Interesting discussion on reddit on open source games

[farrer]

For me we have a lot of good quality engines / code out there, some cool implemented ideas but often (with exceptions, obviously) lack of good art. Particularly for those genres which require a lot of art (in this way, a Free/Libre implementation of a proprietary game is more suitable to do them a whole big game from scratch).

As pointed out somewhere, Free/Libre games by its Free/Libre culture - that is for years a lot related with software - is an easy step to attract developers, mainly those already interested in Free/Libre culture after all. But art, for its side, is a lot more attracted to proprietary intellectual property, which just recently is more tempted to change (Creative Commons and its derivative communities done a good job there).

On the other hand, from some years now, since the release of some game engines as Freemium, it seems for me that the Free/Libre game community just lost some momentum / attraction: A lot of developers who could initially be tempted to adopt Free/Libre licenses to their games, just feel much more attracted to "use the 'same' engine as 'real-game-developers' use" (with a lot of quotes on those fallacious affirmations), and join the ship of those proprietary engines.

Anyway, we are there. For me, Free/Libre development is as much a political act as it can be. And so will be.

[Duion]

I don't get why everyone is saying artists are missing, art ist much easier to do than for example engine development, it is just the quantity that makes art hard, but if you don't need much assets then it is no problem.

[onpon4]

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.

Two problems:

One, you're comparing trademark issues (names that might be trademarks) to copyright issues (art). These are not even all that similar. I think you're falling for the term "intellectual property".

Second, it is not true that these names, at least any of them that I'm aware of, are infringing trademarks. You're being very general, so I can't tell what names in particular you are accusing of infringing trademarks, but I'll give a few examples to explain why they don't infringe any trademark:

- "Freedoom": Easily distinguished from "Doom", so no sane person is going to be confused by it. Plus, it's a nice play on the word "freedom".
- "OpenArena": Doesn't even include the name "Quake" in it.
- "Freeciv": Easily distinguished from names like "Civilization II". "Civ" isn't the full title of any related game.
- "Secret Maryo Chronicles": "Maryo" is an obvious parody of the name "Mario", which is permitted under trademark law. Other than this similarity, the name has little in common with "Super Mario World".
- "Kapman": Doesn't include the name "Pac-Man" in it. It's an obvious parody, but again, that's allowed.

[charlie]

To be fair to Duion (despite me disagreeing with almost everything he has said in this thread) the Secret Maryo guys forked and renamed the project to get away from the Mario brand.

http://www.secretchronicles.de/en/

The Secret Chronicles of Dr. M.

[Duion]

It is still lame, it reminds me of those ridiculous brand name knock offs from china etc. Even if it is "legal", it is clear that it is a knock off, because they want to feed of the design and the popularity and cannot or do not want to create anything their own.
I think it is not good for the image if you have lots of poor knock off products that remind you off those products smuggled in from china that lack in quality and sell for a fraction of the price on the black markets.

[Julius]

Wargus / Stratagus also had to change it's name from Freecraft, but with Minecraft being a thing, I guess Blizzard softened their stance on it over the years.

But I think Duion's point wasn't that the names are legal or not, but rather that they show clear intend to clone. Which you can like or not... but that can't be denied.

I disagree though that art is much easier than engine programming. Good art is just as difficult as good engine programming. However you can get away with OKish art in certain genres, which is easier than most engine programming. But, most games also don't need any engine programming, but rather just some game scripting, and that is again usually easier than even rather basic art (if you don't have to start from scratch... .and yes it can be tedious, but that's not the same as difficult).

[Julius]

On the other hand, from some years now, since the release of some game engines as Freemium, it seems for me that the Free/Libre game community just lost some momentum / attraction: A lot of developers who could initially be tempted to adopt Free/Libre licenses to their games, just feel much more attracted to "use the 'same' engine as 'real-game-developers' use" (with a lot of quotes on those fallacious affirmations), and join the ship of those proprietary engines.

Yeah, that's similar to the general decline of players due to plenty of cheap (<$5) older commercial games being available online (this especially hurt open-source game player numbers of Linux I think, because before the Steam release they had much less options to choose from).

But in general it is not only about those high profile freemium engines available, but also the general indie bubble that made many people try for (a rather unrealistic) indie-game business instead of contributing to open-source projects next to their normal day job. But this bubble has already partially burst, i.e. I think what we are seeing right now is a lot of indie games being released with very low profit margins (and if you count what the persons could have earned with regular jobs, probably a big loss), and many of those teams will opt for not doing another game again to cut their losses so to speak.

