Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dream?

Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dream?

Postby grrk-bzzt » 29 Sep 2014, 23:41

Hello everyone,

To some of you this may sound like a bad joke on a FOSS forum, but this is a question that bugs me everytime.
I've been following Scout's Journey Development Blog for some time now, and the creator decided to drop the FTE engine (an ehanced Quake 1 engine) to go with Unity or UDK.

According to him, GPL games (more precisely, making new games out of the GPL Quake 1 engine) is a dead dream.
This is quite a sad and disappointing statement as it feels not that far from the truth. There's not a lot of FOSS games out there, and even less if you only count the good ones.

I would like you to read his two last posts ("An Open World" and "And Another") and tell me what you think about it.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby onpon4 » 30 Sep 2014, 01:05

I don't see commercial libre games as a "dead dream". It's true that they can't do as well as proprietary games with the traditional model proprietary commercial games use, but who says that has to be the only way to commercialize a game?

Libre games would be at no disadvantage whatsoever if a crowdfunding approach was used. The problem is, no one seems to be willing to use crowdfunding for anything more than funding development of a proprietary game to be used in the traditional proprietary method of selling copies to make money.

The model of simply asking for donations doesn't put libre games at a disadvantage, either, and it's more effective than people trained in capitalism intuitively think. Same goes for optional payments, and other honor systems.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby andrewj » 30 Sep 2014, 02:34

His main argument is that the open source Quake-based engines are not reliable enough to depend upon for a commercial game, where critical bugs absolutely need to be fixed, and there is no guarantee that the engine authors will ever fix anything since it is just their hobby.

I more or less agree with that assessment, but a few points:

(1) there is no guarantee that critical bugs in Unity or Unreal (or whatever) will be fixed, especially when you are doing something outside the norm.

(2) it seems fairly common sense to me that you don't base a commercial project off a hobbiest game engine, unless you have the skills (or staff) to fix things or add features to that game engine.

(3) he talks about realtime lighting being important to him, so choosing an engine where this feature has been "tacked on" was not a good decision. If you are basing your project on a certain game engine, you absolutely need to research whether it really has the features you need.

Personally I think the idtech engines are a wonderful resource for making hobby games, but if I were going to use them for a commercial product then I'd be damn sure to have a programmer on the team who is very familiar with them.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Julius » 30 Sep 2014, 08:56

He is definitely not wrong, but FTE is also an especially unsupported hobbyist engine (I don't mean that negatively, more matter of fact). You should also be careful to be drawn to an engine for all the bells and whistles (e.g. latest graphics features) as that usually points to a bleeding edge / rather unstable one.

If the open-source engine does what you want *right now* and is sufficiently long in development to be quite stable (for example Darkplaces, Torque3D, Irrlicht, jMonkey3d engine to name a few) AND you are able to at least fix some most glaring bugs yourself (or rather are able to work around them), then I see no reason why a commercial game can't work with the open-source engine. But yes, you can't expect any support and definitely don't expect additional features to be added/fixed for you.

More generally I feel FOSS game development has slowed down a bit lately, most likely due to the high influx of closed source games to Linux due to the Steam etc. But the foundations are still being improved on and the real prime-time for open-source games is probably still to come. That the new Unreal Tournament is sort of open-source is probably a sign of things to come.

I have recently argued (and took some heat for it, see: http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5558) that certain niche games almost require to be open-sourced to stand a chance these days. But mind-sets are still very contrary and it will take time for people to realize that open-source isn't just about free as in beer and the ideological side of FOSS.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Arthur » 30 Sep 2014, 16:14

onpon4 {l Wrote}:The model of simply asking for donations doesn't put libre games at a disadvantage, either, and it's more effective than people trained in capitalism intuitively think.

"it's ... effective" -- citation needed. From the limited experience I've seen it's effective if all you want is enough money to buy a soft drink now and then. Otherwise, not so much.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby onpon4 » 30 Sep 2014, 16:42

Well, I didn't say that it's effective, did I? I said it's more effective than people trained in capitalism intuitively think. The intuitive belief I was talking about is the assumption that everyone would just take it and never give anything back: the pessimistic "tragedy of the commons" assumption. But in fact, there are several projects that get funded by donations. Wikipedia is an obvious example: the entirety of the cost of keeping Wikipedia up is paid for by donations. If you're a prolific game developer with a large enough following, for example, I see no reason for the model of asking fans for donations to support continued game development to not be workable the same way it is for Wikipedia.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Arthur » 30 Sep 2014, 21:24

True enough, but the following has to be quite large and devout as well. Even Wikipedia has to "beg" for money in more obnoxious ways than just having a little donation button down the side.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby onpon4 » 01 Oct 2014, 02:47

Right, you can't just put a donate button in the corner and expect people to donate; you also need to tell your users why donating is important, and what it contributes to. Otherwise, people aren't going to think of donating. I don't think you can extrapolate from this that small projects can't make it with the model. They won't necessarily be as successful, but keep in mind Wikipedia's use of the model is extremely successful; they only need to do one short donation drive a year.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Arthur » 01 Oct 2014, 04:17

Well, what if we take a look at http://play0ad.com/0-a-d-financial-report-april-2014/
In total, we have USD 35,251.45 in all three accounts.


