FreeGameDev

themightyglider {l Wrote}:

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GNU/Linux on the desktop has no impact on the market as well, so everybody who develops desktop applications for it is wasting his/her time and should concentrate on server side programing where GNU/Linux has a fair market share. Or if he/she really wants to make a desktop application he/she has to focus on MS Windows and Mac OSX.

PC is dead, there is no reason to develop for it, only Android/iOS.

Let me add a third perspective: not every learning project / purely for personal enjoyment project needs to be loudly proclamed to the public with the seemingly expectation to be praised for creating the next awesome game engine or whatever.
The polite way is not responding at all, or doing some sort of minor comment on possible learning resources, but most people that keep quiet probably agree that at minimum it was show-cased way too early.

themightyglider {l Wrote}:
Now let me be your advocatus diaboli:

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GNU/Linux on the desktop has no impact on the market as well, so everybody who develops desktop applications for it is wasting his/her time and should concentrate on server side programing where GNU/Linux has a fair market share. Or if he/she really wants to make a desktop application he/she has to focus on MS Windows and Mac OSX.

I'm sure that can't be a solution unless you love to be bound to a system that doesn't respects your freedom as user, spies on you and make profit out of your personal data.

Yes, you are right that there are open source software projects that are not only successfull but often even better than the proprietary competition.
But we are not talking about software projects, this is about games.
Classical strawman logical fallacy.

Well you could argue that if open source software is successfull, that this could be transferred into the game realm as well, the problem is just that there are no open source games that can compete on the market.
If you look at the market in software you often find open source alternatives that cannot only compete, but often are vastly superior than the proprietary versions.
Then if you look at the game market you will find that for the most part there exists no open source alternative at all and for those parts where it does, the open source versions are always vastly inferior to the proprietary products, so that nobody bothers with it and nobody sees it as competition.

So why is that so?

I guess the complexity of AIs and the need for graphical assets might be some reasons. Also how time-consuming it can be to create a lot of text, never mind voice acting in different languages.

If you look at the market in software you often find open source alternatives that cannot only compete, but often are vastly superior than the proprietary versions.
Then if you look at the game market you will find that for the most part there exists no open source alternative at all and for those parts where it does, the open source versions are always vastly inferior to the proprietary products, so that nobody bothers with it and nobody sees it as competition.

So why is that so?

Because clones of games always live in the shadow of the games they are cloning. For the most part, people are only interested in new games, that are different from other games. And when games are different, people play them each for different reasons.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:Because clones of games always live in the shadow of the games they are cloning. For the most part, people are only interested in new games, that are different from other games. And when games are different, people play them each for different reasons.

Yes, because the real market is for real creators and not for copycats.

If you look at the market in software you often find open source alternatives that cannot only compete, but often are vastly superior than the proprietary versions.
Then if you look at the game market you will find that for the most part there exists no open source alternative at all and for those parts where it does, the open source versions are always vastly inferior to the proprietary products, so that nobody bothers with it and nobody sees it as competition.

So why is that so?

I guess the reason is that companies support or actively work on projects that are useful for their business. A lot of the free software you are refering to are supported with money or manpower by companies.
Games on the other hand aren't useful by their nature. So the community of FOSS game makers are just a few geeks that like to create games in their spare time. You can't compare the results of this people with the results a professional game studio, with paid coders and artists, can reach.

That doesn't mean that there are no good FOSS games at all. There are various examples for successful libre games. For example roguelikes like Nethack or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. They have big communities of fans without competing on any games from the 'real market'.

Julius {l Wrote}:Let me add a third perspective: not every learning project / purely for personal enjoyment project needs to be loudly proclamed to the public with the seemingly expectation to be praised for creating the next awesome game engine or whatever.

This, this, and this x 100.

Also:

Duion {l Wrote}:Yes, because the real market is for real creators and not for copycats.

Oh God do you have it so not figured out Duion. The real market is saturated with copycats. Some games haven't progressed other than repaints for decades. Play Warhammer: Dark Omen (1998) then Total War: Warhammer (2016) and cry at how little improved it is as a battle simulator other than you can zoom in and see it all in high def 3D and it has some stupid tedious overworld game to trudge through.

charlie {l Wrote}:

Julius {l Wrote}:Let me add a third perspective: not every learning project / purely for personal enjoyment project needs to be loudly proclamed to the public with the seemingly expectation to be praised for creating the next awesome game engine or whatever.

This, this, and this x 100.

