The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Wuzzy » 18 Jun 2017, 19:12

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 Shooter
Red 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 Skill
Neverball: 0
Neverball Clockwork: Not listed

Space Simulation
Endless Sky: 0
Pioneer: Not listed

Roguelike

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: Not listed
HyperRogue: 0
Ancient Domains of Mystery: 0

Racing
Extreme Tux Racer: Not listed

Strategy
MegaGlest: 0
Battle for Wesnoth: 0
UFO: 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

Other
Rigs 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 completion
0 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

Summary
That'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 observations
The 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 factors
Are 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. :D

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?

Conclusion
This 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?
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby onpon4 » 18 Jun 2017, 21:47

Before you get carried away, please consider that popular proprietary games are usually backed by publishers. Proprietary indie games exist too, but the ones that get mainstream attention are especially popular (compared to other indie games), for one reason or another. It's not weird; if people don't know about a game, they don't review it.

No need for an explanation, really. More exposure will yield more reviews. I get the impression that you are leaning toward some sort of conspiracy theory, which doesn't make sense.

It probably looks worse from our perspective, but for a very simple reason: we're in a tiny bubble. Seriously, I haven't collected statistics, but I guarantee you that the number of people playing even the most popular libre game is nothing compared to even the player base of the least popular mainstream games. You might be, at best, comparing numbers in the hundreds for us with numbers in the tens of thousands for them. Heck, even those crappy Flash games probably have more players, and no one pays attention to those in the mainstream media either.

So how to solve it? I don't think that can be done systematically. But one thing that definitely hurts us is that libre games are often following after something. I love STK, Xonotic, Glest, etc, but these are all very generic to the point where most people consider them to be "clones" of something else. As long as we piggyback on mainstream proprietary games, our games will always be treated this way. If a libre game could get people's attention as its own thing, rather than as "libre / open source version of X", that game would be able to get mainstream attention as well, at least to the extent that popular indie games do. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. The best any of us can do is trial and error. Eventually, if you throw enough shit at the wall, something will stick.

Another thing that hurts us: many of us, myself included, have a bad habit of getting overly attached to the games we work on. If we were more willing to abandon games that don't work and stop adding stuff to finished games, we would have more time to develop new games, and so more useful work would be done.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 19 Jun 2017, 01:41

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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby LiamM32 » 19 Jun 2017, 03:16

Well, most reviews are consumer-oriented, which means the purpose is to give someone an idea of if it's worth buying.

But one thing is that I think open-source doesn't work as well for games as well as it does for other software. People only need one word processing program on their computer, so there are very few competing open-source word processing programs. But the world of games is more fragmented. Each individual game on it's own only appeals to small group of people. What compensates this is that this small group are often willing to pay significant prices for the games, so that commercial game projects are still well-funded.

I was still hoping that there would be one "golden example" of an open-source game that achieved significant popularity at some point. Also, it's too bad that there aren't even many simple games that are open-source. Flappy Bird was all made in one night. I guess that most devs doing games like this want to take advantage of the opportunity to make money off of it. A simple-but-good concept for a game is still very possible as an open-source game, so it may easily happen one day.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:But one thing that definitely hurts us is that libre games are often following after something. I love STK, Xonotic, Glest, etc, but these are all very generic to the point where most people consider them to be "clones" of something else. As long as we piggyback on mainstream proprietary games, our games will always be treated this way. If a libre game could get people's attention as its own thing, rather than as "libre / open source version of X", that game would be able to get mainstream attention as well, at least to the extent that popular indie games do.

Yeah, that's true. I guess that it's just hard to get people together to volunteer on an unproven concept. It's also a lack of direction in open-source games; people have different ideas of the direction they should evolve in, which don't fit well together. I think that most commercial games start out with a document explaining how the final game should be, followed by some concept art, then they work until they have roughly what was first envisioned, often with some minor compromises and sometimes only a few major changes in the direction the game should take.
But open-source games need to have some value during every step of development to prove their worth, and get people interested in contributing. They often only make short-term development goals. If they had a solid idea of a finished game right from the start, no-one would know if it will ever get finished.

I wish that some small fraction of the effort being put into mods for games could be redirected at open-source games. Again, this happens due to an established fanbase.

Katawa Shoujo was actually developed over the internet by a group of people (known as "Four Leaf Studios") who got together on 4chan to develop this visual novel based on concept art that someone posted online a few years back. Although people did have different ideas of how the idea would play-out, it still turned out very nicely. It's phenomenal that they managed to get people interested in contributing to this very unproven concept. But then again, being a visual novel, there was likely little programming while most of the work was music and illustration (which so many people do for free anyway).
It's too bad that they didn't make it an open-source project. I think that people only had access to it once they "joined the studio". It's too bad that they decided to put all the art under such a restrictive license (which basically says "Don't use this for anything!").


