Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge.

Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties.

I think it's clear by now the next generation will be real-time raytracing (engines like Brigade [1]), so I wouldn't doubt they are already working on those, and to be sold in the old model.

[1] http://brigade.otoy.com

anyways, not sure what source 2 will look like, but if it means that we can use the existing source code for games like counterstrike or any of the valve's fps series, then for fps indie developers this is a welcome news.

we should see an explosion of new types of fps games with the availability of such base to build new games from, add new content, new modes of play etc.

First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine.

HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has also contributed greatly by open sourcing their old engines.

The Torque Game Engine (Tribes) was opened up to low cost licensing by GarageGames in the early 2000s.

Unreal has long made their tools available for free, though licensing wasn't quite favorable to the indie developer until more recently.

Blender made an attempt at including a game engine but it never really took off from my point of view, although they're still including and improving it.

Even Blizzard's inclusion of map tools with Warcraft 3 spawned one of the biggest gaming trends of the past 10 years, DOTA / MOBA games. Though these have all been recreated with other engines (including Valve's Source), the inclusion of modding tools with games is part of the story and some of the competition that the current crop of free tools must face.

Open source deserves a mention as well. Ogre 3D, the above mentioned Blender, and other engines and especially tools have sprung up in a variety of games and often fill missing gaps in asset creation.

Unity certainly deserves some credit, however. Their simple tooling, relatively early start on mobile, and aggressively lowering the barriers from side project to published game has definitely moved the goalposts for game tooling. The Unity Asset Store is also a great thing.

I've really only scratched the surface though. XBox DNLA deserves a mention, the role of the iPhone and mobile in general has been huge, Minecraft's until recently ambiguous quasi-open source nature, and there's many more. We're in a golden age of game creation and I hope to play some amazing new game ideas. I realize there's also going to be an abundance of mediocre imitations from creators like me but its all part of the fun.