian Barnes, Respawn producer Jim Vessella, and Luke Feenan, a long-standing member of the C&C community who was involved in the development of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection.
https://www.polygon.com/news/531365/command-and-conquer-open-source-code-ea
IIRC, a few years ago EA hired some of the original devs, put them in charge of the franchise, and then went very hands-off, but with very little budget. So far they've done this, and a very reasonably priced 4K remaster of TD and RA1.
Totally makes sense, considering the remaster was perfect. It was just “multiplayer works, we redid the sprites and audio and tweaked the engine to get rid of some of the bugs. Also hit space for original graphics” or whatever the button was. It was everything an OG C&C remaster needed IMO. I would love to see the same with some of these titles, but now that they’re open source it gives the opportunity for better fan made forks, so I’m all for it.
Edit: and forgot to mention the best part, EA didn’t force their launcher with the remaster or steam editions. They are purely steam games, which is a huge win
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Open sourcing old games is awesome for video game preservation.
Yeah, this should be standard practice
This is brilliant! :) aw, I hope it benefits the OpenRA developers and means more fun things to play eventually :)
Wait... this is EA... are they okay? This is very unlike them
Almost like a mistake?
I think the old Westwood dev they put in charge of the franchise just doesn't have any oversight.
That would be a completely legendary move if the dev hired by EA just said "fuck it, I'm open-sourcing this shit!"
It sounds like that's what happened, but through the proper channels. They hired a known CnC community/modding site admin as the dev.
I'd imagine he pitched that this was an easy way to reduce maintenance costs while fostering massive good will and making the amount of long tail sales over time higher.
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To use the compiled binaries, you must own the game
Was expecting a catch. Still good for modding I guess
Anyone know if this is a technologically-enforced “must” or just a “pretty please”?
Open source does not mean that the intellectual property is free. There's a lot of good that comes from this, and it's not like those games are expensive.
Though do also note that of these four, TD and RA1 were already made freeware years ago.
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I'm assuming this is more about art assets. Art is not code and you shouldn't expect them for free. It's not a catch.
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The entire series is on sale on Steam right now for $6 if that helps.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_Remastered_Collection/
That's only the HD remaster of TD and RA1.
Sorry, that was the wrong link.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39394/Command__Conquer_The_Ultimate_Collection/
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Holy shit, EA did something.... Good? I did not have that on my 2025 bingo card. So, what's the catch? There has to be a catch, right?
This doesn't release any copyright work in the game. So you will need to go through and remove any sprites, images, audio, etc that is copyright. Which means you will need to own a copy of the game (to have a right to the copyright usage) to use any binary produced from THIS source.
Additionally, it indicates that you must include in any derivative that the source of your code is from the EA drop here.
Outside of that, it is GPLv3. Of course it has hard dependency on DirectX 5.0. So a fully free version will need to redo those parts. Also the code is very MS VC++ heavy. Don't expect gcc to build you a binary.
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EA ? Did I read right ?
Mmmmm pre-standard C++
Old games being open sourced is a trend I can get behind.
Well I'm very excited to see the injection of life this hopefully gives c&c modding
I wonder how many of the old guard are still around, I'm glad the cncnet project is still going strong
Broken clock
Fuck EA but cool move - if they keep being not shit for long enough I might consider their products again.
Doubt they can keep it up.
Now if only they open-sourced the SAGE engine, then we'd be all happy
The engine is highly optimized & produces great visuals, Of course there IS OpenSAGE
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