PS: You missed Warsow, which has been accepted as a tournament-worthy game.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby LiamM32 » 19 Jun 2017, 03:44

onpon4 {l Wrote}:Another thing that hurts us: many of us, myself included, have a bad habit of getting overly attached to the games we work on. If we were more willing to abandon games that don't work and stop adding stuff to finished games, we would have more time to develop new games, and so more useful work would be done.

Can you think of some examples of "failed game projects"; games that proved to be not worth it?

When you say "games that don't work", you must mean that the concept/design turns out a bad idea. Is that right, or do you mean that the codebase is broken, or that it's proving too difficult to finish?

I wonder if I'm guilty of this with Lips of Suna. I don't think that the game is broken by concept, although I do want to bring it in a different direction than it was going in. But this is an abandoned project that I'm trying to pick up. I have very minimal programming skills, so the lack of assistance that I get with it really sucks. But the concept isn't simple like Flappy Bird or tick-tack-toe, so it is a "big project" to bring it to good shape.

What "doesn't work" very well with Lips of Suna is the codebase. I don't like the mix of C++ and Lua. The Lua codebase is ridiculously modular and very difficult to understand. The way it's written is designed to make it easy to create "meaningless contributions" like enemies and weapons with identical functionality to existing ones, but hard to make "meaningful contributions" like making the enemies behave differently from each other, or changing the underlying functionality of the weapons.

If I had a team of programmers to develop Lips of Suna, I would want most of the codebase to be rewritten, replacing the Lua codebase with something better-written and in a more suited programming language.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby onpon4 » 19 Jun 2017, 04:16

Can you think of some examples of "failed game projects"; games that proved to be not worth it?

When you say "games that don't work", you must mean that the concept/design turns out a bad idea. Is that right, or do you mean that the codebase is broken, or that it's proving too difficult to finish?

I mean games that, broadly, are not worth the effort of development due to things like a lack of identity, development hell, and simply the lack of any following. Basically, games that aren't accomplishing anything. This is a little subjective, but I think all of these games are failures:

* ReTux. It was a failure right from the start; it was doomed to be seen as a SuperTux clone no matter what and should have been abandoned much sooner.
* SuperTux. It was always destined to be seen as an inferior Mario clone, and it was (and still is) taking way too long to get finished, partly because people kept shoving new ideas into it. It might as well be called "Feature Creep - The Game".
* Freedoom. I love it, but the levels have taken far too long and assets and levels have been replaced more times than I can count, and it was never going to be seen as anything other than "the free Doom clone" anyway. Its objective should be downsized into "an IWAD that can be used to play Doom PWADs" and finished on those terms.
* I hate to admit this, but... Naev. It's been years, it's still very unfinished, and I don't think even the libre software community has received it well. I should probably stop contributing to it. Nox Imperelii (a fork of Naev using a randomly generated universe) might still be worthwhile, though, if its developer posts about it outside of the Naev forum. I also still think that Naev could be downsized into a game centered around piracy, but then again, just starting a new game from scratch (with a simpler design, easier to grasp for beginners) would probably be preferable anyway.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 19 Jun 2017, 04:33

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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby LiamM32 » 19 Jun 2017, 06:57

onpon4 {l Wrote}:
Can you think of some examples of "failed game projects"; games that proved to be not worth it?

* SuperTux. It was always destined to be seen as an inferior Mario clone, and it was (and still is) taking way too long to get finished, partly because people kept shoving new ideas into it. It might as well be called "Feature Creep - The Game".

I haven't played it yet. In a way, I find this ironic, as I thought that 2D platformers were a genre hard to get wrong. I can imagine the identity problem being an issue. I'll try it now to see what this is about.

Maybe it would be better if people just made forks of SuperTux if they wanted to bring the game in a separate direction. But they would probably have to replace the sprites to give a separate identity.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:* I hate to admit this, but... Naev. It's been years, it's still very unfinished, and I don't think even the libre software community has received it well. I should probably stop contributing to it. Nox Imperelii (a fork of Naev using a randomly generated universe) might still be worthwhile, though, if its developer posts about it outside of the Naev forum. I also still think that Naev could be downsized into a game centered around piracy, but then again, just starting a new game from scratch (with a simpler design, easier to grasp for beginners) would probably be preferable anyway.

First I thought that you were replying to me about Lips of Suna, and that "Naev" was just a way of saying "No". But I just looked it up. At-least the graphics look pretty in many screenshots.

