onpon4 {l Wrote}:I think an elephant in the room that isn't being addressed is that video game development is not all that profitable.
farcodev {l Wrote}:Yeah we can't make AAA with million polynurbs and giga of textures, yeah we can't pay millions of $ for artists like for Space Citizen, and so what?
farcodev {l Wrote}:And I'm with Charlie, if it wasn't profitable the investors and financial sharks would not put even one $ in the projects.
"From" or "for"? If from: honestly the active part of this community is tiny and mostly made up of people busy working on their own projects. If for: yes, sadly the player support for open-source games isn't really there.Duion {l Wrote}:And since there is almost no support from this community, I don't see much hope.
Duion {l Wrote}:farcodev {l Wrote}:Yeah we can't make AAA with million polynurbs and giga of textures, yeah we can't pay millions of $ for artists like for Space Citizen, and so what?
Why not?
onpon4 {l Wrote}:Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. For a video game to be profitable, it needs to be immensely popular
farcodev {l Wrote}:I don't want to sound like a FSF or Gnu Fanatics, but if you dev open source game it isn't to make money at first.
Yeah we can't make AAA with million polynurbs and giga of textures, yeah we can't pay millions of $ for artists like for Space Citizen, and so what?
farcodev {l Wrote}:With such lack of hope here, better to do nothing and look the paint drying on a wall or do gardening (nothing against those doing it)...
charlie {l Wrote}:onpon4 {l Wrote}:Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. For a video game to be profitable, it needs to be immensely popular
That's just false. Profitable = pay the bills + a bit more.
Do you mean incredibly profitable?
There are many games and game devs that tick over on small communities. I can think of many examples. The New Star Soccer series is a good one. That has a very limited player base, but only a small (1 man? Can't remember) development team.
If you can sell 10,000 copies of a game at $10, that's $100k, which is more than enough to live on for a couple of years. A lone developer could easily do 1 decent quality game every 2 years if he had good ideas and is disciplined, determined, and dedicated.
charlie {l Wrote}:You don't need to do paid advertising. Most open source games do not, yet people know about them. You need to contact people, yes. You need to get your game reviewed, get it an online presence, post about it in forums etc, and all of that takes time. Don't impose huge cost expectations on small projects though because that's basically untrue. AFAIK Minecraft, as an example, had 0 advertising budget.
You say $10 is a lot, but that's also not true. People are abundantly prepared to pay for games they like. Millions do every month.
How does this reflect on open source gaming though? It is, perhaps, tough to charge $10 for a game that could be acquired for free. That's a different issue.
charlie {l Wrote}:farcodev {l Wrote}:I don't want to sound like a FSF or Gnu Fanatics, but if you dev open source game it isn't to make money at first.
Yeah we can't make AAA with million polynurbs and giga of textures, yeah we can't pay millions of $ for artists like for Space Citizen, and so what?
Yes, so what? If your goal is to make a AAA quality game but have it be free, then you are living in la la land.farcodev {l Wrote}:With such lack of hope here, better to do nothing and look the paint drying on a wall or do gardening (nothing against those doing it)...
What the hell are you talking about? What lack of hope? Unless you are referencing the hope of competing with AAA game studios...
If you cut out open source clones of succesfull commercial titles, open source game development is almost non existant.
Duion {l Wrote}:If you cut out open source clones of succesfull commercial titles, open source game development is almost non existant. There is more to development, than just copying something. Developing something means, you design the story, the art style, the game mechanics etc all yourself from scratch.
Julius {l Wrote}:@farcodev: don't take it personal. I see really no reason why those relatively neutral but maybe poorly worded comments by some of the others have railed you up so much.
Duion {l Wrote}:The clones identify themselves as being named like what they clone, like OpenMV, OpenArena, FreeDoom, FreeAblo etc the naming cheme is always original title or mockup name of the original title combined with "free" or "open". You can like it or not, but I would not call it original game development, it falls more into the category of modding or fan art. Additionally in the cases where you still need the proprietary part of the game, like with the quake and doom games, it can also not be considered open source at all, it is just the engine that is open source, not the game.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest