Is the open source community in a slump?

[dulsi]

This is my personal slump.

Why write games if:

Because you have a game you want to create. Most people writing novels will never make money at it. They may not even intend to share it like a diary.

[eugeneloza]

I'd say it in a bit different way.
In order for people just to see your game you need marketing. One is expected enforce it by himself (by posting links at forums, creating cool promos/trailers/letsplays), not mentioning that programmers are usually bad at it. Otherwise the result is almost zero.
If the result is zero, then I write games just for my own fun. If I write games for my own fun, I don't have motivation to finish them, to make them look fancy or to make them easy to learn or whatever else, that eventually takes 80%-95% of development time. Even commenting the code and make it extensible and contribution-friendly: there will be zero contributions, as no one will ever know of my game.
E.g. what can be my motivation to push FireMaddness from RC2 to Release if it got only 14 downloads for a year (that doesn't mean a single of those even played it for longer than a few seconds)? Why would I spend 2-3 hours, maybe more, to add gates that would show player hint on where he can or can't move if there are no players? Why would I care to spend a week or two port it to Android if there will be just another 5-10 downloads?
On the other hand. If the author is concentrated on "make money at it", he/she pays for marketing, he/she pays for art, he/she pays for promos and reviews and releases a non-FOSS game to get his/her money back.
Maybe, that's the problem? That even FOSS community will never know of new FOSS games? Even if they have quality art and fun gameplay. Even if they are good enough to compete with commercial ones. And if the community won't provide feedback and contributions, the game will never become even mediocre, author will just run out of motivation and that's where we are. A few well-known games (like FreeDroidRPG, STK, Wesnoth) are being actively developed with a team of contributors and constant player feedback (thou often relying on 10-years old obsolete technologies), and no new FOSS game can actually get any attention without a significant additional (kinda marketing) effort/investment.
We shouldn't miss this solar maximum and die out like dinosaurs just due to poor communication

[Danimal]

You people have some pretty valid points; why employ so much time on something that may go totally unnoticed? Every time i think of starting my dream game i arrive to a few conclusions, Its a hella of work, nobody but me may play it, i should be employing all that time to get a proper work or socializing, i suck at programming - get real me. Even now when making a new 3d model i take months just to finish it, and wonder if they will even credit me when used and what good is that to me who is unrelated to art profesionally. I have already seen the death of a few Foss games, the main reasons being halt of development/poor documentation and no community support. Sometimes the devs are too strict on their personal views, others they dont care at people who may use it (like Flare, thats supposed to be and engine but only a few know how to get content into it and dont share the ways), the team may loose motivation across the years...

And thats only my experiences, a game is something far too complex, not something like a novel that doesnt need a framework at all to be made, its an endless sinking pit of work, as long as you feel satisfied you may work on it, when that wears out, you will look back at it and say "What a bunch of crap, i totally wasted my time; i should have just played at some AAA instead" and delete everything. Comparing yourself to any commercial project will hurt A LOT, i sincerely envy people who just make games at ludums and such because they feel like it. The main reason we may stop working on them is because we want our effort to be recognised, and that rarely happens leading to what i said previously, you have to be very motivated and your project unique and enjoyable for yourself to get motivated to finish it (Undertale is a good example of that).

So join that kind of views to the need of getting food on the table and i dont wonder at all why there are so few foss games that survive the years, add this is some kind of obscure movement with little to no cohesion and mostly no one knows its existance. Like Eugene said there is nowhere dedicated to promoting it.

But i cant deny its our love that drives us to start project after project, as impossible as they seem to complete... regardless of all i said i still want to make my dream game.

[themightyglider]

I think there are many reasons why foss games fail and get abandoned. But the two main problems I see are:

1.) Far too abitious goals

- Many games start with a very clear vision. That doesn't need to be bad but often the ideas are too complex and one would need years to just produce a playable prototype.

2.) Over-engineering

-People aim to produce elegant, perfectly readable and generic code. Again not bad, but a woorking game with some sections of poor code is better than a lot of beautiful code that fails to form a playable game.

I think this two points kill a lot of games before they reach a state where a community could form around them.
Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent example how to do it right. This project follows the KISS-philosophy from the very beginning.
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/WesnothPhilosophy

About motivation

Of course I know this frustration too. And to be honest I don't know if I had droped my own game at some point if eugenelotza wouldn't give me that many high quality feedback frequently. I think FOSS gaming needs more people like him. I feel a bit bad that I don't have have given him feedback on his projects so far. Maybe everyone of us should just take one (or more) underated projects and give the autors some feedback on it instead of complaining that nobody gives feedback on the own projects.

[SecureUvula]

i sincerely envy people who just make games at ludums and such because they feel like it.

Ludums are the only games I've shipped, because at least then I know the following:

1. It will only take me one weekend

2. I can 'buy' playtesters through the exchange system of playing other people's games

3. I'll be judged against games made under the same constraints, which is a much much smaller pond.

I actually have not missed a Ludum since starting out on LD27, but I find it almost impossible to rouse that motivation outside LD.

[dulsi]

Ludums are the only games I've shipped, because at least then I know the following:

1. It will only take me one weekend

2. I can 'buy' playtesters through the exchange system of playing other people's games

3. I'll be judged against games made under the same constraints, which is a much much smaller pond.

I actually have not missed a Ludum since starting out on LD27, but I find it almost impossible to rouse that motivation outside LD.

If that is what you are happy doing, then go with that. You might try to find a small community and develop games in there. For example minetest has a lot of capability to build new games and people experiment with new mods all the time. Or the TinyArcade from tinycurcuits has a small community. With 96x64 pixel screen and limited memory, you are creating much smaller games. I had a pacman game up and running in 24 hours.

Personally I don't think I can do a 48 hour game challenge at this point. The kids want to play with me. I have considered the month long opengameart jam. They are starting a new one on June 30th but I don't know if I will be able to find the time for it. Already have a lot of projects particularly my new Color Monster game.

Of course I know this frustration too. And to be honest I don't know if I had droped my own game at some point if eugenelotza wouldn't give me that many high quality feedback frequently. I think FOSS gaming needs more people like him. I feel a bit bad that I don't have have given him feedback on his projects so far. Maybe everyone of us should just take one (or more) underated projects and give the autors some feedback on it instead of complaining that nobody gives feedback on the own projects.

I used to do more of that with my Open Game Source articles. Unfortunately I haven't found the time to do any beyond my own games recently.

[Jastiv]

Yeah, there isn't really any point in writing open source games that no one will ever actually want to play. In fact, I think I will start a thread about how developers of open source games drive development rather than users and how this is a problem. Actually, I think if we solve this problem we could solve a few more issues with open source game development namely.
1. funding ie the money
2. ironically, the problem of attracting more developers to open source.

[charlie]

Yeah, there isn't really any point in writing open source games that no one will ever actually want to play.

This is dead wrong. It shows a lack of critical thinking on your part.

Things that might happen if you write an open source game that nobody plays:

- you might enjoy it yourself
- you might enjoy the process of developing it
- you learn and practise your development skillset (programming languages, practices, dev tools etc)
- you might develop something as part of your project that you go on to use in future projects
- you might make connections with people through your experiences that develop into longer term relationships

That's just off the top of my head.

[Vandar]

Some of this is in response to messages earlier in the thread. I agree with those who said the discussions moved elsewhere, forums are getting out of fashion. Except a few really big ones, they all seem to be dying. A forum which was nice and active and where I was posting often in the early 2000s is dead since years. And it was a nice place for RPG development before.

The younger generation grew up with social media, and they are sticking to that. I am not quite sure, but I read articles that in some places "internet = facebook", so people never see any internet that isn't facebook.

I see that the company which I am working for uses more and more open source tools - so open source as a whole is still going strong, but it seems to be more business/service related software now, where companies can sponsor and pay developers if the tools appear useful.

PS: I also want to second Charlie, even that most of my projects went nowhere, they gave me a lot of training both with coding and graphics work.

