Because my mind is not understanding how CoH had such a messy mess that seems to have been created especially for it....but then it may be being used in other NCSoft games? I'm not quite understanding the process that would allow for the mess to happen in the first place...I understand even less that the company would then use that mess for other games. The one benefit to "the mess" in my mind was that it would be useless to NCSoft because it couldn't be used for other games...now I'm hearing the opposite. Or I think that's what I'm hearing...that can't be right, can it?
The whole code reuse thing is pure speculation that people are throwing out there as a possibility.
The one instance of code reuse that I think is likely is in the authentication code. I know for a fact that COH uses a modified version of the Lineage II authentication protocol to log in, so it's likely that component is built off of NCSoft's code rather than Cryptic's.
Beyond that, I doubt it. I think it's very unlikely that anyone currently working for NCSoft has even looked at the code, much less has any idea how it works. That's quite possibly part of the problem.
In order to offer it as part of the deal, they'd have to get experienced programmers to pick it apart and make a list of issues for the lawyers to vet. Things like proprietary info specific to NCSoft's server environment, commercial code licensed from third parties that needs to be accounted for, etc. Off the top of my head it's apparent from disassembling the binary that quite a few libraries are statically linked, an audit of those would need to be done to determine if they are allowed to redistribute them / transfer the license and under what conditions. They would also need to remove any pieces that can't be transferred, which would likely leave it in an unbuildable (though not necessarily unsalvagable) state. Things get murky if there are any instances of third-party code copied into the main source, and from what I hear the COH programmers
looooved CTRL+C/CTRL+V.
Given that they don't have anyone on staff experienced with the code (and we can assume from dev statements that it's not well documented), that's a very big project, and it would take quite a lucrative offer to make it worth the cost of undertaking.
Alternatively, it could just be that parting with source code they own is something that they simply
Do Not Do, Under Any Circumstance. It's not an uncommon attitude in the corporate software world. NCSoft has licensed
binaries to people before -- several of their games in the European market are operated by third parties -- but they don't get access to the source and are dependent on NCSoft for patches and updates. As far as I know, they have never sold or licensed source code to anyone.