F2P MMORPG BitCraft Online Decides The Community Is More Powerful Together And Will Make The Game Open Source

While BitCraft Online won't be the first MMORPG to make its code open source, it may find itself to be the one with the largest reach since similar experiments have been on smaller games. The F2P MMORPG announced today that while other companies may view their game's code as "secret sauce," BitCraft thinks that opening up their code brings benefits to players, the community, and the game itself.

Although it could be a scary proposition, the team thinks it's the right call for multiple reasons. First, they say, "We believe that the BitCraft source code will provide both an example of how to build an MMO and an example of how to use SpacetimeDB (trailer below) to do so. That’s both a win for the developer community and for our platform."

Clockwork Labs also believes that this is a win for BitCraft itself. They've already been very impressed by what the game's community has come up with tools, spreadsheets, and fan sites, so they're eager to see what fans come up with after they have access to the full code. They're hoping that benefitting from open source themselves, turning around and opening the code up to fans will not only lead to interesting content, but also easier feedback lines when it comes to testing and even security issues.

Just don't make fun of some of their bad variable names.

Could it lead to BitCraft basically giving its next competitor a huge starting point? Maybe. However, Clockwork is trying to open things up in a way that makes sense for their future ability to generate revenue, too. In that regard, it makes sense that BitCraft will be focused on getting a proper early access version of the game out first, then they'll start moving everything to be open source.

It's certainly interesting and if you've ever wanted to tinker around with an MMO, this is one hell of a way to start once it's all open.