[cynicfm]

My view on this is that today we live in different times than 10 years ago when libre open source games were at it's peak.
First of all the most popular genre of games nowadays are those that are online, multiplayer ones. 10 years there was no stuff like league of legends, dota 2, or maybe there were but much less and much less mainstream. People who liked playing games (including myself) were playing and enjoying single player games most.
Of course mmorpg had to come, games like runescape for example, world of warcraft and others took over.
So because of this people now don't really bother with playing single player games, because devs who create games and put them on steam/download/multiplayer whatever are designed to be played without any ending.
Let's say completing game like big mmorpg lets say i dont know what morrowind maybe takes about 100 hours maybe to complete, while mmorpg takes 100 days.
I am aware of this recently i got myself into linux but i been playing games like diablo 3 all the time, counter strke, league of legends and i always felt something is wrong because i just play and play and play and time disappears. Also all these popular game are all about violence and killing others.

People are just for something that is easily accessible and convienient. 10 years ago there was windows 7 at it's peak, today we have got closed source windows 10. People are attached to steam, steam is having a monopoly with multiplayer linux games genre i think.
I personally don't like steam because it's very sad to play linux game i need to create an account on some 3rd party proprietary platform??
Also people who make games they only make them for money, it's not like in the past people cared about creating very good game, today it's all about money not about good game. So basically people are being brainwashed by all these popular games and corporates.

I don't think there's anything you can do about this i only know that if i had lots of money in my bank account like millions dollars i wouldnt spend it for myself, for traveling, for cars houses, id definitely spend it to create company that makes games no money, and it'd be free open source games for linux only. Of course non profit so after i run out of money im gonna close the company XD, but games will exist!!
Also i think good game shouldn't be about graphics, but i believe music should be really good and sound, modern games have bla music unfortunately. And violence games should be stopped too.
If somebody has an idea for nice genuine game which u can enjoy and it doesn't have any violence like killing then i'm buying it. For now i am bored with popular games... And people who play them well... is there anything you can learn from them?

[Julius]

People are attached to steam, steam is having a monopoly with multiplayer linux games genre i think.

It's actually quite the opposite and one one the concerns that people "attached" to Steam have. All the really popular big multiplayer games right now are not on Steam, and Epic is even using their's to try opening up a competing but even worse store from a consumer perspective.

There is many reasons not to like Steam (not trying to whitewash them), but looking at their main competitors (Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard and now Tencent backed Epic) one quickly comes to realize that Steam both as a piece of Software and also the company behind are by a long shot more consumer friendly and more recently have done a lot of good things for the overall FOSS ecosystem.

[cynicfm]

Well the thing is how amazign steam wasn't and valve, truth is owner and CEO of valve is multi billionairie and i am poor. I don't wanna contribute to his billions of dollars by being steam customers.
And i based my experience of saying multiplayer games, like moba games. All of them that are available on linux are only available via steam.
When i went to the shop in poland that sells games i seen that 75% of pc games available need registration on steam.

Another this what's so dumb about using steam is in England i went to CeX entertainment shop, i bought games like: SpellForce 1 platinum edition and 2 gold edition for viola, one pound!! with CD and boxes!! one pound!! i go on steam or gog.com and i see what SpellForce 1 platinum 7 pounds. i have 2 gold edition as well just for one. Gothic 1, 2 and 3 i bought with box in the same shop as well CeX enterainment, paid 3,50 (i lost the gothic 3 guide book though somewhere ;/). on steam or gog.com gothic 2 only is 7,50 pounds. isn't that ripoff??
Also the truth is pc gaming industry has been digitalized.
Gosh i dream so much about linux magazines available for example in tesco that comes with bundle of free open source libre games on DVD. That would be so awesome!! I'd be buying every issue. But how can you start something like this without funds.
While there are people out there like me who would love to contribute to world of free open source world, company valve only does what's the best in interest for steam (long-term i suppose), and because they wanna monopolize the linux market (or already have) everybody who's gonna want to play some games on linux, 95% games will be only available on steam.
It's very sad... I wish that physical copies of games appeared in shops again...
It's very hard but damn, how great it would be to go to shop and see let's say 50 pages magazine about libre games that come with guides of compiling/installing/whatever them from source, that would be nice. And not just also about libre games, also about how to create them, how they're created basically whole magazine not about linux, about about libre games and everything related to them.

