Can the FSF rule be applied to video game business model

many big commercial games are already following a free-to-play model so your assumption doesn't follow, they already figured out how to make money even if the product is free

i never said it was

nobody wants to mod them because the developers intentionally make it difficult for them to do so, consider that if the game is a blatant cash grab and the code is provably garbage and will be thrown away quickly, maybe that game shouldn't exist and we need better market solutions

Most games, single player narrative-driven games, are consumable by their very definition, not because they're bad games but that's how stories tend to be. Unless a movie is really good or you're obsessive you don't usually watch it twice. Same thing for most games. Unless it's an exceptional game most people don't care about modding it

free to play is not open source. that's exactly where the issue is, and exactly what explained. stop arguing a mute point.

the story of a game is not the code and so doesn't need to be open source
>Unless it's an exceptional game most people don't care about modding it
most people don't care about playing it either, that doesn't mean the few who would care about modding it should intentionally stifled

you said it wasn't possible to make money if the product was free, but there are already many examples proving you wrong

but that's not foss no one is allowed to modify the game and delete all lootboxes from the game and destroy paywalls and make things unlockable. free to play itself is a business model now that was specifically made for s.e asia because asians don't feel good paying upfront monthly subscription but don't hesitate on buying from cashshop. as I have heard from mmo devs.
open source means source code is open and which is of course modifiable and if one goes for open source game it is impossible to expect good amount of money because there won't be any cash shop in it because people will just modify them out.

Wow a shitty pointless post that contributes nothing

if the players find lootboxes and paywalls so offensive that they feel the need to delete them from the game, consider that your product sucks and should be improved to have a real value proposition. if the items in the cash shop are actually worth buying, players will buy them and won't mod them out. it's that simple, open source does not mean you don't still have to come up with a good business model

>that doesn't mean the few who would care about modding it should intentionally stifled
you're saying that under the assumption that making game code open source is a trivial task
It usually isn't
Game code is usually a complicated mess from a legal standpoint and an actual code standpoint
It would take significant effort to tidy it all up, document it properly and get the licenses all sorted out for an open source release that nobody gives a shit about

you cant "delete" lootboxes from games genius, they're part of an online system

that's part of a classic vendor lock-in strategy and we have been warning you guys about that for decades now, fortunately there are more and more commercial-grade open source engines, libraries and tools being worked on every day

now that I see yeah, I completely forgot about the possibility that open source games can also earn money using cash shop and paywalls.

or they mod it so the shop items are just free and everyone will use that version, because, its free.

if a game is open source that means people can also make their own private servers. what will one do than?

what the fuck are you talking about?
All the code I use in my games is open source, but I don't release the source anyway because it's a huge pain in the ass, I'd have to document the whole thing, organize and release all my build tools and the libraries I use or link people to them or whatever
for no reason

an online system of an open source game?
so people can just host their own version of the game servers where those items dont cost any money.

online systems arent magic

Only if the server code comes with the game, but yeah, you could
You'd also have to convince people to play on your server instead of the official one

make game, sell merch

You mean like a game like Fortnite? But Epic has literally made billions from that f2p game.

because they constantly shove dances and outfits to buy on "sale" in little kids faces.

In the world of crowdfunding, this is definitely possible if you're an established name - bing bing wahoo'ers will pay full price for a bad product months before it releases. You charge people prior to the products release, then release it as FOSS.

But its a silly idea, on a worldwide scale I think that any amount of work in that industry will naturally have more value as a closed-source product. Bing bing wahoo'ers don't care about the code they run, and you make more money from the closed source product even compared to the above model. So you essentially reduce the value of your work for no gain.

>you cant "delete" lootboxes from games genius, they're part of an online system
If the game is truly FOSS people would just fork the game without lootbox system and completely free "design and customize" your character rather than lootboxing cosmetics or stats

if a game had lootboxes it would never be completely open source in the first place for that reason

that is the problem, that differs open source with freetoplay games.
just look at it all good rogue likes have a lot of variants and all the original rogue like devs that were asking for donations will have to give them up if someone else is making a variant of that game. but on that scale they are just asking for donations through their game imagine a game with full fledged systems and servers with working cash shop and they find out all their users are playing on a fun server because they made the game open source. do you honestly think one would do that? obviously one CAN do that but its not practical.

if you bring more developers on you will have to do all that anyway, plus even for binary releases legally you need to document all the open source you use and ship with copyright statements
>build tools and libraries
you should already be checking these into your VCS

The first episode of Doom is this.

