Interesting discussion on reddit on open source games

[Julius]

Some outside perspective from the general Linux_gaming public:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/c ... rce_games/

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Taknamay]

Interesting, although I could have guessed people have most of these opinions. Basically boils down to three related points:

1) Art quality, cohesion, direction is missing
2) Games do not lend themselves to collaboration; they need centralized direction
3) No money, so talented developers/artists make proprietary games

I have mixed feelings about all of these points. I would say they all have at least a grain of truth, but I think the biggest problem is simpler than that. There are fewer free games than proprietary games, period. Therefore, the number of free games that are not half-baked is incredibly small. Ultimately, the most fundamental thing we lack is a sizable community (both developers and players) in my view.

As an example:

There are 10,000 proprietary games, and 10% are good. Then there are 1,000 good proprietary games.
There are 100 free games, and 10% are good. Then there are 10 good free games.

Of course people would ask, "where are the good free games?"

Like I said earlier, the original three points do have some merit. They will have to be addressed in parallel to the community issue, I suppose.

[farcodev]

I read a few on Reddit;
"I think free software game makers need to be realistic - I don't think we're at a position yet where a free software team could make something like Skyrim or Deus Ex or Tomb Raider - the skill/talent gap is just too large"

Well, it's a question of $ too
There are a good bunch of high quality assets on OGA, especially since these last years.

But the incentive of the open-source have nothing to do with the AAA and indy scene, and to have a full pro team working FULL TIME on a open source project will stay a wet dream and nothing else.

[onpon4]

I think an elephant in the room that isn't being addressed is that video game development is not all that profitable. The thing is, developing a video game is a lot more expensive than people realize. People openly criticized me for setting the funding goal for ReTux at $10,000, claiming it was much too high, but that was a very low estimate for the total cost of its development, and it would have had me working at less than minimum wage. (The actual result was that I ended up working pretty much for free, since what was raised was a pittance that was entirely poured into paying artists and sales of copies have been not even close to enough to make up for that.) And that was for a 2-D platformer made in Python by one person with very few new graphics. Start getting into the realm of more modern games and you're talking easily millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars for a single game. With a $40 profit margin per copy, a 2 million dollar game would need to sell 50,000 copies just to break even. At a more realistic $20 profit margin, that's 100,000 copies you need to sell. And that's with the copyright model; with other models, you need to find ways to convince people to voluntarily give you money, usually much less money than the $60 particularly popular proprietary games sell for, so the game needs to be even more popular to be profitable.

I don't know if this is really a problem that can be solved unless the proprietary video game industry collapses. But the best chance we would have is if there was a video game publishing company that was dedicated to publishing commercial libre games, ideally set up as a non-profit organization, or at least a video game publishing company that was willing to publish libre games. Even then, we would have to accept either much lower standards than mainstream proprietary games, or doing a large portion of the work for free, or possibly both.

Barring that, we are just going to have to compete exclusively with proprietary indie games, because realistically, that's all we can hope to match. In particular, we have to focus on producing our games cheaply without making them look unreasonably cheap. In short, we have to be creative.

[charlie]

I think an elephant in the room that isn't being addressed is that video game development is not all that profitable.

If you are going to make an argument, start with a true/provable premise.

Video game development is incredibly profitable if done right. There are too many examples of huge commercial success, from viral indie titles - Minecraft - to big commercial brands - such as Mario.

The problem, as with any industry, is there are lots of people involved that don't do it right so there are many examples of failure too.

Any well professionally managed game, that has a target audience (i.e. is fun to enough people) and is marketed well, can make money.

[onpon4]

Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. For a video game to be profitable, it needs to be immensely popular, and how popular it needs to be skyrockets the more production value you put into it because it costs so much more. We're talking hundreds of thousands or even millions of players for anything even close to the level of mainstream proprietary games. The point I'm getting at is that making expensive video games profitable requires very, very good marketing. That's why I said a publishing company would be helpful; if we, like proprietary video game developers, could rely on a publishing company to market dozens of games a year, they could take calculated risks to turn a profit on the successful games and figure out what games are profitable at any particular moment. That would in turn enable them to pay us to make more expensive games.

But that's probably a pipe dream. So the best we can do is plan only on reaching thousands of people, and that means we need to be very, very cheap.

