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Unfortunately, almost all I see out of the Open Source crowd is an endless mass of Quake clones with a small handful of clones of other games. There are a few gems here and there that are truly unique, but in the end, why the hell would you want to play Maryo Ripoff Chronicles or Tux "Not Mario" Kart or Tux "wishes it was Avalanche 1080" Racer or Tetris Remake 1324 or Quake3+ when you could play a new, interesting, innovative game that has higher quality art, more refined mechanics, and an overall better experience? The clones are interesting to people who want to point and say, "I can play an Open Source game!" while to the vast majority of regular people who just want to have fun, the clones are already out of date and boring and the Open Source teams are for the most part failing to compete with even the lowest-budget commercial indie games like World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars, Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, and so on.
And how do you define "failing to compete"? Do you have detailed reports on #'s of users per day, or is another subjective opinion based on personal preferences? Of course simple puzzle games have vast numbers of players, but that's not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would be comparing to competing commercial titles like Quake IV or UT3(and you'd be surprised, maybe, to know that many OS "quake clones" have larger playerbases than many commercial FPS games.
Furthermore, I'd hardly call a dozen or so FPS games a "mass of Quake clones". There are clearly VASTLY more other types of OS games out there. The difference is, those games don't have the replayability factor that the multiplayer FPS games have, so they don't see the continual development, periodic releases, and therefore not in the news nearly as much.
You may think that these games are "out of date and boring", and I grant you a couple are in fact in that boat, but the ones that are more consistently updated are hardly out of date, and boring is just an opinion, as many people, evidenced by the amount of players, still want the old-school deathmatch experience. Many of these games are advancing their engines and technology to higher standards, and continue to close the gap between themselves and commercial game engines. Most of them are enhancing their gameplay to something far beyond what the original Quake Deathmatch offered.
I can't speak for the development teams of Warsow, or Nexuiz, or Tremulous, but I can speak for the project I am a part of, Alien Arena. Our goal is, and was never, meant to clone Quake. We set out to make a game that had new elements, and use technologies that weren't available when Quake was released to make it a more modern looking game. We added a variety of game types, and we also refined and added to the base Deathmatch experience to make it something we felt was more interesting. Should Unreal Tournament never have been released, because that is essentially the same goal they had? I think not.
Also, you have to understand that not everyone has even played the "originals". The clones of games offer new gamers an opportunity to play a game for the first time freely, or in some cases, period(if there is no access to the original). It's very unfair,IMO, to complain about the types of games out there being made. You might as well just complain about the popularity of a specific genre in general, because that is the very reason more of one type of game gets made than another. And if that is the case, you just have to consider that maybe it's your tastes that are outdated and out of the mainstream, and not the games.
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