>if you bring more developers on you will have to do all that anyway
true, but bringing in more developers has a tangible benefit while releasing open source doesn't

>even for binary releases legally you need to document all the open source you use and ship with copyright statements
you don't

>you should already be checking these into your VCS
yeah but I just copy all the files over, the hard part is documenting them and teaching people how to use them

There are several amazing open source games
>0ad
>SuperTuxKart
>the battle for wesnoth
>hedgewars
>freeciv
>openArena

Some were even popular among normies and were also on android
>2048
>dungeon crawl stone soup
>shattered pixel dungeon

And some were originally proprietary but were released as open source (excluding assets) which is honestly the best solution
>Quake 3 Arena and all id engines before they were bought by (((zenimax)))
>7 kingdoms
Obviously, the development of a game needs some funding or A LOT of free volunteers. It's very difficult to find volunteers so you can't expect every game to be open source.

You mean vacuous items that have no impact on the game?

the only good open source games are ones like id games that were first released commerically
dedicated open source games are usually embarrassingly bad, like most of the ones you listed

SuperTuxKart is actually really good

this is a great example of how open source devs get fucked, the 2048 guy made almost no money from that. but a bunch of other people did, they took his open source and uploaded it tot he app stores and made a shitton.

disagree, closed source is still appealing to big companies because they already have been hoarding their code copyrights and reusing in-house closed source engines for years, but for a small/crowdfunded company there is more benefit to open sourcing because otherwise all the work goes to waste once the sales end and the studio shuts down
and even for big companies, this is changing because of standardization, once an industry matures you start to see lots of open source because no one wants to rewrite the same code over and over again at every new job

MUGEN is a glimpse of what a truly open source heaven game would look like. Granted the engine itself it's not open source but the idea of a game where content is developed by volunteer content creators, building off each other's content.

Honestly it is fantastic despite nobody is making money off it, plenty of people can find endless free entertainment

Attached: F8B5TJMHEI47QZV.MEDIUM.jpg (620x465, 136K)

>releasing open source doesn't have a tangible benefit
so all that open source code that other people wrote that you use in your game, isn't benefiting you?

>you don't
you literally do brainlet, even for MIT/BSD, read the fucking license

>the hard part is documenting them and teaching people how to use them
you don't need to do either of those things if you don't want to

>volunteer content creators, building off each other's content.
fucking terrible for 99% of games, but works for something like Mugen where people can just add their own fighters

the guy said he didn't give a fuck and he didn't even try to make money from it

Say I'm a small game developer.

I just don't understand what I would stand to gain from releasing an open source game outside of it helping me get recognition (which I can do in other ways) or to demonstrate my ability to potential employers (which I'm not interested in as an independent) or collaborators (which again, if I'm worth my salt, are a dime a dozen).

I also don't really understand how others would benefit from me open sourcing my game outside of people attempting to clone it through alternative or even the same distribution channels I use without even reading, appreciating or understanding the code, most often. Any experienced developer won't care about my code because its primarily composed of API calls that are freely available anyway. Who does it help?

None of the code I use requires me to inform anyone that it's in my compiled binaries, although I do anyway because I'm grateful for the contribution, but if I didn't do it nobody would ever know

Releasing undocumented code that nobody knows how to use is pointless. Why half-ass it? I can't think of any way anyone would benefit from the source code to my games, maybe if the game was really popular

>make engine open source
>make server open source
>sell assets
>sell access to official servers
>fuck DRM
I see no reason why this shouldn't work.
>but muh pirates and 3rd party servers
Normies don't care.

still, he deserved to

>I just don't understand what I would stand to gain from releasing an open source game
So people can improve, do bugfix for you, add their own content, etc. It might not be a whole lot for you personally in monetary term, but it'll add to the community.

Agree with the last point made here especially - having worked on released games in the past, undocumented open source code for any of the projects would have been close to valueless. Practically no developers' time would be spent well trying to decipher my own undocumented product in comparison to simply building their own with the same engine.

Art isn't communism
It doesn't get better by having anyone come along and contribute
An open source painting that anyone can come along and have a whack at is not a good painting

I can agree with this, but counterpoise that against simply enabling modding through other means - such as exposing API calls to modders and writing a 3rd part asset manager, practically provides all the benefits of what you've described without any of the downsides of open source. There's slightly more work required, granted, but that exists in other channels with responsibly open sourcing your code, too.

the fan who bought your game and wants to be able to fix a game breaking bug after you stop working on it would still value it

the code to the game being open source is not the same as the art, is football worse because i can make up my own rules when i play with my friends?

Volunteer developed game for no monetary compensation would always be inferior to closed source game that charges for money.

Just compare the polish of Mario Kart vs. Super Tux Kart. You're free to add Shrek, Mario, Goku, etc into Super Tux Kart but nobody did. You're free to polish the janky animation and janky sound effects but nobody did.

Game making is a creative endeavor with end goal of entertainment. Many FOSS program are just ways to achieve a mean (of which is not entertainment). Just like baking the cake for gay couple, US Supreme Court decide you cannot force someone to do creative endeavor for you, even with monetary compensation yet alone do it for free.