[Duion]

Video game production is not profitable at all, at least 80% of indies fail.
The big companies instead loot their big fanbase for money constantly wihtout providing much product, so for them it is profitable.
It is similar to the music industry, one could say making music is profitable, since there are bands making millions, but the reality is for outsiders it is almost impossible to make money, it is similar to the video game industry.
And since there is almost no support from this community, I don't see much hope.

[farcodev]

Well now the question is; Is profit relevant for the fun of dev & sharing? Is it now a problem for the current open source community?
Because you know at the origin, that wasn't the idea... and I hope that isn't the idea now of this forum.

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?

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)...

And I'm with Charlie, if it wasn't profitable the investors and financial sharks would not put even one $ in the projects.
The failure for the indie is also sometimes due to bad financial management and lack of clear vision. At least the failures shows that it isn't easy and not a given even if you have money.

Sorry if I sound harsh, it isn't my intention.

[Duion]

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]

And I'm with Charlie, if it wasn't profitable the investors and financial sharks would not put even one $ in the projects.

Since I didn't say that it isn't profitable at all, I'm going to assume that you're arguing that if people are investing in it then it must be very profitable. This simply isn't true. There are all sorts of industries where profit margins are thin, and video games are one of them. It's all about accumulating those thin profit margins to the point of substantial profit, mostly in this case by taking many calculated risks. That's something that requires a publishing company, and that was my point.

[Julius]

And since there is almost no support from this community, I don't see much hope.

"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.

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?

Yeah why not Crowd sourcing would work for open-source games, but often additional profit from selling copies of the game is too sweet of a deal to go down this route.

[charlie]

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.

There are plenty of really crap games on Steam that have sold more than that.

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.

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...

The open source game developer should have a clear goal that is achievable with little help, with the end hope of making a game that is easily maintained into the future (i.e. doesn't bitrot / stop working on future platforms) or to seed a positive community. There are lots of very, very active communities based on open source games - e.g. Wesnoth, Freeciv, STK - or inspired by open source work on proprietary games - e.g. OpenMW, OpenTTD.

[onpon4]

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.

Everything you're saying here rests on the assumption that a single developer can do everything alone. That means the developer has to be adept at not just programming, but also drawing or at least pixel art, sound production, and music composition. These people exist, but they are not that common. If you don't have every single skill needed to do every task for a game, you need to get someone else to do it. That means paying them, which translates to a lower wage for you.

Your argument also rests on the assumption that you can sell 10,000 copies of a game for $10 each (a rather high price for an online download) with no paid advertisements whatsoever. This is a patently absurd expectation on several levels. First of all, that price is going to mean you're going to have a much harder time convincing people to buy the game, which means you're either going to have to have an amazing concept or great production value. The former is something that happens only once in a while (only a few games can be so lucky), and the latter is something that's going to take a lot of work, and that means expense. Second of all, to even reach that number of people, you need to advertise. Granted, you don't need to advertise as much as mainstream games, but you still need to do it, and in practice, when you're looking to convince 10,000 people to buy a game, that means paying for it. Every time you pay someone to advertise, that's more money you have to make just to recoup the cost, meaning you have to sell to more people.

So these numbers need to be adjusted. First of all, without paid advertising (because remember, we don't have thousands of dollars to spend up-front just to reach out to people), you're not going to just automatically sell 10,000 copies. 10,000 might be the number of views you can aspire to get, though let's push that to 50,000 to be extremely generous. Second, since we're doing everything by ourselves, we're not going to be able to produce something in the span of 2 years that people are willing to pay more than $2 for, realistically. But also, these kinds of games don't have 2 year development cycles, so let's say it takes us just one year; that's more realistic. With that, we can make $100,000 if every single person who views the game buys it. But that's not going to happen. In practice, we need to work very hard to convince people to buy it, and if we do this very well, we might convince, say, 10% of them to buy it, selling 5,000 copies for a grand total of $10,000, less than what you would have made working a minimum wage job full-time. And you have to repeat this every year.

To my mind, struggling year by year to make less than minimum wage is not an endeavor that's profitable.

It takes the kinds of calculated risks, particularly with expensive marketing, that only rich people can take to make video game development consistently profitable. In other words, a well-established publishing company is needed.

[charlie]

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.

Of course you have to scale down your art/sound expectations, source free material etc (opengameart.org is a goldmine and I'm sure there's plenty of others) but a well designed game often doesn't have as big an art requirement as you might imagine.

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.

[onpon4]

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.

Minecraft was an exceptional (lucky) case.

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.

