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

[AnonymousCoward]

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.

Also, you can't develop story-based games as open source. QA depends on people doing the same thing over and over, which works for "normal" applications, but for games? You spoil the story for everyone who wants to help you, similar to early access stuff. Unvanquished and Xonotic are both multiplayer, no story (I think like the most successful early access games, but I don't follow those usually).

[TheOne]

That is a weird statement, I would say.Of course, its video games that makes kids violent. Earlier it was movies, comics, heavy metal music, ... . This is getting old.

You just proved that you are part of the problem, accepting these kind of trashy content as something that is good and acceptable, even my self have done so by buying the same trashy FPS games where I don't earn nothing in exchange, just some twisted violent fun. And don't tell me no body has commited suicide because of listening to black heavy metal music... Lets call the bad good and the good bad.

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.

There are thousands of other ways to make money, but hey, the game development industry pays millions (billions?) so lets stop developing more useful stuff because hey, that isn't paying, instead lets develop a cool game where you can smash zombie heads, kids and adults with a child pshychopath mentality will enjoy it.

What a short sighted statement.

Maybe a short sighted statement for a blind sighted living being.

[chithanh]

Michael, too bad that the article didn't mention the Spring RTS engine. It is off the radar of most open source driver developers though, so this was not very suprising.

A while ago, Spring developers initiated a discussion about Spring and s3tc support in Mesa, where it became clear that open source driver developers

• did not know about the engine,
• did not care about its developers' needs, and/or
• did not understand why a game engine has different requirements than a game.

As such, it apparently became an exercise in frustration and I can fully understand why someone would be demotivated afterwards, both in engaging with the driver developers and in continuing with their open source project.

[Min1123]

I think it's really about the big engines. Crytek, Unreal, Unity, Unigine, they all have some flavor of support for Windows and Mac OS, and even if they have a simple "click-to-export" for Linux, a lot of people don't use it. Thing is, it used to be very difficult to get a hold of professional level engines for games, so people had to make new engines, or they had to mod an existing title. It's still primarily a Windows-only field for gaming, and I'll never really understand why (people keep saying marketshare). With the current licensing plans on all of these engines, and the level of sophistication/ease-of-use, it doesn't make sense to go through all the hassle of getting a game together in some other way. Making a new FOSS engine is rather painful, and modding iD code isn't necessarily easy either, but I think the price to entry and easy tools make most aspiring devs head straight to these tools.

[log0]

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?pag...Game-Faltering

There are plenty of active open source games. They are just not the type (flashy graphics demos) you would be interested in.

You are not a gamer anyway, so I don't really get your rants vs open source games and how much they suck and how they are fading away...

[d2kx]

I *love* Xonotic, SuperTuxKart and Battle for Wesnoth, but overall, honestly this is good news. It's not that the game or modding scene is dying, quite the opposite. But it moved from creating 100 own engines to just working on/with the Unreal Engine/Unity and from creating a fork/new game with every new idea to concentrating on maps/mods for big titles.

For similar reasons Tim Sweeney from Epic Games predicts that many Indie Game devs will fade away soon, because just look at how many new games are released on Steam every week... about 10 new sidescrollers/survival games/whatnot that no one can even play due to the amount of releases. We will see more and more focus around the big engines like Unreal Engine 4 and modding around big, established titles in the future.

[Zeioth]

Yeah, no. Ask to the guys of Godot Engine.

[duby229]

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

Yeah sure, Of course I do agree with that fully.

I just meant that a number of very fun commercial games are still playable today only because they were open sourced. That is one area where open source gaming has real value.

[Xaero_Vincent]

I think what's changed here is Steam.

Prior to Steam, the only real source for gaming on Linux was Wine and Open Source games and so there was a bigger movement around open source gaming. Native Steam for Linux has changed the game and now game developers looking to support Linux can jump on the Steam bandwagon and charge for their games, all while Steam handles the finer details like hosting the games, bandwidth, multiplayer servers, transactions, and basic game advertising.

[justmy2cents]

and just the same commercial engines keep vanishing. it is a simple product of major engines bringing much cheaper solutions than in the past. right now, writing engine unless you do it for fun is economically as viable as shooting your self in the foot is considered as health improvement