Today I have spent
far too much time in researching how popular free software games are in the mainstream. Turns out: Free software games are completely vaporized.
I always had that feeling that free software games are something you never see in the mainstream media. But I never guessed it's
that bad.
So I went through my list of free software games of which I think they are finished or at least finished enough to deserve to be reviewed. I chose to look up the number of reviews on
Metacritic.
Note I am not a huge fan of Metacritic (okay, I absolutely despise it!) and do not agree with their dubious metascore. But Metacritic is “mainstream”, and this website includes hundreds if games magazines (many of them mainstream as well). Which is exactly what I want, so the number of reviews on Metacritic alone should give a pretty decent idea on how well-recognized a game is. Note that this is different from a game's rating. This post about whether a game got any review from a mainstream medium
in the first place, no matter if good or bad.
Here follows a number of reviews for each game I looked at on 18th June 2017 (UTC):
First Person ShooterRed Eclipse: 0 reviews
Nexuiz Classic: 0 (the original Nexuiz by Alientrap, not the proprietary remake published by THQ)
Tremulous: Not listed (this means there is not even an entry on Metacritic)
Game of SkillNeverball: 0
Neverball Clockwork: Not listed
Space SimulationEndless Sky: 0
Pioneer: Not listed
RoguelikeDungeon Crawl Stone Soup: Not listed
HyperRogue: 0
Ancient Domains of Mystery: 0
RacingExtreme Tux Racer: Not listed
StrategyMegaGlest: 0
Battle for Wesnoth: 0UFO: Alien Invasion: 0
OpenXCom: 0
Scorched 3D: 0
Warzone 2100: 0
Wyrmsun: 0
Freeciv: Not listed
Zero-K: Not listed
Annex: Conquer the World: Not listed
OtherRigs of Rods: 0
OpenTTD: 0
OpenClonk: 0
Rocks'n'Diamonds: Not listed
Puzzle Moppet: 0
Cubosphere: Not listed
StepMania: 0
AstroMenace: 0
FlightGear: 0
Technically unfinished, but practically fully playable (just call it “1.0” already!)Xonotic: 0
Voxelands: Not listed
SuperTux: Not listed
SuperTuxKart: Not listed
Unfinished but notable completion0 A.D.: Can't find it, I drown in results :-(
Widelands: Not listed
Naev: 0
Hedgewars: 0 reviews for iOS, not listed for PC
Pingus: 0
Valyria Tear: Not listed
Minetest: Not listed (this is expected, it's an engine)
Minetest Game: Not listed
Terasology: Not listed
Freeminer: Not listed
SummaryThat's right!
Not a single game in this list has even one lousy review.
Note my list may be incomplete, but I tried to limit myself to games with at least a decent quality or completion.
If you can find a free software game with a review on Metacritic or a
mainstream publication (this automatically excludes all “Linux” publications), that would be nice. But I haven't been able to find any
Interesting observationsThe prorietary (and commercial) remake of Nexuiz Classic, also confusingly called “Nexuiz”, got 2 reviews. This is still very few, but its intereting that the proprietary remake managed to get
more recognition than the original.
Accounting for other factorsAre 2D games ignored?
Not at all! There are several modern-era
proprietary 2D games with significant coverage:
Terraria: 29
Eufloria: 9 on PC, 18 on PS3, 1 on iOS, and probably more I've overlooked
Plants vs Zombies: 41 on PC alone, several others on other platforms
King Arthur's Gold: 4
Super Meat Boy: 11
FTL: Faster Than Light: 42
The Binding of Isaac: 30 (+other platforms)
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth: 10 (+many other platforms)
Yet a 2D game which happens to be free software … vanishes.
Are very simple games ignored?
I'm not sure. It seems to depend at lot on the hype. I think most very simple games get simply because there are so many of them, so this might affect. But very popular games still tend to get reviews, but it's not a lot. After a very lazy research, I found:
Flappy Bird: 7
Super Hexagon: 4 (needless to say, the free remake “OpenHexagon” is not listed)
I can't remember any hyped simple game which happens to be also free software. This might just be a coincidence.
Are unfinished games ignored?Well, not ignored, but at least not reviewed (with rare exceptions). This makes perfect sense and applies to all games, both free software and proprietary. So no surprise that free software games do NOT have reviews when they are still unfinished. This means, getting your game
actually finished is a very crucial step to getting recognized. This should be obvious.
Still, the fact that unfinished games are elminitated does not explain all the
finished free software games being without any mainstream reviews.
Is the roguelike genre ignored?
Not at all! Here are some proprietary games of the genre:
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon: 34
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky: 26
Shiren The Wanderer: 21
WazHack: 1
This is really strange. Historically, the roguelike genre came exclusively out of the free software scene. There is a ton of roguelike game from the free software scene, yet almost all of them seem to be ignored in the mainstream. WTF?
ConclusionThis is absolutely terrifying. NONE of the games has a review. WTF is going on here? Not a single review, let alone a metascore (which requires a minimum of 4 reviews).
Note that Metacritic includes
hundreds of publications, so this means that hundreds of publications either don't give a shit about free software or they really just didn't know about these games. Or there's another explanation. I really have no idea.
My list is not perfect, and I probably have missed a few important games. Still, I have hoped there would be at least
one review.
This really doesn't make any sense. It's as if free/libre games are completely vaporized in the mainstream media.
Well, this data at least explains one thing: Why many free software games often struggle to maintain a large and stable player community. Those games are simply not covered in mainstream media!
Because of this free software games also have a hard time in getting a Wikipedia article because of the lack of “reliable sources” (aka mainstream coverage).
I really wonder what is going on here. There are finished and polished games out there, with years of hard work behind, yet they still fail to get
any recognition in the mainstream media whatsoever? They don't praise them, they don't give them a mediocre rating, they don't shred those games in pieces and call it garbage. No, not even their very existance is recognized. Weird.
What do you think of all this?