Duion {l Wrote}:FaTony {l Wrote}:Duion {l Wrote}:I just wanted to confirm for everyone here the fact that most FOSS games are clones, nothing else.
I just wanted to confirm that all platformers are clones in Super Mario Bros, all FPSes are clones of DOOM, all RTS are clones of Age of Empires, all...
Yes and all board games are a clone of chess and all ball games are a clone of football and all card games are a clone of poker.
Of course it is not, this is a typical strawman fallacy, it goes like this:
"Doom is a 3D game, therefore all other games that are 3D as well are clones of Doom."
You don't have to be a genius to see that this is obviously wrong.
You also don't have to be a genius to see that STK, in its current state, is not a clone of Mario Kart; you just have to play it. The same holds true for many of the more mature FOSS games that may have started out as clones. A clone can grow and sometimes even surpass the game that originally inspired it. This is one of the great advantages of the open source, community-minded develpoment model that many of these FOSS clones have.
For example, I could sit down and make a clone of, say, Pong, and upload it to github licensed under the GPL or something. If I just left it at that then, Duion, your statement that it is just "a clone, and nothing more" would hold true. But if instead, I, and perhaps a group of contributors, were to work on the game for several months or years, and take it beyond the original boundaries of the game Pong and into new and original territory, then it wouldn't be *just* a clone. It would be its own seperate and unique game, despite its humble origins.
This has happened many times in the FOSS game scene. It all comes back to what has been said or implied many times here already: so what if a game is a clone? That doesn't invalidate the game or the work of its developers. Clones are fine and legitimate, provided they do not use lifted, non-free assets or something of that nature. If anything, people should be encouraged to make
more clones, because you never know when one might take off and be the next big thing