Not sure if there are any licences that would make this feasible, or at least not in a long time, but wouldn’t it be awesome? 
Has the thought ever crossed your minds over at Snapshot?
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We have plans to continue to provide content for and support Phoenix Point long into the future. It is highly unlikely for it to ever be made open source, at least within the lifetime of the studio.
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Great!
Awww. I’d be so happy to contribute 
And there are others out there, I’m sure.
It’ll happen some time in the future, though – not necessarily with PP, but with something similar. It’ll be grand 
Why would it need to be open source? I’m not a programmer but with proper mod support I would think that one could do pretty much anything they wanted. Such as all the mods out there for X2 or the HeXen 3 “game” which is actually a Doom III mod. So is there something that “open source” realistically gets people that couldn’t be done with mod support?
Well, mod support, for one … 
Yes, good mod support is great, and can really increase the fun and value of a game – look no further than to Long War. Then again, things like bug fixes, engine changes, etc., are not likely to be accompished with mods, or at least that’s my opinion. Also, a great quality-of-life improvement in a mod benefits only those who have installed that particular mod.
As the fraction of players that are also developers increases, and as general programming proficiency grows, I think open-sourcing (without quotes, mind you!) anything makes more and more sense. What makes the scales tip for a game like Phoenix Point is not for me to say, though 
Professional software dev here: going open source while keeping the project consolidated opens such a huge can of worms, most projects are better of without it. Managing a team of in-house developers, making them write coherent, readable, standardized code is a chore in and of itself. Managing a distributed mass of anonymous contributors is worse tenfold and then some. So unless you are letting your code live a life of it’s own or you have no team to speak of and are forced to take any help you can find, you are better off keeping the code closed, at least until the goal you are aiming for is implemented.
And for a boxed commercial product PP is, there is simply no way of selling it if the code will be freely available to anyone. I’m not even talking about the ways some open source licenses outright prohibit selling the software made under it, but simply pointing out the fact that if the source code is free for everyone to use, it is naturally impossible to enforce any kind of restriction in terms of distribution of the end product. I am sure, some people will still pay for an official copy of PP, but the vast majority of Random Joe Gamer types wouldn’t.
Priority number one is getting a functional, fun game out the door by Q2 2019.
After that, we can worry about mod support in the vein of XCOM 2. Maybe it can be added post-release.
We have always said that we were including post-release mod support.
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Nobody says they have to allow random contributions. Just forking for the sake of modding.
You are also implying that there is a mass of Random Joe Gamer guys who want the game for free but would not download it from torrent sites. These hypothetical people would then rather clone gigabytes of code and assets from a repository and build it on their own. A mass of guys so large that it would hurt sales.
Just. No.
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One guy with enough persistence to download sources, build the game and upload it to a dropbox will be enough, all the rest will only need to grab it. Keep in mind, the key difference here is, pirating is illegal. Downloading a game built by a 3rd party from freely available sources is not.
Not convinced it would make a difference on straight piracy, especially for a single player game that would be sold on GoG and de facto easy to pirate. It will be found on torrent sites within minutes of its release and I don’t see snapshot actively hunting this down, legal or not. It’s actually a lesser evil compared to having the game fraudulently purchased and resold on grey market/reseller websites.
However, there’s a host of other hurdles to deal with if additional content is developed from the open source code released and ir’s simply a bad decision to take from a risk vs reward point of view. And mod support doesn’t require full disclosure of the code anyway.
The OP is way ahead of himself, that’s for way way down the line … 15 years from now, if ever.
Please be patient and wait for studio to die out and sell the game enough to “abandon it” or someone to reverse engeener it one day.
Beside free Xcoms, these days I have discovered open apocalypse http://openapoc.org/ Its very early in development, but so far so good.
Some things needs to be paid to be developed. I am more for free demo. Can happen. Can promote game. Can help team with more $$$.
Om piracy: there will be always such people, but this arent fans or better to say friends who care for developers and what is done. But torrents arent only bad. They offer chance to people that for various reasons might be unable to get it, not just laizy ones.They might like the game, save a bit and buy it. So support might also come from that area. Not 100% leechers, but …
Is anything even happening with Open apoc? As far as I can see, it looks like it’s pretty much been sitting silent for 2 years or so.
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Last I looked it had been making some progress. I just looked again and it appears to have been roughly a year since their last YouTube video. Quite a while for sure but not quite 2 years.
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Well, piracy tend to be one word speaking of many different behaviors.
I, for one, tend to occasionally download games in torrent. Why? It’s pretty easy to understand. Nowadays, publishers promise everything, and many of these promises are lies. EA is a specialist in this regard, deliberately lying before release. So, there are two reasons why i may download a game.
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If it is a game i would never buy anyway, for whatever reason.
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If i want to check the game before buying it. Never, ever, would i buy a game sold by one of these crappy publishers without testing it before. I’m not this stupid. If publishers were worthy of my trust, i wouldn’t have to do that.
No need to say, i plan to properly buy Phoenix Point (although i would never buy anything on Steam, so GOG please). Even if i were to dislike the game at the end, i would not regret it. Supporting Snap Shot would be enough of a satisfaction. But well, i don’t feel the urge to support EA the same way.
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We will be on both Steam and GOG. Pre-orders from out site will give you the choice of key too.
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While I agree with point 2 (see below), this one is trickier. If you’d never buy it anyway, why would you play it? That said, I used to pirate games when I was much younger and couldn’t afford games. Now that I can pay for them, I make up for it
I do that too, despite working for a big evil scummy publisher. I tend to like complex games and Steam’s 2 hour refund policy is barely enough to finish tutorials for these games.
Piracy can hurt small studios much more than big publishers anyway. With most AAA games having online features and multi platform support, piracy is less annoying than grey market shenanigans.
Have you ever been hesitant about a game? I’m not rich enough to pay for any game i’m not sure i even want to have. Most of the time, i download it, and barely play it anyway. So, if i were to decide to buy it or not, i definitely wouldn’t. Another reason is when a game is steam only. I would never buy on Steam anymore. There are occurences where i had to illegaly download a game i bought in order to have it work properly, too.
I think it’s probably best if we steer this topic away from piracy, as it is offtop for the OP anyway.
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