Lips of Suna was in a world made by hand in 0.5.0 (as far as I can tell, though I never got to play it). But after that, much of the game was basically put to disposal, and Amuzen wanted it to be totally procedurally generated.

If I ever have the programming skills to put more into it, I would like to bring it in a direction somewhere in-between. The mediocre reception of No Man's Sky has shown that procedural generation has it's limitations, even in the most well-developed case. So I think I want to be careful to have the right blend of procedural generation and pre-made content.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby eugeneloza » 19 Jun 2017, 10:29

I strongly believe there are two major reasons.
First and the main one. Proprietary games spend sometimes even more than 50% of the budget on promotion. Often this is millions of USD (or equivalent amount of effort).
Second, but not the last one. Proprietary games often use unique art, professional consultations, etc. E.g. compare assets quality of "Dungeon Crawl" versus "Plants vs Zombies".
Other indie games "hitting popularity" (like Flappy bird, thou I don't know their full story) are extremely rare.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Julius » 19 Jun 2017, 11:23

Lyberta {l Wrote}:
LiamM32 {l Wrote}:PS: You missed Warsow, which has been accepted as a tournament-worthy game.


Warsow is not free. It uses proprietary assets.


More or less untrue since recently, as they released almost the entire asset library under the CC-By-SA 1-2 years ago or so.

By the way, I found a FOSS game that has metracritic reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/tales-of-majeyal

While I agree that it is disturbingly few, one important factor seems to be if it is available through a common distribution platform, i.e. either retail stores or something popular as Steam. As soon as more FOSS games get on steam (now easier than ever, just $100 and you are in) we will also see more mainstream media reviews.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 19 Jun 2017, 11:41

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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Julius » 19 Jun 2017, 13:05

Would be quite trivial to remove these though and still have a working game with more or less the same graphics and content. The real problem of Warsow is that development stalled over the dev team breaking apart and no one can be bothered to replace the last few remaining non-free assets.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby themightyglider » 20 Jun 2017, 09:52

I think that the mainstream media is mostly about video game industry and libre games are mostly hand made. So the mainstream media won't cover it.
But onpon4 made a good point when she wrote that libre gaming is just a small bubble. To me it seems like most libre games fail to break this bubble and reach a wider audience.
For example if you visit youtube and search for let's plays of libre games you mostly will find absolutely nothing (only exception seem to be a few roguelikes like nethack or Dungeon crawl). But if you are looking for let's plays of small indi games like 'VVVVVV' or 'Binding of Isaac' or whatever there are tons of videos. Whats the reason for this? Of course not the quality of the libre games, because the games that have been mentioned in the initial post are for sure not worse then these indi games.
I strongly believe that the true problem is that we Free Software people seem to have problems to leave our comfort zone and reach other gaming communities who would be willing to adopt another (libre) indi game.
But thats a general problem of the Free Software Movement, many of the initiatives and actions seem to targeting people that already have know the message. It would be much more important to reach people who never have thought about freedom and privacy in computing at all.
I think libre games could be a good way to get in touch with such people. The only thing we need to figure out now is how to do this.
I assume a good first step could be to contact some youtubers (of course not the big ones that are paid for playing AAA titles) and ask them if the would be willing to make a let's play or at least a let's test of a random libre game, not because it is free software but because it is a cool indi game that should get more attention. Thing like this could really help to push the acceptance of libre gaming even if platforms like youtube or steam don't share our values.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby farrer » 20 Jun 2017, 12:58

themightyglider {l Wrote}:I strongly believe that the true problem is that we Free Software people seem to have problems to leave our comfort zone and reach other gaming communities who would be willing to adopt another (libre) indi game.


I somewhat agree, but I also believe that we miss something like what the Linux Game Tome was but for Free/Libre games. The Linux Game Database never got the size and community that the LGT had back on early 2000s, and more recently it was just 'spammed' (ok, not really spam, but the real effect is similar) with tons of non-free and wine runnable - and more recently unity-based - games (which reflects a bad side of having more games ported and available for Linux). Don't get me wrong: I do believe it's a good thing to have more Linux games, even proprietary ones (ie: it potentially removes a barrier to lot of people who keep having dual-boot machines or just using windows). And this 'spam' effect would also had happened to LGT if the community wasn't closed due to software problems/limitations.

I known the existence of the LibreGameWiki, but the wiki never got momentum too (and is somewhat a hidden place, even for the Free/Libre game community). Even the blog which gave born to this forum seems almost dead now. Hopefully, we still have this forum, which is a great and the main place, in my opinion, of the Free/Libre game community. And more recently the Free Game News blog, which is also good for knowing new Free/Libre games.

