The current situation with a lot of these games is that companies are
licensing an engine and that engine is proprietary. Companies like Epic Games
do make a good chunk of change on their games, but they make more licensing
their Unreal engine to various developers and publishers. They wouldn't
release the source code for their engine becuase it is their big money maker
and keeps the lights on. It is their main business model, unethical or not.
In an ideal world, the game engines themselves would be free software and the
only thing that wouldn't be open obviously is the game artwork. This is also
one of those situations where companies could get confused with the GPL and
how it works. If the engine were GPL and a company included their trademarked
artwork in the completed game, then only the source code would have to be
made available and not the artwork. It would still be considered a free
software game in the code alone even if the artwork and names are
trademarked.
Since this is drawing similarities with Mozilla Firefox and how you can only
use the code if their trademarks and artwork is removed, then wouldn't a game
engine benefit from being under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 instead of the
GPL? Would the game engine be GPL and when the completed game is released, it
goes under the MPL 2.0 umbrella? Or would all the code start from being under
the MPL 2.0 license?
Of course if it was under a permissive license like Apache or BSD, the engine
could still be free software but then they wouldn't be forced to give back
code or release the source code for the game. They could make the game free
software or proprietary and the choice is up to them.
