We pay studios $50k to $1M+ to license the source code of games they've finished with, as training data for frontier AI. Unreal Engine 5 back to Unreal 1, Unity, and engines you built yourself.
Ten minutes. No code changes hands until you sign.
Shipped, cancelled or unreleased. Console, PC or mobile. If it compiled once, we want to hear about it.
Tutorials and open-source demos only go so far. What labs can't get anywhere else is the code behind games that actually shipped: the gameplay systems, the engine modifications, the build scripts, and the years of commits that show how a real team solved real problems.
Your studio already has it, on a server or in a Perforce depot nobody has opened since launch. We turn it into a licensing payment, and we handle the technical and legal work that makes the deal happen.
Payment depends on the size of the codebase, the depth of its history, how unique the engine and genre are, and how cleanly the rights are held.
A shipped title with its full source
One game, its codebase and its version-control history.
A catalog, or a custom engine
Several titles, long commit histories, or significant engine modifications.
Rare, large, proprietary codebases
In-house engines, decades of history, and genres no one else can supply.
Indicative ranges, not offers. Every codebase is evaluated and quoted individually.
You stay in control the whole way. Nothing is shared until you have signed.
Ten minutes. Tell us about the engine, the titles and the history. No code, no attachments.
A short call to scope what you have and who owns it. We sign an NDA before anything technical is shared.
A written offer with the price, the scope of the license, and exactly what is and isn't included.
We run the secure handoff, scrub credentials and secrets, and pay on delivery.
A game director and a programming-languages researcher. We read your code the way you wrote it.
Partner · Toronto
Roy has spent more than 24 years making games, and for over a decade has been Game Director at Jubei Games, where he is currently bringing Spelltech to Steam. He has led teams from prototype to release and knows what it took to ship your game, and what its code is worth.
Partner · Command Center
Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow and holds a Ph.D. in programming languages from MIT. He has founded venture-backed developer-tools companies. Since 2010 he has led Project Ironfist, a mod of Heroes of Might and Magic II built by reverse-engineering the original game, so he has spent fifteen years inside other people's game code.
Ten minutes, no code. We reply within two business days with next steps, or with an honest no.
Prefer email? Write to hello@patinasource.com.
We'll read it closely and reply within two business days.
Often, yes. Cancelled and unreleased projects can carry the same engineering value as shipped ones. Tell us about it in the questionnaire.
No. You can get paid for every Unreal generation back to Unreal Engine 1, along with Unity and proprietary engines. Older codebases are harder to find, which is part of what makes them valuable.
Sometimes. It depends on your agreements. We help you work out what you can license and who needs to sign off before you commit to anything.
No. It is licensed privately for training AI models, not published, open-sourced or resold as a game. The exact terms are written into your offer.
It depends on the size of the codebase and how clean the rights are. We give you a timeline with the offer, and you are paid on delivery.