Truth is digital games isn't worth a penny, but with steam it's not just you can play some games for free, all data about you that is valuable (ie what OS u use, what pc specs, location) goes to them as well... Or games that need internet connection required to be played. It's very unacceptable from my point of view. I wanna be able to play a game without any 3rd party platforms like steam mining data about me like google does or facebook. I don't really know and understand why linux users are so hyped about Valve and their evil platform which is steam.
I could play cs go and dota 2 all the time because it runs on linux, but... no thanx. I'd rather learn how to make my own games.

[Lyberta]

And violence games should be stopped too.

No, there are definitely not enough violent FOSS games, I can name Xonotic, what else? We need more FOSS multiplayer shooters.

[cynicfm]

uhh Xonotic is great game;P.
well FPS is not really what i meant, i meant games like league of legends diablo 2 kind of games that you see from different perspective and only kill kill kill i mean like rpg games and kill kill kill to progress that kind of games.
i enjoy fps games i play them on playstation, so it's not kind of what i meant but for example counter strike global offensive gives me bad vibe it's turning me into aggressive asshole this game is... xD when i played it.

[Sockstah]

On the topic of multiplayer games, I believe a big reason for open-source ones not being as popular as they once were (I remember Warsow in its prime, good times) is the prevalence of matchmaking and not a single open-source multiplayer featuring it. This is understandable of course as matchmaking generally seems to require centralized server infrastructure which open-source folks seem to be allergic to but matchmaking is expected by the vast majority of people today. I wonder if there's solutions to this dilemma.

Considering FPS I'd also love to see more FOSS ones. Especially something that goes away from the classic arena shooter formula. There's not a single FOSS FPS I can think of that isn't an arena shooter.

[cynicfm]

well but to be fair i feel like multiplayer games is something that has been enforced on everybody. i recall the past when i was little kid there was windows xp and lots of different windows xp games available in shops as physical. Lots of games that you used to start and play till the end and everything mattered, music, plot, music, to me music really matters... What i hate about popular games is the music is very like crap. Diablo 3, counter strike global offensive, all these games have bla music it's all about graphics.
It's also why everybody thinks that valve is good with steam, because they support creating drivers some vulkan bollocks (i dont even know what it is) directx vulkan (as dxvk) so people can play games that are more gpu demanding but...
let's be honest what the hell the think i am that i'm all about graphics??? Is the graphics the only thing that matters nowadays?? Where is soul of the games, vibe atmosphere??
so because of today genre i feel like online games most of them brainwash us and suck our time and energy that we could have spent for learning how to develop our own games or at least play those made by individuals that in fact are free and open source (although lots of them require stuff like steam or sourceforge that for example has google ads).
It's a shame that apart from games available in linux distro repositories, you have to download them from 3rd party services...
I'd rather pay money for game and it's physical ( i dont care for drm free gog.com games) than just download it for free and its digital and i have to see ads too and that gives money to somebodys pocket.

Basically the first thing that matters is how these games are delivered to people. I started to feel a bit sick of digital games and it's like it's too much of everything and it's all multiplayer or steam, what if i wanna use computer without connecting to internet all the time, i can't get hold of any linux games if theyre not preinstalled with distro because they're no everywhere.
If i had tons of cash and was able to change how things are happening around us i'd definitely push delivering those libre games in physical ways. I hate when people say cds or dvds are dead because i like them and i still pay and give money t somebody for it than have it for free digital, because it's not the same.
I recently bought about 10 games that i run on wine and i can't even start or get into any of them because im brainwashed by playing multiplayer mmo windows game all the time and it's hard xD.

Thanks for reading anyways.

