Are Open-Source Games & Community Game Engines Fading Away?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Are Open-Source Games & Community Game Engines Fading Away?

Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren't mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there's a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Open-Source-Game-Faltering

[anarki2]

"Open source engine development" my @ss. All that happened was id regularly open sourced their engines and then the community modded it. End of story.

Like seriously, as a hardcore engine developer, which would you choose? 100k salary at a gaming company, or free work, "kind donations", crybaby users/trolls on the forums and endless arguments with other devs in a "superior" democracy model at an open source project?

Grow up.

[duby229]

Well, I think the value in open source gaming is in fact keeping old titles working. Look here for a list of examples that make sense.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...le_source_code

[Michael]

"Open source engine development" my @ss. All that happened was id regularly open sourced their engines and then the community modded it. End of story.

The last time around with id Tech 4, as said in the article, the community didn't even do much with it.

[TheOne]

Well, I think the value in open source gaming is in fact keeping old titles working. Look here for a list of examples that make sense.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...le_source_code

well, there is ogre3d which was developed from scratch as a nice open source graphics engine.

[anarki2]

The last time around with id Tech 4, as said in the article, the community didn't even do much with it.

Exactly, they didn't even bother that much and got stuck on id Tech 3 lol.

[ssokolow]

To be honest, the only one of the open-source games you listed that interests me is 0 A.D. All of the rest of the ones you mention just came across as "Oh. Whoopee. Another Quake 3 clone that I enjoy less than the real Quake 3."

Instead, give me things like I Have No Tomatoes, OpenTTD, Enigma, Hex-a-Hop, Mirror Magic, Pushover, PySol, Widelands, Zaz, and Brogue.

As for the point you made, there's always been a bit of a gulf between the technical community and the artistic community and the artistic side tends to 'get' open-source less. I remember a ton of open-source games that fell by the wayside for being a programmer's attempt to create a game without properly understanding what makes a game appealing.

[makson]

2 more still kicking and worth mentioning are:
- SuperTuxKart
- Battle for Wesnoth

as it goes to keeping old games alive, beside OpenMW, we should also mention OpenJK.

[bregma]

There's still the same activity out there. In fact, maybe more activity than ever.

There are a few differences now, though.

First, a whole major chunk of what we formerly called "open source game developers" but now dub "idie game devs" don't care or pay any attention to licensing issues and just slap their projects on github, which doesn't care or really pay any attention to licensing issues. So "open source" has morped into "I don't care about that legal mumbo-jumbo stuff it's hard"ware.

Second, a whole slew of game devs build on the "free for indie devs" versions of commercial game engines, like UT or U3D. That means that, although you can download their binaries for free from some untrusted site, they're not Free.

Another thing is that everyone thinks they're writing the next Flappy Birds so they charge a few ${currency}s for their steaming pile in one or more walled garden shoppes. All the gold stars they earned just for showing up as a schoolchild have taught them something.

Finally, a lot of the energy formerly put into writing games now goes into writing mods for commercial games. The commercial guys have discovered a whole new way to milk the market and have indies contribute to their hefty for free.

[fat-lobyte]

Quite frankly, I don't think Open Source games are viable. The amounts of ressources that have to go in a "good" game are gigantic, and unpaid volunteer workers coding on sunday and after their dayjob just doesn't cut it. To make a good game, there have to be multiple people working full time, over the course of 3 years.

And who's going to pay for that development?
The reason why open source works elsewhere is because there is actually a *necessity* for them. Every time that a project is about creating free software for freedoms sake has doomed. The successfull open source projects out there filled a niche that no commercial producut could fill.

A lot of programs are actually small enough so that their maintainers can support them, and the big ones are usually sponsored by bigger coorporations that highly benefit from the software. This simply does not work for games.