I don’t follow this argument. In this context, proprietary code is work product that has value to its owner. Often large swathes of said work product is reused across games so the theory is that releasing the work product means your competitors can make your work product. I do not understand how wrapping someone else’s work product in your own work product doesn’t require them to first release their work product.

Note I don’t necessarily buy the company mindset on proprietary code; I explained here because I don’t understand where you’re coming from.

In my experience working with devs at game studios (i'm a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.

It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.

Abstraction is a trade off. You don't want to build interface layers between everything... It's a pain in the ass, and if there's a 1-1 relationship between parts of a system then you're basically putting in a minimum cost to modify that area in any way. So if you do it, it'll probably be once you've locked down the design pretty well

Game development is pretty different than normal development too. You have a lot of one off and lose ends based on creative decisions... You aren't building up on top of your system, you're building out

And frankly, it leads to a mix of mind blowingly good code and a lot of terrible code

So no, I don't think it's that easy. I think it's also a bullshit argument, and they should release the "proprietary" code when they finish supporting the game, or put in the time to make the interfaces

Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real "okay, let's go back and reduce our technical debt" for the majority of games.

So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.

But also... how does that change anything? "Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works"?