I've seen some interesting topics here.
Fair question, but I think this is needless to ask. It's fairly common knowledge that proprietary game devs have more and better tools. I think a better question would be, are the tools we have enough? I mean, is all of the game creation process covered by at least one FOSS alternative, or is there a step lacking a proper tool?PeterX {l Wrote}:1.) Could it be that we free game developers need more tools before we can concentrate on developing? Proprietary developers can buy a license of a ready-made engine or throw "human capital" at the development of the engine in-house. We have Godot and other engines but we still have less tools than the game industry, haven't we?
Yes, I agree, we definitely have less manpower. I'm not sure if they are less capable, or just less motivated though.PeterX {l Wrote}:2.) And we have less people but have to do the same job. And also important, we have less capable people I guess. Sure we have coding and art geniusses. But less than the industry has.
Good question. I don't know if this is true or not, less motivated sure. (BTW by definition "professional" means you get paid for your work, this obviously isn't the case here, and I don't think you meant that in its original meaning, rather you meant "experienced" or "capable".)PeterX {l Wrote}:3.) Maybe we behave less professional than the industry pros? See old forum. (EDIT2: This is not pointing a finger at someone. Notice that I said "we". That includes me. And maybe being unprofessional is part of the fun in open source developing?
I think the biggest difference is, a professional game developer has to finish the game no matter what (boss says, "I don't care if you're capable or not, you'll get fired if this isn't ready by tomorrow"), while a FOSS developer says "give me a break, I'm doing this in my freetime, I'll finish it when I want it to".
Conclusion? Professional game gets done and released (even with bugs), while on the other hand free games are left unfinished, and sadly over time, abandoned.
I think this isn't so. The reason why proprietary dev is the default and what's stopping devs from joining FOSS is the same IMHO: newcomers simply do not know about FOSS. If you don't know there's an alternative, then you can't join in, and if few people are joining in, then it's never going to be the default, and if it isn't the default then newbies won't try it out. This is a vicious circle.HuguesRoss {l Wrote}:Looping back to this, I think today most places of discussion are sort of agnostic towards libre/proprietary. The majority of folks you might see in an engine's community, or itch, or various social medias will be doing proprietary dev because it's the default, but there's nothing stopping FOSS folks from joining in--and I believe some do.
Also very few devs are doing game dev for fun, their goal is mostly not creating a good and enjoyable game, but about 99% of them are greedy and just want a piece of the gaming market. And if they are choosing FOSS alternatives they choose that because they want to do it without any investment, and not because of the freedom. (There are exceptions, of course, 1%.)
OGA is a perfect example of that latter statement. If you take a closer look at the "free" assets there, you'll realize that they are unusable in a game, and pixel artist do that deliberately. They are not thinking about creating some great free assets that FOSS game developers can use (save 1%), most of them are thinking about OGA as just a free advertisement platform, where they release something half-ready and they never say, but they expect you to pay for the missing parts. (And they get mad at you if you point out that their submission is lacking something.) Well, this isn't the libre / free software development spirit for sure.PeterX {l Wrote}:There's opengameart.org about assets.
EDIT: changed url because topic was splitted.
Cheers,
bzt