In fact, I do believe this lack of current momentum have a clear cause. The Free/Libre game movement suffered a lot (it was plenty discussed on some threads here) with the Indie game bubble (both the mobile game bubble and the release of commercial non-libre game engines free of charge). Lot of people which would be potentially attracted to the Free/Libre game movement was just attracted to the miraculous gold pot at the end of the "garage-game" development rainbow. Even now, when this bubble is clearly saturated and deflating, often people appears here on some threads with those kind of games (not to mention the regular appearance at OpenGameArt of people talking - and suggesting - the use of Unity and C#).

On the other side, I also agree with that the mainstream media is for mainstream games, which have a lot of money to spend on marketing (and also for paying biased reviews).
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby onpon4 » 20 Jun 2017, 15:23

Heck, it's probably our greatest disadvantage that the libre gaming community is so independent. It removes an incentive to intermingle with other indie game communities. Consider GameDev.net, for example, which is very similar to this forum we're on, but includes proprietary game development as well. If we were forced to use that forum, we would look like the tiny minority we actually are, but at the very least we would get exposure to each other. Perhaps we should all post less in isolated forums like this one and more in mainstream forums like that one.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby leilei » 20 Jun 2017, 22:49

It doesn't really bother or concern me much. To be frank, coverage of Free Software in something big PCGamer would attract those who don't understand the philosophy and just think of it as a punching bag of bootleg stuff only for the RMS hippie cult to enjoy, and may result in worse productivity as hobbyists will suddenly have to deal with the noisy, often vindictive public.

On the other hand, I'm more bothered by being shafted by a certain free gaming blog because of an administrative bias to a rival game or to pretty engines. because a hobbyist development for a hobbyist niche has to be all about graphics the way a moderator wants. One could argue this to be a problem with mainstream games media as well. quite ironic really
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby onpon4 » 21 Jun 2017, 05:10

To be frank, coverage of Free Software in something big PCGamer would attract those who don't understand the philosophy and just think of it as a punching bag of bootleg stuff only for the RMS hippie cult to enjoy, and may result in worse productivity as hobbyists will suddenly have to deal with the noisy, often vindictive public.

This is only a legitimate fear if there is no legitimacy to the libre software philosophy, i.e. if it's nothing more than a cult. Otherwise, people will see its legitimacy and not "think of it as a punching bag", as you put it. Unless you're talking about immature kids who don't even understand that you can't "pay" people by promising a share of the profits of your first game which is sure to be the most successful MMORPG of all time and make millions. But not being bothered by kids being naïve is just par for the course.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 21 Jun 2017, 08:34

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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby onpon4 » 21 Jun 2017, 13:17

Maybe that's true for you. Not for me, or probably anyone else on this forum.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 21 Jun 2017, 13:52

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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby themightyglider » 21 Jun 2017, 15:30

I think it is important to keep save places like this for people like Lyberta and to keep up a feeling of community.

But the free software movement has to stay in contact with the rest of the world. Otherwise we risk to drift into isolation and loose any chance to change things in a possitive way.

Maybe thats what allready happened to the libre gaming community and the reason why our games don't get the attention they would deserve.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby c_xong » 22 Jun 2017, 01:34

I have some artist and musician friends that make games together with me, but they don't want to release their stuff as free/open, whereas I can't accept non-free assets in my free games because then it would make them non-free and be excluded from various repos. As a result, the non-free games I've made often look and sound much better than the free ones.

I'm not bitter or blaming anyone, just saying that's the situation I face. There are barriers between the non-free and free gaming worlds.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby themightyglider » 22 Jun 2017, 15:40

@c_xong
It would be interesting to know your friends reasons for decline free licenses.

Generaly I think that there is a number of people around in the internet that make quality art and would be fine if it would be used, modified, etc. But they are simply not aware of free licensing (or they just don't care because they think its too difficult).
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby rogerdv » 22 Jun 2017, 17:39

Some years ago, the only way to legally play a game for free was to play libre games. Now you have tons of free (gratis) games you can play. So, there is no reason for people to look at open source to find good games, and lets face it, many open source games are not good games (terrible graphics, unfinished, etc).
Is there a way to change this? Probably, if we build some network to promote good games using mouth to mouth, via Facebook or Twitter.
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Re: The mainstream media ignores free software games :-(

Postby Lyberta » 23 Jun 2017, 06:09

Deleted.
Last edited by Lyberta on 01 Oct 2021, 06:24, edited 1 time in total.
Lyberta
 
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