This includes several crowdfunding campaigns, one of them where they asked for $160,000 and got $33,251.
And this is arguably the most commercial quality FOSS game around. If this is what the cream of the crop gets, what chance do others have to make enough money to make it worth it (purely commercially speaking)?
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby webshinra » 01 Oct 2014, 09:59

Arthur {l Wrote}:Well, what if we take a look at http://play0ad.com/0-a-d-financial-report-april-2014/
In total, we have USD 35,251.45 in all three accounts.


This includes several crowdfunding campaigns, one of them where they asked for $160,000 and got $33,251.
And this is arguably the most commercial quality FOSS game around. If this is what the cream of the crop gets, what chance do others have to make enough money to make it worth it (purely commercially speaking)?


Remember also that if, technically speaking they are pretty good, i'm not sure their game is fit to have a public. What are the gameplay innovations it bring ? Is the human competition interesting ? etc.

Most of people don't care that a game have been made ethically, they look a the price «It's free (as in free beer) it should not be that good». Promotion is an hard think to do, and without the possibility to get (enough) money back, it's even harder (and most communication chanel gamers are listening to are commercial ones (steam, gog, humble tips…) which will not promote things unless they can earn money with it.).

From my experience of being dev-director and co-ceo in a indie studio I can tel a game require lot of money to be made, even considering only paying people.
As a example, our studio is paying equivalent of 4 full-time professional (we are 8 but not everyone at full time) with minimal standard, in france, you get a minimal salary of 1056€/month (~1300$ which is insufficient to get a good life near Paris).

With all social cost, we can approximate that full time salary cost ~2000€. which mean we have a _minimal_ cost of 96 000€ per year.

Add to that the TVA of 20%, and you have to get more than 96000+19200 = 115200€ (145 385.28 U.S. dollars) from customer just to be in legality when running the studio.

Notice that the predicate of using FLOSS made us have a near null cost on software licences. but you still have to pay for server, electricity and, if you don't work at home (which is hard) you need a place to work.

Add to that the fact that developing a complete game with interesting artistic and technical content take years, you can imagine how hard it is to make a full Libre game from the release and eat at the same time.

I don't think it's impossible, but I see no other way than crowfunding.

You can also think of free the game code but not artistic content or think of freeing all after a while. That last option, even if ethically good ask true legal question if your using GPL-based code (as we certainly will with openVDB).

conclusion, I would not say «a dead dream» but «a hard fight».

Edit:

I would also add that it's technicaly more complex to build a game only with floss-compatible technology, as you need to handle a relatively big part of low-level stuff (not only graphically but also with gameplay articulation stuff). Most of dev in Indie studio being relatively incompetent programmers, that's another explanation for the lake of FLOSS commercial games
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby charlie » 02 Oct 2014, 10:31

I believe the www.te4.org guy is making a very healthy sum of monies from porting his FOSS-ish game to Steam. So, no, the dream is not dead. You just have to make a good game then put it on a platform where people are prepared to part with cash for it. Given the volume of users on Steam, selling a well done game for a few bucks could earn you a substantial amount of money.

Here's te4 on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/259680/

There's 600 reviews. That alone, at £5 each, equates to £30k (a good year's salary).
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Julius » 02 Oct 2014, 16:02

Still not enough to fund an actual team of developers. But never the less an important lesson: don't put up your FOSS game on steam for free and get it lumped together with the f2p stuff. Donate the money for a good cause if you insist on doing it for free ;)
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby Akien » 02 Oct 2014, 17:03

charlie {l Wrote}:I believe the http://www.te4.org guy is making a very healthy sum of monies from porting his FOSS-ish game to Steam. So, no, the dream is not dead. You just have to make a good game then put it on a platform where people are prepared to part with cash for it. Given the volume of users on Steam, selling a well done game for a few bucks could earn you a substantial amount of money.

