It's almost as if capitalist billionaire sports team owners in the US believe that doing everything possible to ensure all parties have equal chances at success is worthwhile and benefits the whole system, and conversely, that allowing completely unrestrained economic competition would lead to ruin. 🤔

Revenue sharing

Revenue sharing is a business tool used by North American professional sports leagues to redistribute revenues from wealthy large-market clubs to less wealthy small-market clubs.

Salary caps

In professional sports, a salary cap (or wage cap) is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players' salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team's roster, or both.

Drafts

A draft is a process used in some countries (especially in North America) and sports (especially in closed leagues) to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players.

To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a "lottery" factor in an attempt to discourage teams from tanking.

NO promotion or relegation

Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a league system, based on their performance over a season.

An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.

And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?

Edit: I'm more looking for instances of the actual original game being open-sourced through fan efforts or outright purchase, like how Blender was originally open-sourced as a result of a crowdfunding campaign. The open-source rewrites of games are awesome, but I don't have the skills to build a relatively elaborate game on my own. It's also not a popular game, more niche, really, so I'm just wondering what are the possibilities.