You really haven’t examined anything or answered any questions, you debated some random titles and what you think about opensource!!

(no offense intended)

Taking for example Auto Assault’s case, NCsoft owns all IP and assets while NetDevil controls the base and engine code, thus complicating any efforts in untangling who owns what in bringing an open sourced mass to the public that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights-toes. Many of us AA fans, after a failing campaign to resurrect the MMO in any GPL format and a communication breakdown, ended up working on our own inspired mmo, [url=http://apokalypsos.com]Project Apokalypsos[/url], with our own engine and assets.

A more optimistic view is of the Myst Online case, where a company owns the entire project and releases a community-controlled development system.

All-in-all, MMOs should start moving towards an open format once its commercial viability is drained, and a community run environment is the best way to preserve its legacy.

The big problem is that you never know what’s going to happen with a game. In E&B’s case, EA could get intelligent management (stop laughing) that realizes that an MMO with “only” 100k users can still be very profitable and resurrect the game within the company.

In my case, if 3DO had open-sourced the game, it would have been less attractive to operate as a commercial venture. You can argue if that’s a good thing or not. The other problem is that for a lot of developers, their games are like children they’ve raised since very young. It’s hard to release it out into the wild. A lot of the original M59 developers are glad to see the game running and an attempt at preserving the game. (I also think some of them aren’t overly proud of the code, since this was the first major project for some of them.)

Will M59 ever be open sourced? The chances are greater than 0. I imagine there will come a time when it’s better to allow people to see the inner workings than to try to preserve the game for future generations. But, for all the reasons listed in the article above, it’s not an easy decision.

My thoughts.

Furthermore if what you say is true, then how come they haven’t open sourced Commander Keen or any number of older fledgling games they’ve put out? CK in particular is still going for more per copy than Quake4 on store shelves…

Just my 2 cents.

Cutting into your own profit.

Many publishers are selling other MMO’s as well. By having users play the game without paying a subscription, the vendors might miss sales on their current product. By making the old product effectively unusable, they’re forcing players to shop elsewhere and some might buy their other product.
Sale of clients for defunct MMO’s is an option you mention, this however would require some level of support to remain intact and might cause problems when unsuspecting people buy the client assuming a vendor-provided service is attached only to find open source servers, bringing yet more support costs to the vendor.
it can be argued that the amount of client sales will not outweigh possible lost sales and subscriptions of current products.