FreeGameDev

What are everybody's thoughts on the Free Game Alliance?

http://www.freegamealliance.com/

We’re happy to announce that we’re supporting the Free Game Alliance An initiative started to promote collaborative game development and open source.

The Free Game Alliance (FGA) is a great collection of Open Source games, one per genre, which will keep you busy for years to come. What do you need more than a good FPS, a good turn-based strategy game, a good real time strategy game, a good mmorpg and a good car racing game? Probably nothing if the content is updated regularly enough!! That’s why the FGA wants to support these projects and make them become known and famous, so more developers and contributors can join them to make this the perfect set of constantly evolving games!

I'm less than impressed.

1) Seems like an exclusive members club

Free Game Alliance {l Wrote}:Welcome to Free Game Alliance a group of open source games, one for each genre in constant evolution. Play and get involved in the community!

2) I question the motivations. Being "open source" is a means to an end for the Planeshift project, the same people who created the FGA, if I'm not mistaken.

Maybe just sour grapes because I didn't create it?

Hmm all the best to them, but I fail to see the point a bit.

The games included are far too different and advanced in their development that serious and far reaching collaboration (as in common artwork and story for example) will be possible.

So it seems to me that in the end it is a PR effort only :-/

Yes, it is a PR effort. Planeshift developers, frustrated at lack of exposure and general recognition for their hard work (and it is a long sustained development effort and they are to be commended for it) are looking to use the "brand" of the FGA, by virtue of the brands of the games included, to drive more traffic to their game. So it is disingenuous to call it an open source collaborative effort. It is a collaborative PR effort, and the open source nature of the projects is the only common theme and being used to make the FGA a unique "product".

Well, I kind of think this is a good thing either way. The will to at least signal collaboration is commendable, I mean most of the projects that is open source lives in their own world.

But I can't say that I'm much impressed at first sight though, let's see what will happen.

charlie {l Wrote}:1) Seems like an exclusive members club

I agree - the insistence of only needing one game in one genre (which is bit dubious anyway - if I love a genre, I often love playing lots of games in that genre, whilst other genres I'm not interested in at all!) means it's locking out games that haven't been picked. I don't mind having something the focuses on high quality games rather than just an endless list, but with one game per genre is if they've already got a game for that genre, other games won't pass their requirements, no matter how good they get. There's also an implication of "You don't need to play anything other than what we list here" - apparently one game per genre is enough. It's not an alliance for free games - it's an alliance only between these selected free games.

There's also the point that the projects they list are already some of the most well known open source games. I'm not sure that someone setting up a webpage is going to add to that awareness (at least, a quick Google suggests that this Alliance isn't anywhere near as well known as they games they list).

They say:

selects the projects who have the potential to become the best in their genre, inspiring other developers to join their effort and make the game better and better

Hmm, well are the games they list already the best in their genre, or not? It seems contradictory... Also I suspect that the well known open source games don't have trouble attracting developers (or if there is a lack, it's probably due to a lack of skilled developers willing to work on someone else's project for free full stop, and this alliance won't change that).

helps new developers to join forces around a single game per genre to have one finished product instead of 10 never completed!

Seems rather unfair to suggest that if you're not the best in a genre, you're no better than a never completed game. There's a big difference between "only one per genre" and "list of completed games".

To be fair, there are lots of list of games. Why add another?

I'm all for polarizationing, I think there won't be much effort in making a competing 'list' of games if this scares you.

I see that they modified the wording so that it's one good game per genre instead of the best game of the genre. It would have been a tragedy if they had to eject PlaneShift from the alliance because of Ryzom being better.

here is where I want that like-feature. nek-amuzen is spot on.

I think the FGA is a great thing.
I'm sad about the "The license for the art/data can be any. Copyright of both source code and art/data can be any. This is to allow projects to protect their uniqueness and style." part of the about thought. I'd have like a alliance of completely Free Games. But it seems planeshift is not that Free so that's not surprising they don't create an alliance they can't be part of.

I understand their explanation of the "one game per genre" thing. The idea is that it's better a guy that want to works on an FPS works on Xonotic rather than starting its own project from scratch.
They don't say all other FPS projects than Xonotic should stop, they just say they choose to support this one.

I see the FGA like an alliance between several Open Source Games in order to across their audience and their contribution.

I think the FGA is a great thing for the dynamism of the Free Game ecosystem.

And the FGA kind of works, they already made me play to Megaglest and Xonotic, I did not have test them since a long time. (well, not that long for Xonotic, the project is young anyway)

MCMic {l Wrote}:I think the FGA is a great thing.
I understand their explanation of the "one game per genre" thing. The idea is that it's better a guy that want to works on an FPS works on Xonotic rather than starting its own project from scratch.
They don't say all other FPS projects than Xonotic should stop, they just say they choose to support this one.

It's not a consistent idea, because the same argument would apply to these games in turn - unless they were the first open source games in a genre ever.

Also not all games support anyone joining the development team, or if they do, you're not going to have much control or input, especially as a new developer.

Nothing wrong with them choosing to only support it - but it also means there's no reason for anyone else to support the FGA. It's just a "club" between a small number of existing projects.

They only have RTS, MMORPG, "Vehicle Simulation", Turn based strategy, and FPS as their genre's. Isn't that a little shallow? Also their choices, particularly Battle for Wesnoth, to my understanding are very mature. So isn't it a little bit of watering the top of the planet to make these as suggestions for all the free developers to focus on? Is there not more promising projects out there who have lots of work todo before they can stand on their own as a complete game. I mean there is a kind of diminishing returns once a game reaches a polished fully playable state... There are only so many extra levels and characters you can put up with.

Also didn't happypenguin.org already try something like this before?

We are very happy to announce that MegaGlest is a founding member of the Free Game Alliance, an initiative to promote open source game development and mutual exchange amongst the projects forming it.

It seems that they are publishing some sort of public agreement to share each other's free developers which is a completely disgusting display. Also that picking the most mature games is by design. I'm not sure how this is supposed to convince developers or get support from players. Not sure what their point is aside from putting a few pretty games together, calling them allied, and pretending they are extra noble and special. It's childish.