Duelyst Is Now Open Source, And For All Intents And Purposes, Public Domain

Counterplay Games has made the rare move to release Duelyst, a game that was just published five years ago, open source and public domain.

Counterplay Games, who also made the Godfall video games, was founded by former developers from Blizzard, particularly lead producer Keith Lee. Duelyst was their first project, a turn based strategy focusing on squad based combat, and with a collectible card game element. Duelyst was fully funded on Kicstarter and originally self-published, until Counterplay made a deal with Bandai Namco to handle publishing and marketing duties.

Right before publishing Counterplay made the call to make Duelyst free-to-play, arguing this model would allow them to get more updates out and more rapidly. It was published on April 28, 2016. They were ultimately able to publish six expansions, and brought the game to Windows and OS X. An iOS version was released but later removed.

On Feburary 27, 2020, Counterplay turned off the servers for Duelyst, revealing that the game had been declining in player counts and was no longer profitable enough to sustain itself.

In a new YouTube video, Counterplay’s JuveyD AKA Richard Heyne revealed that the company had decided to make the game open source. The way Richard explained it is that they are making the game available for their community, to make their own games with no fees or royalties.

In fact, the game and its source code was placed under a Creative Commons zero (CC0) license. The CC0 license is as close as Creative Commons can take to allow IP holders to make their works public domain. In situations where certain laws or regulations do not make it possible for IP holders to relinquish their rights in this way, it works as a fallback equivalent license. In plain English, the game, and all its assets, are now effectively public domain.

This means more than fans being allowed to make their own mods and versions of the game, and run their own servers for it. It means any developer or studio, big or small, can now use Duelyst’s code and assets to make their own games. There is no one stopping, for example, Square Enix, or Keith Lee’s original company, Blizzard, from using these assets to make new games, that they can then sell.

While there have been many cases of online games like Duelyst persisting online thanks to fandom months and years after the official servers were removed, this is likely the first ever case that a game that was just recently released immediately became public domain. It’s an incredible precedent for Counterplay Games to set. However, when you consider that it was funded via Kickstarter, and that fans were part of the development of the game from the start, it makes a lot of sense. It makes you wonder if there are other crowdfunded games that will take this route in the future as well.

You can watch the announcement video below and check out the github depository, which has all the game files, source code, and CC0 license, here.