[Jastiv]

I’ve been reading this post, and all the recent replies, and I can assure you that we are not in a slump, not at all. I think rather what we are dealing with is an inner conflict, not as in a person vs person conflict but a person vs themselves. Let me illustrate what I mean here on three specific issues.

1. Marketing. We need more marketing for our games so we can find testers, developers and users. Ads are evil incarnate. There is nothing better than an ad blocker blocking ads of itself. Marketing is diablo in hell breathing fire at you.

2. Money. We need money so we can work full time on free software games. But money is the root of all evil. Everything it touches turns software into proprietary DRM ladden hellware. If we had money, we would just give it all away to develop free software games, and then we would run out because how would it be self sustaining?

3. Servers and the cloud. Clouds and servers store our personal information on computers we don’t directly control. They are bad. But at the same time, without some sort of way of connecting computers together to share, we are just playing by ourselves and we miss the social aspect of gaming.

I am of the opinion that solving these inner conflicts in a way that is favorable to free software with free cultural assets will allow us to propel it far beyond our wildest dreams.

[Lyberta]

I believe a big reason for open-source ones not being as popular as they once were (I remember Warsow in its prime, good times) is the prevalence of matchmaking and not a single open-source multiplayer featuring it. This is understandable of course as matchmaking generally seems to require centralized server infrastructure which open-source folks seem to be allergic to but matchmaking is expected by the vast majority of people today.

I think matchmaking goes against the spirit of FOSS. With FOSS games it is expected that each server will run different mods that alter gameplay. Matchmaking thinks that servers are interchangeable which strips server owners of their fundamental rights.

I'd rather pay money for game and it's physical ( i dont care for drm free gog.com games) than just download it for free and its digital and i have to see ads too and that gives money to somebodys pocket.

If i had tons of cash and was able to change how things are happening around us i'd definitely push delivering those libre games in physical ways. I hate when people say cds or dvds are dead because i like them and i still pay and give money t somebody for it than have it for free digital, because it's not the same.

I see a lot of downsides to physical media.

1. Cases with internal 5" slots are less beautiful

Pictures were put into URLs because of their size.

When upgrading my PC case I seriously considered this case:
Thermaltake View 71 Tempered Glass RGB Plus Edition

But as you can see, it doesn't have internal 5" slots. I was scared of not having them so I settled on this:

Be Quiet Dark Base Pro 900

Much less beautiful but one of the best options with internal 5" slots.

2. External DVD drives are expensive and slow

You can get internal drive for 17$ that reads CDs at 48x and DVDs at 16x while external drive can cost 45$ with 24x and 8x speed. WHAT???

3. Optical media is extremely slow

Wikipedia says that 16x DVD speed is 177 Mbit/s. This is so slow. I have SATA III SSD that saturates the SATA interface at 6 Gbit/s while reading and I think this should be a baseline for acceptable performance. I also have an NVMe SSD that is about 6 times faster than SATA III one and it provides proper comfort. So if anything is to be distributed on physical media, it should at least provide 6 Gbit/s read speed. Such media should at least saturate USB 3.1 Gen 1. DVD should be at least 34 times faster to have acceptable performance.

4. Physical media occupies physical space

Yeah, I'm already struggling with storing my PC hardware, should I struggle with storing physical discs? Hell, no. And what about privacy concerns. I can just lock the screen and no one will be able to see what is on my PC, how do I hide physical discs?

5. Nobody ships a FOSS game and forgets about it

If a game is good, you'd want to build a latest version from git every week or so and then actually help with development. Physical media is useless in this case.

6. CD is insane format

Ugh, everything about CD is such a hack. But what gets me most as musician is nonsensical sample rate of 44100 Hz. This is a binary format, it should have a proper binary sample rate of 65536 Hz.

