Heroes of Might and Magic: fans' free rebuilds beat Ubisoft's 47%

Short answer: Ubisoft put Heroes of Might and Magic III back on Steam on Aug 25 2026 for $9.99, and it sits at 47.2% positive (117 up, 131 down). The two free fan rebuilds of Heroes II and Heroes III, fheroes2 and VCMI, have 723,803 downloads on GitHub. The people who own the franchise are losing to the people who love it, and it is not close.

TL;DR: fheroes2, the open-source Heroes II engine that hit the Hacker News front page tonight with 204 points, shipped 521 commits from 32 people in the last 12 months. VCMI, the Heroes III rebuild, shipped 3,000+ commits from 77 people in the same window, with zero salaries from Ubisoft. Across 14 fan rebuilds of classic games we checked, fans have earned 94,815 GitHub stars, while the publisher's own 2026 rerelease cannot get a majority of buyers to say yes.

Key numbers

What	Number	Source, checked Oct 26 2026
Ubisoft's 2026 Heroes III on Steam	47.2% positive (117 up, 131 down), $9.99	Steam app 4921760
Heroes III HD Edition (2015)	79.6% positive (16,729 up, 4,276 down), $14.99	Steam app 297000
Olden Era (Unfrozen / Hooded Horse, Apr 30 2026)	86.2% positive (17,416 up, 2,793 down), $39.99	Steam app 3105440
fheroes2 + VCMI release downloads	723,803 (243,494 + 480,309)	GitHub releases
VCMI commits, last 12 months	3,000+ from 77 people	GitHub
fheroes2 commits, last 12 months	521 (393 human) from 32 people	GitHub
14 fan engine rebuilds, total stars	94,815	GitHub API

Ubisoft's own rerelease is underwater

The 2026 Heroes III listing launched Aug 25 at $9.99. Launch week was already a coin flip: 64 positive, 60 negative.

Then it got worse. Most weeks since, more people hit thumbs down than thumbs up. The week of Sep 8 went 3 up, 10 down.

That is lowkey wild for a game people still play 27 years later. The demand is obviously there: the 2015 HD Edition holds 79.6% on 21,005 reviews. The problem is not Heroes. The problem is what Ubisoft keeps shipping with the Heroes name on it.

The fans rebuilt the engine, for free, and kept going

fheroes2 is a from-scratch recreation of the Heroes II engine. You bring the original data files, and it runs them on modern systems with fixes the original never got. It started on GitHub in Aug 2019 and pushed code three days ago.

VCMI does the same for Heroes III and goes further, with mods and new content. It has been on GitHub since 2014, and its 77 contributors in the past year outnumber plenty of real studio teams.

Release downloads are a floor, not a player count: one download can be shared, and people who build from source never show up. Even so, 723,803 is a real number from a real API, and it dwarfs the 248 people who bothered to review Ubisoft's version.

Follow the money: who wins, who loses

Ubisoft wins a little: both fan engines need the original game files, so fheroes2 and VCMI quietly sell copies of the old games for them. The publisher gets free maintenance, free ports and free marketing, and pays nothing.

The volunteers lose the most. Thousands of unpaid hours keep a paid product alive, and the rights holder could pressure any of it with one letter. Nobody has proven Ubisoft would, but the pattern in this industry says rights holders tolerate fan projects right up until they want to sell the same thing again.

The clearest winner is whoever treats the brand like it matters. Olden Era, built by Unfrozen and published by Hooded Horse, sits at 86.2% on 20,209 reviews at $39.99. Same franchise, four times the price, almost double the approval of Ubisoft's $9.99 rerelease. People will pay for Heroes. They will not pay for a reheat.

Ubisoft's old Heroes games beat its new one

Here is the part that should sting in Paris. Heroes V, a 2008 game Ubisoft published with Nival, holds 87.8% positive on 4,315 Steam reviews at $9.99. Same publisher, same price, an 18-year-old game, and it nearly doubles the approval of the 2026 listing.

So the ranking, by Steam's own numbers, goes like this:

• Heroes V (2008, Ubisoft): 87.8%
• Olden Era (2026, Unfrozen and Hooded Horse): 86.2%
• Heroes III HD Edition (2015, Ubisoft): 79.6%
• Heroes III (2026, Ubisoft): 47.2%, dead last

The newest Ubisoft product is the worst-rated Heroes on the store. Players are not nostalgic for Ubisoft. They are nostalgic for the game, and they can tell the difference between a careful rebuild and a quick relisting.

The 30-day window says the gap is not closing either. Olden Era picked up 500 positive and 116 negative reviews in the last month. The 2026 Heroes III picked up 33 positive and 38 negative. One game has a community still showing up. The other has a review section in the red.

We think the cleanest read is that the fan engines set the bar now. Anyone who has played Heroes III in VCMI, with modern resolutions and mod support, opens a paid relisting and compares it against a free project. If the paid one loses that comparison, the reviews say so, and they did.

This is bigger than Heroes

We pulled 14 open-source rebuilds of classic games. OpenRA (Command and Conquer) leads with 17,654 stars, then OpenRCT2 with 16,499 and openage (Age of Empires II) with 14,551. devilutionX keeps Diablo alive with 9,945. Most of them pushed code this month.

Our read: preservation in games is now a volunteer job. Publishers own the rights, fans own the work. We think the next fight is legal, not technical. The bet: within two years a big publisher takes down a major fan engine right before a paid remaster, and the backlash costs them more than the remaster earns. We covered a similar squeeze in the decomp.dev shutdown, and more game industry receipts live at our games hub.

What this means for you

If you want to play Heroes II or III today, skip the 47% listing. Get the original files once (the HD Edition or an old copy), then run them in fheroes2 or VCMI. If you build games, the lesson is free: fans will carry your game for decades if you let them, so ship the modding tools and the file formats in the open. More from us at our Rust work and the news desk.

Want to see what a studio that respects players ships? O'BLOCK is free on Steam. If you like it, back it with the $4.99 Supporter Pack, and if anything in it does not work as promised we keep fixing it at no extra cost until it does.

Sources

• fheroes2 on GitHub (stars, commits, releases via the GitHub API), Oct 26 2026
• VCMI on GitHub, Oct 26 2026
• Hacker News front page, fheroes2 at 204 points, Oct 26 2026
• Steam: Heroes of Might and Magic III (Ubisoft, 2026), review histogram, Oct 26 2026
• Steam: Heroes III HD Edition, Oct 26 2026
• Steam: Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Oct 26 2026
• Steam: Heroes of Might and Magic V, Oct 26 2026
• GitHub API repo data for OpenRA, OpenRCT2, openage, devilutionX, OpenTTD, OpenMW, ScummVM, OpenXcom, dhewm3, OpenLoco, Freeciv, FFNx, Oct 26 2026 (full list in the data download)