Just because some people are willing to pay $10 for some games doesn't mean it's not a lot. $10 is not the asking price for a small game like, say, VVVVVV. When I look for $10 games, I see very few of them, but the ones I do see are either really big, mainstream, or just not doing all that well.

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.

How it affects libre gaming is that it means we must be even cheaper than indie games, and this necessitates not having the kind of production quality we see in the mainstream (the kind that costs millions of dollars). That was my point.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Duion]

Almost all open source games have a playerbase close to zero, I talked to some other developers personally and they all had the same problem. Most open source games that have some player base are those who are a clone of a clone of a clone of a previously successfull commercial title, so they gain popularity by the original games community and brand names.
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.

[farcodev]

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.

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...

What the hell? I was just referring of the comments here making useless comparisons between aaa/indie vs opensource...
Anyway since it is like talking to some wall, I prefer to stop here.

If you cut out open source clones of succesfull commercial titles, open source game development is almost non existant.

Thanks for spitting onto the work of others

[Taknamay]

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.

Valyria Tear, Wesnoth, RogueBox Adventures, Project: Starfighter, Legend of Edgar, and FLARE all seem pretty original to me.

Two other games I like are Mana World and Naev. I know those are partly originated in Ragnarok Online and Escape Velocity, so I do not know how different they are. They don't seem like clones to me though. I could be wrong. (Endless Sky is also based on Escape Velocity and plays very differently. Nox Imperii is based on Naev and has a lot of mechanics that seem new and interesting to me).

I suppose it depends on how you define clone. Is every roguelike a clone of rogue?

[Julius]

I don't think we are talking about clones in a general sense, because lets face it: the entire games industry is pretty uncreative and makes one generic FPS (fill what ever main genre you like here) after the other.

What is meant are engine drop in replacements, such as OpenMW for example. While these projects require a great deal if ingenuity, creative game design really isn't part of it. I understand why they are popular with programmers, and many of these projects are really neat and have over time developed into more than just an engine replacement. But they are not showing that FOSS game development can be working model and people are mostly also not perceiving them as open source games (more like "this great commercial game can be combined with this open-source tool that allows it to run better and have additional cool features").

@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.

[farcodev]

@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.

I'm sorry I didn't want to make a drama and I don't take it personally, it's just that I found that saying that OSG dev is non existant is a bit over the top when we see projects already named by charlie.
I'll try to be more cold headed next time

[Duion]

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.

I don't want to argue about titles like 0.A.D being an age of empires clone for example, since even though inspired by it, it is an original standalone game.

For the clones or free engine implementations of commercial titles, I consider them a waste of time, since 1. no original new content is created, 2. it is still not open source, so it does neither fit the definition of game development nor the definition of open source, it MAY be some time in the future, but currently it is not, this is why I don't like that approach.
So even if you want a clone of a proprietary game you liked, you should consider better making a standalone game inspired by it with a unique brand name that belongs to you or the project, not a direct clone.

[onpon4]

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.

I can't say I agree with the definition of what is a "clone" being based solely on the name. It's also not necessarily true that games named this way are intended as clones. A couple examples from what you named:

- OpenArena isn't a clone of Quake III, it's a fork of Quake III.
- Freedoom isn't intended to be a game similar to Doom. It's intended to be a game compatible with Doom (though not vanilla Doom, mind; it can't run on Chocolate Doom because its levels use Boom features).

When I think of a clone, I think of a game that explicitly tries to be similar to another game, without using the original engine. Where you draw the line and just say that a game is inspired by, rather than cloned from, another game is ultimately up to you, but I draw the line where the project actively makes decisions that go directly against the inspiration game. For example, in my opinion:

- SuperTux Milestone 1 was a Super Mario Bros clone, but when things like deprecating the run key, the pay-for-checkpoints mechanic, and the backflip happened, it stopped being a clone.
- ReTux was never a clone of SuperTux (despite what some people think) because it uses powerups differently, handles death differently, and includes a health bar rather than growing/shrinking.
- Minetest stopped being a clone of Minecraft when it developed further and pointedly didn't adopt many of Minecraft's designs for the default game.

[Duion]

It is not based on the name, but the name makes it the most obvious.

Also from a legal standpoint it is probably not allowed to use their brand names, even if it is a legal grey area, it still makes it look lame.

At least for open source art creation this is not allowed, but somehow in brand names this is legal? Opengameart does not allow content based on proprietary works, Blendswap tolerates it, but it must be labelled as "fan art" since it is a legal grey area, meaning it is not legal, but tolerated in most cases.