Why FOSS-ish? Apart from the nonfree tileset, the whole code and scripts are GPLv3 IIRC.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby rogerdv » 02 Oct 2014, 17:53

It is not a dead dream, as TE4/0AD proves, but a very difficult one. The greatest obstacles I have found are lack of productive open source engines, or at least free ones. Also, people doesnt donates unless you give them something almost finished, which is a sort of never ending story: you cant develop because lack money, and cant get donations because you cant develop. People doesnt pays for ideas (unless you are Brian Fargo), they pay for tangible products, because a good looking demo is the proof that you can really achieve what you are promissing. I have 2 good artist, one of them is also an excellent developer, but I cant put them to work unless I have something to reward the time they spend working for me and Im sure that many developers are in the same situation.
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Re: Is making a FOSS serious game/commercial game a dead dre

Postby mdwh » 11 Oct 2014, 13:17

He says that "John Carmack’s GPL engine dream" is dead, but I'm not sure what that is. He doesn't provide any argument to claim that making games with Open Source engines is dead, he only talks about the now old Quake engines.

He claims that more games used the commercial Quake licence than the Open Source licence (I don't know if that's true), but surely, the commercial Quake engine was also "under-documented and relatively arcane. Perpetual bugs and lack of tech support are another."

This isn't an issue of "Open Source is bad, commercial engines are well documented and supported", because those same engines started out as commercial engines! Rather, it's more that Unity has come along, and is better documented and supported than anything else out there.

Does this mean that making games without Unity (Open Source or not) isn't feasible? Hardly, since plenty of games are still done without Unity, and we managed before Unity came along. Although I can see that a lot of people will be tempted to just go with Unity now.

It is a fair point that Open Source means you can't fix the bugs, but that's missing the actual point. Making the Quake engine Open Source wasn't just done to allow individual game developers to fix bugs, it was done so that game developers could use it, not just for free as in beer, but under an Open licence. And that other people could extend the engines, as indeed happened.

If he wants to use Unity because that's the best way to make a game, that's fine, but otherwise he seems to have an axe to grind against Open Source.

Using commercial engines, especially under a free (as in beer) licence, doesn't mean the engines are dependable or the authors "committed enough". Bugs don't magically get fixed just because it's Unity. Indeed, if you want support from Unity, you have to pay for it ( https://store.unity3d.com/products/support ). Otherwise AFAICT you're left with posting on forums. Even for paid support, support doesn't mean bugs get fixed - there may be a lack of resources, and developers are working on high priority issues, or some bugs may be really hard issues.

He says: "My fear is that a nasty bug pops up when the game ships (or during testing), and the engine coder is not motivated to fix it at that time. " - what on earth makes him think that Unity is going to fix his bugs, especially if he's using the free licence?

He's also made a more recent post, "Unity sale rumour". He dismisses the advantage of Open Source by saying "You don’t have full control over an open source engine unless you either are an experienced C/C++ programmer or can afford to hire one / are successful at recruiting one. "

Well, some people are experienced C/C++ programmers - obviously less experienced people are better off with game creation tools - but that's missing the point. The advantage of Open Source is not that you personally have to develop it, but that someone can, and it isn't lost if the company goes bust or decides not to produce it anymore.

When Nokia announced the switch from Symbian to WP, there was a question over Qt, which was then owned by Nokia due to its use for Symbian development, but Qt is also a widely used toolkit elsewhere. As it happened, Nokia sold Qt to an independent company to develop, but no one was really concerned - if Qt had have been ditched/or dropped, the source was available for forking.

And does Qt being Open Source mean I don't get support? AFAICT I get the same level of support as I would get from a free Unity licence.

His argument of a different mindset - aside from sounding rather insulting - is odd given that many Open Source programmers also work as commercial programmers. It also makes no sense for products that are produced by companies but released as Open Source (Qt, Android, or indeed the Quake engine that he ditched). More generally he seems to be arguing against a straw man (who's saying Open Source is perfect, etc?.

What about this author's mindset? If he's an indie, does also have a "lack of discipline and commitment"? Or did that magically get fixed now that he's no longer making an Open Source game?

The "open source games have never taken off" is a related but separate issue - are we talking about open source games, or engines? The state of available open source engines may be one reason for fewer open source games, but other reasons will be that it's harder to make money, as people have discussed in this thread. This isn't an issue of commercial companies versus hobbyists (as the blog author portrays it) - a lot of successful Open Source software has come from commercial support (Android, Firefox, Ubuntu, Qt), whilst a large amount of hobbyists don't release as Open Source. I'd argue a reason for lack of Open Source games is because it's not something that commercial companies seem to support, other than for old engines. Which is odd - surely the possibility of "open source code + proprietary assets" makes it still possible to make money, compared to non-game software where you have to make money through other means.
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