Why Are There Not More Open Source Games?
There are millions of open-source software (OSS) projects; 100+ million developers[1] on Github (a site known for hosting open source projects). On Github there are many popular game engines[2] but there is an apparent lack of games themselves. We discover this deficit when struggling to find game code to take inspiration from, i.e. to learn how to structure our code in a nice way, instead we notice basically every game we play is behind closed doors, the code is secret, behind a big corporation or some indie studio, game companies are very protective of their code.
To be clear, open source games exist[3], but when looking at the most popular games of 2025, not one is open source[4] and when looking at popular open source source repos[5] you can see that games are very rare to come across.
We would assume that beginners, open source maintainers, and everyone in between would prefer maintaining a fun playable game rather than another text editor, but we seem incorrect in this assumption.
So now you can see our opinion on the perceived deficit of games, let's look at a list of reasons why we think this might be the case.
Games are pieces of creative work
Projects needs a clear direction.
The popular open source games are reworks of existing games, where the direction is already clear, and ongoing effort can go into discrepancies with the original game.
Libraries, utilities, business applications are well slightly better defined, which I argue because you don't care if they are "fun", but rather if they get the job done, that alone makes development more clear.
Open source projects are often funded by a businesses
Some OSS library is often an important backbone to a, or multiple businesses, and these important libraries to these businesses are well supported / developed because businesses make it possible.
Games often require multiple departments
This includes
- Art
- Design
- Animation
- Music
- Stories
.. when looking at popular open source projects, you will notice that a lot of the time, it is purely a programming effort, programming in a specific language.
Money
- Clone the game rather than paying
- Businesses can clone the game, and resell it, if the license is good this would be legal, if license is not good, this would be illegal, but people might try attempt anyway
- OSS projects often make money by providing business support (source?)
Games are often built once, big release and done
Sure, there are plenty of long-lived games such as Grand Theft Auto V Online, which are receiving regular updates, but there are also plenty of games that build hype, have a story, conceal information from players, then the fun is to discover and progress within the game, therefore, new updates and features may be limited.
Development happens all at once, then developers move onto the next project.
Business applications, require ongoing features and therefore inevitable bug fixes, as time goes on, therefore there is a clearer benefit from open sources those applications (or libraries).
Conclusion
Here, we have listed a few reasons why we believe there are not more open source games. Thanks for reading.
Footnotes
Whether you trust Microsoft (Github owner) or not, I'm sure this stat is likely true: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-developers-and-counting/
See here for a good list: https://github.com/collections/game-engines
Have a look here for some open source games https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games + Osu is very popular: https://github.com/ppy/osu, most of these games are however, are long lived, i.e. not recent viral hits.
I went down this list, checking if each game had open source code, and none did: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming-lists/best-video-games-of-2025-1235469710/
As of December 2025, a search here https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories results in 287 Million results. Public does not mean open source + there are many OSS projects not hosted on Github, so we are estimating that there are at least 200 million OSS projects.
For example when looking here, we couldn't link our exact results, but trust us, we couldn't find a single game trending: https://github.com/trending?since=monthly
Look at how many text editors we have: https://github.com/collections/text-editors