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

[TheOne]

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.

Because games aren't productive and useful, in the contrary, I don't understand how game developers become rich when developing something that will not contribute anything useful to our life. Most popular games are just about killing with a gun, so you may understand why today kids are so violent. Why spend 3 years developing a FPS when you can make the world a better place? Money, that is what has taken our society and destroyed it.

[MoonMoon]

Because games aren't productive and useful, in the contrary, I don't understand how game developers become rich when developing something that will not contribute anything useful to our life.

So giving people something to enjoy is not useful? That is a weird statement, I would say.

Most popular games are just about killing with a gun, so you may understand why today kids are so violent.

Of course, its video games that makes kids violent. Earlier it was movies, comics, heavy metal music, ... . This is getting old.

Why spend 3 years developing a FPS when you can make the world a better place? Money, that is what has taken our society and destroyed it.

Of course, because game developers don't pay taxes so that infrastructure of your country can be maintained, education can be financed, ... . Not to mention the thousands of jobs the game industry has created that helps people to feed their children. Does absolutely not help to make the world a better place.

What a short sighted statement.

[Calinou]

Very interesting article; I would like to see more essays on FLOSS games.

Is it just me or are open-source games faltering?

The fact that people give gratis advertising to Valve and Steam doesn't help. Proprietary games being ported to GNU/Linux is an (overall positive) thing, but giving them gratis advertising and presenting them as the saviour of "Linux" is a (quite negative) one.

If you are a gamer, I would encourage you to get into free/libre game development. Godot and Urho3D are excellent starting points. Or, just mod an existing libre game.

[GreatEmerald]

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.

In the case of UE4, you can download the source for free from a trusted site (GitHub). The licensing is still proprietary, but you are free to license your own work under whatever license you wish (for GPL you just need to add an engine linking exception).

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[wizard69]

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.

The size of the team is an issue but so is coordination. Also creative brainstorming is much harder to do for this genre over the net. Open source would take years to accomplish what a game developing company can do in a few months.

And who's going to pay for that development?

Who is going to feed the programmers doing open source. One thing that has made Linux so successful of late is that people get paid to work on the code.

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.

I'm not sure I buy this part totally. There is value in software or more exactly in the case of Linux, system freedom. Contrast this with gaming and you have to ask where is the value.

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.

This is very significant, game development is big business and frankly Hollywood like in its talents demands. Small games are very doable but the larger games are nearly impossible due to all the different actors required to get a large game done.

[blackiwid]

0 a.d. is the best opensource game ever, the first opensource game that can compete in features with commercial (better) ones. if some bugs would go out and speed gets a bit better you could consider it nearly as AAA title. So here we see that more happend recently than in the past.

Another Problem is that people dont get that Opensource dont means you cant sell it. You dont have to put your artwork under the CCC lisense so just release every comercial game under the GPL and sell it. The only thing you loose is drm but there are nokey cracks for most games in 24hours or so, so is that really an big advantage?

I developed together with 2 friends the game canta (there are another projekt now with that name) as subjekt of our diploma thesis.

Its not so bad and does work but the libraries we used had not good long support and have some issues, soya3d, I started a rewrite as canta ng, which uses the blender game engine, something I would suggest for projekts to use, especialy for non artists that are no or not good programmers.

I even made a simple version of a tictactoe game without typing a line of code, completly in the blender gui, it took me maybe a 2hours or so, as somebody that has not used blendeer much before.

under windows as far as I undernstand it can spit out .exe files, so multi-os support should be easy.

http://gtk-apps.org/content/show.php/Canta?content=97994

[verde]

There is not and never was such a thing like quality open source games. And there is no need for that. First of all there are plenty of quality games from indie developers to top-tier game studios. Then if you need to play a game for free...there were always been ways to play a game for free.....

I am not against open source games. I just dont see open source gaming as viable or having any special advantages over proprietary.

Open source community have bigger issues than open source games. All those years, while Windows were struggling with severe security, stability and cost issues, opensource and Linux community was fighting against their most viable and user friendly alternative to Windows for political and ethical reasons.

There is a fragmentation problem with Linux desktop operating systems and that fragmentation doesnt have to do with packages or desktop environments or even display servers but with the community itself.

[GreatEmerald]

From the things I follow, there's a push for reverse-engineering the Super Mario Bros. X engine, called PGE (Platformer Game Engine). Sounds like a bit of a waste to me, since SuperTux is already pretty neat (and SMBX is by itself a fangame), but they are aiming for SMBX map compatibility including physics, characters, events and other stuff.

[Calinou]

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.

Free/libre software can be sold.

And who's going to pay for that development?

Users can (note that I said "can", not "must") pay for it. Set up crowdfunding campaigns; set up something like Patreon; ask donations for real (like Wikipedia, Mozilla or the FSF do).

In any case, keep in mind that proprietary software business is just as risky as free/libre software ones.

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.

Isn't it the (primary or secondary) point of any free/libre software project to liberate its users? When I look at Blender or Ardour, this looks like it is the case. Most software projects mention that they're "open source" in their feature list, for instance.

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.

What about indie gaming?

[dungeon]

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.

That is fatamorgana Michael , opensource is still there... because once you start counting growing amount of Steam Linux games every month or every hundred instead of saying "Warsow 2 is now almost fully FOSS!" opensource opensource just looks like dimminished

So I can only agree opensource games does not obey and follow growing number of steam games