You are the ones who praise everything, I just said it is a waste of time.

charlie {l Wrote}:Also:

Duion {l Wrote}:Yes, because the real market is for real creators and not for copycats.

Oh God do you have it so not figured out Duion. The real market is saturated with copycats. Some games haven't progressed other than repaints for decades. Play Warhammer: Dark Omen (1998) then Total War: Warhammer (2016) and cry at how little improved it is as a battle simulator other than you can zoom in and see it all in high def 3D and it has some stupid tedious overworld game to trudge through.

It is not being a copycat if you produce sequels for your own product.
Being a copycat is copying someone elses product, just because it is successful and you want a piece of the market share it has generated. You cannot copy it directly because of copyright, but you can take all the game elements and rebuild them.
Yes copycats exist on the market, but not as many as you might think, there are a handful under the most successfull games and those are pushed with lots of efford, but the average copycat game just hopes that some people accidentally buy them, because it looks like the real thing, but overall they have no significant marketshare.

Duion {l Wrote}:Being a copycat is copying someone elses product, just because it is successful and you want a piece of the market share it has generated. You cannot copy it directly because of copyright, but you can take all the game elements and rebuild them.

This isn't really what FOSS games usually do though, is it? I realize that there are many "copycats" in the FOSS scene, both of games and of engines, but they aren't really competing on the market in an economic way because they are usually shared for free and turn little or no profit (or, just the opposite, lose money).

I think the difference in thinking here is that you are seeing games (including free software games) through an economic lense. I think this perspective is only legitmate to a certain, very narrow extent in the FOSS game community. It is true that most FOSS game projects fail in a monetary sense, but then, so do most commercial game projects. The same certainly holds true for engines. But there are many other metrics to measure success by besides money, or market share, or even popularity. And if the creator gets what they want out of their game (or engine) project, who are we to say they have failed?

Duion {l Wrote}:the open source versions are always vastly inferior to the proprietary products, so that nobody bothers with it and nobody sees it as competition.

What? Red Eclipse and Xonotic beat most proprietary games.

Magellan {l Wrote}:This isn't really what FOSS games usually do though, is it? I realize that there are many "copycats" in the FOSS scene, both of games and of engines, but they aren't really competing on the market in an economic way because they are usually shared for free and turn little or no profit (or, just the opposite, lose money).

Isn't that what almost ANY FOSS game is about? It is a pure copycat scene, often they give it even a similar brand name to indicate which game it is a copy from.
If making money or economic or not, it does not matter, copycat is copycat. You just get away with copying more likely if you do not profit from it, since the original creator sees it not that much of a threat, but many big companies sue anyone who copies their stuff, regardless if making money or not, since they know how much worth their intelectual property is.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:Because clones of games always live in the shadow of the games they are cloning. For the most part, people are only interested in new games, that are different from other games. And when games are different, people play them each for different reasons.

This comment from onbon4 is clearly referring to that every FOSS game is a clone and therefore live in the shadows of the games they cloned and so nobody is interested.

FaTony {l Wrote}:

Duion {l Wrote}:the open source versions are always vastly inferior to the proprietary products, so that nobody bothers with it and nobody sees it as competition.

What? Red Eclipse and Xonotic beat most proprietary games.

You are beyond delusional, of course they do not, they are not even as good as the games they are a copy of.

Duion {l Wrote}:You are the ones who praise everything, I just said it is a waste of time.

I do try to encourage people. Developing things is a lonely enterprise, what's wrong with a bit of motivation?

You just call things a waste of time. So if somebody gives up on something, because of you, that makes you proud?

Duion {l Wrote}:Yes copycats exist on the market, but not as many as you might think.

I have Steam. There's little "original" content IMHO. Lots of games that are copies of other games. Lots of games that want to be Minecraft etc. I just bought Axiom Verge which is a superb indie title but a total clone of Metroid. They just sell it instead of making it open source, so they have a business model instead of a community model. You seem to approve of one and not the other, which is contradictory to me - to be honest I don't even get why you hang out on this forum or care about open source at all?

charlie {l Wrote}: You seem to approve of one and not the other, which is contradictory to me - to be honest I don't even get why you hang out on this forum or care about open source at all?

Because I do care.
Encouraging people to continue with projects that are almost guaranteed to fail has nothing to do with caring.
So if I see someone producing bad content or trying something that will not work, I tell him that, that is true caring.

Duion {l Wrote}:

charlie {l Wrote}: You seem to approve of one and not the other, which is contradictory to me - to be honest I don't even get why you hang out on this forum or care about open source at all?