[cynicfm]

Okay, well i got your point.
Okay so basically what i am not fan of is how there are libre games but available only on steam.com or gog.com or even sourgeforge.
The thing is i wanna play a game without talking to any 3rd party companies. Sourgeforge for instance has google advertisements. itch.io gave me fill google recaptcha to continue after login.
I understand that i have got virgin media ISP at the moment, so it probably talks to it everytime i go on internet... Well not like i can change it at the moment... but why if i wanna download a 'libre game' or 'free open source game' i need to see google advertisements, google recaptcha, amazon ads too... I think if somebody exchanges the game and in the same time he collects data about me (ip, pc specs, location, even browse history) then i don't wanna download it.
This is why i think steam is disgusting. Maybe ok they support linux compared to other corporates like blizzard and others, but they're still generating billions or trillions of dollars revenue like other companies. And i must accept the fact that i play game that comes from multibillionairie corporation that generate so much money while i struggle to get 2000 dollars to build linux pc for my own needs and be able to afford paying bills for electricity. Isn't that bizarre...

Also i am not fan of digital as i said... Cuz digital nowadays means that it's not 100% free because by downloading a game like flare from sourgeforge you also see google ads and they track you because you just wanna download and play the game. Ok of course it's not the case with downloading stuff from official repositories.
From my point of view physical lasts for longer, because digital is just a file... I don't really even listen to audio files like i used to, not fan of youtube or streaming services, for me the only way of listening to music nowadays is straight from CD or record using some nice stereo system with proper speakers. Then somebody gonna tell me that cds r dead and only audio files matters... sigh... same with games i recently own 19 pc games that were made in winxp/vista era, and they're great and they're always gonna be there (i have cases/cds/guides) while file is just a file... Im not gonna format my /home folder any soon but well, one click and it's all gone.

And another fact is that im really looking forward to learn how to write simple basic games using lua and python for now... I downloaded some .pdf's but well... they sell python books in bookstores, never seen lua for example... but there's nothing anywhere about thing like libre games. Nowadays almost every game that is created for PC needs you to be connected to internet and it steals info from you all the time.
I found out about linuxing and libre games by using search engines all the time (well not google, searx.me or duckduckgo.com) but not everybody does that and i'm personally fed up with search engines cuz they generate results that are not valuable nowadays. Most of em r forums like reddit, where i think people are jerks. youtube i dont go on youtube. other websites that probably always have google advertisements and accept cookies... uhhh piss off with your ads.
and other results that have interesting titles but then i read content of this website and after few minutes i realise i just wasted few minutes of my life because content is worthless.... It's really hard to find any valuable source of information nowadays, and like somebody said forums are dying nowadays unfortunately... and then you usually get banned for having your own opinion too, you're not allowed to have your own opinion nowadays as well... if you do admin will warn you and then ban you or even ban you without warning.

[dulsi]

@cynicfm: Forums don't generally ban people for their opinions. They are banned for being abusive, rude, etc. It's confusing to me that you don't like that sort of moderation but complain that reddit is full of jerks. If you are being banned, it probably means you should look at how you were communicating on the site.

Free software/open source is not about zero cost. It is about the freedom to change the software. Rather than directly charging you sourceforge uses ads to offset the cost of hosting the software. You could always ask your distribution to add the game but I'm not sure how you feel about updates from your distributions. I think the reason you don't see physical discs is partially because there aren't enough people who will pay to avoid ads on sites like sourceforge.

CD/record/other physical media can break. Even if you get everything in physical media a backup isn't a bad idea. Assuming you backup digital products you shouldn't lose them any more frequently than physical media. (Of course if it has some sort of copy protection that can be a problem.)

@Lyberta: I don't know that he was arguing that games should run off the optical media. It could easily be installed to the hard drive. Also many people are still using spinning disks not SSD. I don't think I've ever played a game that needed the transfer rates of SSD,

Anyway. We should probably go back to talking about the topic.

Personally I don't find open source games to be slump. Open source game development has always been a small community. Making games is hard. You need to have a lot of skills or additional help. Many people making games are going to try the indie game route and hope to make money rather than go open source. As for the quality of content on OpenGameArt or other sites, I haven't looked at quality over time. There are already a lot of good material on OpenGameArt. Even if lots more were produced I suspect I would still find holes in my content need like I did with OpenGameArt Movie Video Game.