[onpon4]

I disagree though that art is much easier than engine programming. Good art is just as difficult as good engine programming.

I would go further and argue the opposite: programming is much easier than art, and programming can be made even easier over time or even be made unnecessary altogether in some cases with game engines. Basically, it gets massively easier because we can re-use code. But that's not the case for art; you can't just take whatever libre images you want and slap them together to make new images, you need to make sure they fit together aesthetically (and there are tons of different aesthetics out there). And you simply can't replace the skill of a good artist with a powerful drawing program.

[Duion]

There is probably a 100 times more artists than engine programmers in the scene, just a rough estimate. You need years of experience in programming before you can start go engine programming, but you can get some art done in a few days, even without experience, just watch some tutorials. Even the big engines/games have very few engine programmers, maybe 4 people on a 100 people team. I have not seen anyone doing engine development in the open source scene, so theres probably also just a handfull of those at max where on the other hand you have hundreds of people doing art.

[Julius]

Just like there are hundreds tinkering with game engine script, which can be done with 5 minutes reading a short tutorial.

And with basically no exceptions I have yet to seen really high quality 3D models with good animations, sculpted normal-maps, all the other maps needed for PBR done in the open-source game scene, compared to (very) few people in the scene who can do top-class engine programming (for example Eihrul, who programmed the Tesseract rendering engine: http://tesseract.gg/ ).

But you are right that in big commercial titles you normally need more top class artists than programmers, which partially explains why there are none left for us

[farrer]

There is probably a 100 times more artists than engine programmers in the scene, just a rough estimate.

By scene you mean the Free/libre game scene or the general game development scene? If the second, ok. If the first, as far as I know it's exactly the opposite (even if we consider more than just engines, and look at Free/Libre games too, there's much more developers involved than artists, with few specific projects exceptions. And even within these exceptions, I doubt that it got near the rate of 100/1).

But in general it is not only about those high profile freemium engines available, but also the general indie bubble that made many people try for (a rather unrealistic) indie-game business instead of contributing to open-source projects next to their normal day job.

Totally agreed.

[mdwh]

I don't know how profitable the games industry is, but I don't think you can just look at examples like Minecraft - these are the rare exceptions, not the rule. Of more interest would be things like median averages of things like sales, revenue, profit. The revenue numbers of the games industry for a whole are impressive, but I don't know what things look like for a typical indie developer.

In terms of not needing to advertise - yes some people can know about them, but it's a question of numbers. In some cases it can lead to large numbers, but again those are the exceptions. I see from my own set of open source applications the range that is possible - the most successful (not a game) gets more downloads per day than all my others get in a year.

There is the question of expectations - even for my games, I can still say I've had thousands of people try them, and hopefully at least some of them like it (and from reviews, emails, I know that some of them do). So in that sense I've both achieved my goal of having fun writing a game I wanted to write/play, and had other people enjoy it too. Making enough money to make a living would require a lot more (of course if I was working full time on it, I'd have a lot more time to invest; but it'd be a risky business venture for me to take).

Having said that, it's not clear if that's the reason for Open Source game development (or alleged lack of). I don't think Open Source developers in general do it for the money. Regarding the Reddit quote "the skill/talent gap is just too large" - the biggest factor is time. In the commercial world, this also means money. For Open Source, this has typically come from people working on projects in their spare time.

Some non-game Open Source projects do benefit from funding from companies, I don't know how much of a factor that is.

The usual answer for a difference that games have is they require collaboration from both developers and artists. I think even if there are just as many artists, the fact that this collaboration between the two sets of people is an issue. Collaboration is in general harder (when people are working for free in their spare time, and aren't in the same office); many famous projects (Open Source or commercial) started from a single developer, which is therefore harder with games.

I think another factor is not that there's a lack of artists as such, but there may be a lack of people interested in working on Open Source projects? Arguably the "Free / Open" philosophy doesn't seem as common among artists (after all, the movements came from software developers, and I'm not sure the art world has had any similar kind of movement - Creative Commons is the closest attempt).

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

Open Source engines are a good thing to have, no different to it being a good thing to have Open Source development tools of any other kind.

They might not end up being used much or at all - but like games, any software may end up being popular or not.