Because I do care.
Encouraging people to continue with projects that are almost guaranteed to fail has nothing to do with caring.
So if I see someone producing bad content or trying something that will not work, I tell him that, that is true caring.

So let's try to do it on a positive way (as the discussion is more and more circular now), rather than the negation-way (ie: "shouldn't do that"): on what you, Duion, believe that the FLOSS game scene should work? On what kind of games and from what kind of economic perspective?

Duion {l Wrote}:This comment from onbon4 is clearly referring to that every FOSS game is a clone

No, it isn't. It's referring to the fact that most libre games are not considered to be competition for proprietary games because they're not clones. Take SuperTuxKart, for example. Yeah, it takes a lot of inspiration from Mario Kart, but it is different. So its existence doesn't prevent people from wanting to play Mario Kart. STK is just another game, not a Mario Kart replacement.

Of course there are a few clones, but those games are not well-known. A lot of them are just parts of the KDE games and GNOME games collections. They also don't usually try particularly hard to provide the same experience, because their purpose is to be a substitute, not a replacement.

@onpon4
Come on of course it is a clone, the creators even admit it by using a knock-off name for their knock-off game, they very likely knew what they were doing.
Try finding a few FOSS games that are not a total knock-off, there are a few, but not easy to find, but I would estimate 80-90% of FOSS games are knock-offs.

No, it isn't. It started out very similar to Mario Kart, but it has since been doing its own thing. Have you played Mario Kart recently? Other than the basic theme of go-karts that pick up random weapons, it's barely similar. The weapons are different, the control is different, the game modes are different, and nitro doesn't exist in Mario Kart.

It is named as a knock-off, it was intended as a knock-off and it was a knock-off in the beginning, so how is it not a knock-off anymore?
Sometimes I think you people do not understand the concept of reality...

Duion {l Wrote}:@onpon4
Try finding a few FOSS games that are not a total knock-off, there are a few, but not easy to find, but I would estimate 80-90% of FOSS games are knock-offs.

Battle for Wesnoth
Rigs of Rods
Freedroid RPG
Unknown Horizons
Cataclysm: DDA

Additionally, sometimes self-professed "clones" can take games in new and exciting directions. Look at OpenTTD for example. While it is certainly not an original concept, it greatly builds upon the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe game. Isn't that really what free software is about? Sharing and improving programs via community participation?

onpon4 {l Wrote}:No, it isn't. It started out very similar to Mario Kart, but it has since been doing its own thing. Have you played Mario Kart recently? Other than the basic theme of go-karts that pick up random weapons, it's barely similar. The weapons are different, the control is different, the game modes are different, and nitro doesn't exist in Mario Kart.

Really, when I played it, STK seemed much more similar to Crash Team Racing than to any Mario Kart games I had played. It doesn't seem to me like a clone at all, just another entry into the kart racer genre

Battle for Wesnoth - don't know that, looks like civilization, but I will let that pass
Rigs of Rods - technically not a game, it says it is a "simulation software"
Freedroid RPG - ok, not that familar with those games
Unknown Horizons - clearly an Anno 1602 knock-off
Cataclysm: DDA -ok

So you got 3 out of 5 correct.

Duion {l Wrote}:So you got 3 out of 5 correct.

Hey, 60% ain't too shabby!

In all seriousness though, I understand where you are coming from, since there are a lot of clone-type games in the FOSS community. I just don't really see that as a tremendous negative or something that should be railed against. After all, by virtue of being truly free these games must have their own open source media, in addition to their code. Even if some games skirt a little close to their proprietary counterparts, it is not a huge problem so long as they remain technically free and open source.

Duion {l Wrote}:It is named as a knock-off, it was intended as a knock-off and it was a knock-off in the beginning, so how is it not a knock-off anymore?
Sometimes I think you people do not understand the concept of reality...

I don't care what the original intention of the TuxKart project was, or what the original intention of the SuperTuxKart project was. It has no bearing on the design and development direction of SuperTuxKart today.

I dislike the term "knock-off" anyway. It casts cloning in a negative light, and the only possible reason to do this is to be in support of an anti-sharing, copyrighted culture. Sharing is good. Copying is an act of love. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So no, cloning is not a bad thing. It's just that it's so difficult to properly clone a large game, and so few people are going to play it, it's far less worthwhile than making a new, similar game.

I just wanted to confirm for everyone here the fact that most FOSS games are clones, nothing else.