this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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In a surprising announcement, Electronic Arts announced that they have open-sourced Command and Conquer Red Alert under the GPL license along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and related titles.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I was not expecting this from EA of all people. I wonder what prompted this

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

They made a fan council to work on the remaster a few years ago and chucked a ton of archival stuff in there, too. That thing was one of the, if not THE best, most community-focused retro remasters I've seen. Admittedly, I think it wasn't developed internally, but hey, they greenlit all that.

EA gets a bad rap for legitimate stuff, but they also tend to not get credit when they do actually cool things because they make such a great punching bag. They have great accessibility standards, that they started making mandatory before other AAA devs did. They open sourced a bunch of their accessibility tools recently, too. They were also one of the first (first? second?) online platforms to offer unconditional refunds on digital games. I remember because it's one of the things that surprises people when I remind them that Steam REALLY didn't want refunds and only caved due to regulation.

If you're trying to reconcile that with whatever else you don't like them doing, maybe it's a good time to remind people that corporations aren't people. There are tons of people working in all corpos and most of them don't even suck as human beings.

Apply the same thing to Ubisoft, Activision, Microsoft and whatever other game dev you like to hate, incidentally. Not Twitter, though. Everybody left at Twitter probably sucks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago

EA games were the first AAA games I saw that had an incredible range of colour blind settings

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago

i think when organizations get this big they just can't be 100% evil all the time, at some point someone will manage to make a good decision and it'll just slip through the machinery

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 hours ago

Good guy EA? I'm so conflicted right now...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 hours ago

Hope openra can benefit from this in some ways!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Generals Zero Hour too, damn that game was the tits