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- cross-posted to:
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A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
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Absolutely and with great game engines like Godot it has never been easier to make open-source games from scratch as well.
I legit do not understand new devs picking unreal or unity instead of godot.
Is it because they think they can crank out a AAA level of graphics for their game?
Development is very much a “use what you know” type of field, especially at big game companies. Learning a new game engine is like learning a completely new programming language, often because you’re doing both. Every game engine has a scripting language, and very few use the same scripting language.
What’s Godot?
It’s an open source game engine comparable to unity. It’s governed by a foundation dedicated to maintaining it, so it has no risk of pulling a unity
*little risk
No risk. Godot is distributed under the MIT license. If the foundation does something shady, you’re free to clone the entire engine, name it “Frodot”, and continue to add features to your own version.
Exporting to other platforms like Xbox, Nintendo Switch depend on some additional infrastructure, so the same may not apply.
It’s what you’ve been waiting for.
But what about the profits?
Isn’t this idea against the rules of acquisition?
/s
(Yes, I’m comparing businessmen to Star Trek’s Ferengi. There’s no difference in their behavior)
You joke, but developers can make profits with open source. The final part of the article deals with this issue.
Like many people, I have aspirations of making games. One thing I’m planning on is some sort of charter or agreement (which I could hopefully automate somehow) that 5 years after the last update that the code would go open source. Some sort of attribution, no commercial use license or something.
Great idea, that’s what I would probably do as well if I wanted to make a commercial game.
Just remember, if you want something to be “Open Source” or “Free Software”, the license can’t prohibit commercial use [0][1]. If you really want others to be able to continue maintaining the project after you have stopped, they need to have permission to recoup their costs for servers, physical copies and to get paid for their development time. (Open Source) development needs to be financially sustainable; and if that is forbidden for future developers, it’s not a community project anymore, i.e. not Open Source.
Also, if by “attribution, no commercial use” you mean some Creative Commons license, they explicitly discourage use of their licenses for software [3].
[0] https://opensource.org/osd
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling
[3] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software
I love this.
I like to build open source tribute games to my favorite forgotten games of the past.
Lets be realistic, companies won’t want to make it open source because they think it will lead to a loss of revenue (there is a mindset of “never work for free”). openttd basically led to loss of revenue because now that there is a open source version (even the assets got re-implemented) people that are playing that are not playing proprietary games (including the proprietary original version).
You might argue there is no significant loss, but i don’t think you can prove that especially to the people who own the companies which include pension fund managers who only care about the profits because if they will underperform people will go to some other pension fund or invest in other stuff like real estate.
A source available license is a more realistic option , You get the source code and permission to improve it but still have to pay something to run the game.
You could do open source engine, proprietary assets. Like the original doom 1, 2, and 3. You can get the engine for free, but have to pay for the art assets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games#Open-source_games_with_non-free_data
Only if they still sell the assets.
I’m in favour of also dropping any copyright and intellectual property protections the moment a company stops selling the game. They evidently have no more commercial aspirations for the title, so it doesn’t need any protection from technically feasible copy protection circumvention methods.