Attached: screenshot-subsea.jpg (640x338, 67K)

>closed source game
>screenshot of game is a giant list of stolen IP

K dude, it's free because whoever distributes this would get litigated up the ass dry if they sold it for money.

muh larger company comes in and sells servers for much cheaper and prices you out of the market

Attached: eeb161ed0103676b8657f90a21f519e8.png (451x619, 428K)

Pretty weak argument imo. Not enabling others to add work to your product actively prevents them from adding value, whereas if they are enabled, there is at least some possibility that their work may add value, and unlike a painting, a piece of software is clonable and immaterial and can be appreciated separately from the contributions of others if properly maintained.

Do you also want other works of art like paintings for free? Nigger

The argument is releasing open source is not a trivial task, so unless your game has some exceptional potential for doing so why even bother, go with a mod API or nothing at all

most game code is incredibly specific and has little value outside its own game

Copiable digital painting? Sure

>Shrek, Mario, Goku
these are all copyrighted characters and it would be illegal to add them in
>janky animation and janky sound effects
those give it charm, after all it's art and it's a game for small children
>Volunteer developed game for no monetary compensation would always be inferior to closed source game that charges for money.
you can still charge money for an open source game. doom and quake are still being sold on steam to this day

>most game code is incredibly specific and has little value outside its own game
You'd be surprised. Counter Strike started as modded Half Life 2.

People can take your most basic code, say in an RPG maker the turn based system menu and engine, add their own models, effects, etc without the need to reinventing the barebone skeleton of turn based menu everytime they develop a new turn based game.

t. never played any of the listed games
SuperTuxKart and 0a.d. are great. Hedgewars is basically Worms Armageddon with different aesthetics. OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with different aesthetics.

>Who does it help?
The community based around your game. Getting mods and people adding their own assets gets exponentially easier in an open source game. Developers learning from your code and developers trying to make similar games would need significantly less time to make something since they wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel.
Either way, you don't lose anything if you release the source code in, let's say, 4-10 years after the game is launched.
Also this . An example is jazz jackrabbit 2. A still closed source game with an open source mod being made to improve it and patch up all the dumb bugs it has. The game still has a decent community and it would be possible to significantly improve the game if it were open source since a lot can't be fixed or made work better in modern computers without source code access.

You have a completely retarded view on what open source is.
>anyone can come along and have a whack
False since you're not forced to use any contributions. They're just recommendations. The point is that if anyone wants to add or remove something in THEIR OWN repository/copy you can't stop them but they also can't interfere with your (main) repository. It's not any different than people using mods. So you're literally saying you're against mods too.

The first point you make here is probably the best argument for FOSS games, maintenance after the original developer has moved on.

I'd argue that that can be resolved by the original programmer doing a good jobin the first place though. Open sourcing hasn't been required for most well-made games to still be enjoyed - people still continue to enjoy retro games, bugs and all, many years after their official maintenance has ended.

In any case, I'd look to closed-sourcing a game for whilst I continue to maintain it, and then open sourcing it once I officially decide its a legacy product.

no Half Life games are open source, most game mods are made through modifying the data files in a data-driven game

I definitely agree with the point you're making now, but that didn't seem like the point you were making in the >art isn't communism post.

>these are all copyrighted characters and it would be illegal to add them in
MUGEN still hasn't received a copyright strike. With FOSS the idea is that nobody is making money off it, so there's not a whole lot of ground for copyright strike.

Not against mods, as you pointed out, you're free to choose what to use and what not to use, just saying mods have very little value for MOST (not all) games, so open sourcing really isn't worth it

maintaining a mod api is not a viable long term solution, it's a lot of work, massively complicates the codebase, gives you a huge API surface to have to maintain, further locks you in to any technical decisions at the time the mod api was made, etc, and still it only allows customers to do a small percentage of what they could do if it were open source

>MUGEN still hasn't received a copyright strike
they won't because they don't distribute the community content, it's the players who are violating copyright
>With FOSS the idea is that nobody is making money off it
this is completely false and i'm embarrassed that this myth persists to this day

Would you say those shortcomings are the case for any API, or generally down to the abilities of the API developer?

>maintaining a mod api is not a viable long term solution, it's a lot of work, massively complicates the codebase, gives you a huge API surface to have to maintain
most games are data-driven. They don't need a "mod API", they can build game content in the same way the developers build game content, by modifying the game files or using game editing tools. My games are heavily moddable just by the fact that you can go into the folders and edit the scripts or use the map editor. No extra cost to me as that's how I built the game content in the first place

>just saying mods have very little value for MOST (not all) games
Adding titties and nude mods always add value to literally any game. Literally any, from barebone game like Pong to AAA game like GTA can be improved (for certain section of the population) if you add tities (or cocks if you swing that way).

Again it's about free as freedom mindset. Everyone is free to modify a program to their need

Attached: 768455.jpg.png (1021x568, 1.25M)

Strong agree.

>they won't because they don't distribute the community content, it's the players who are violating copyright
Can't you use the same logic for any other open source game? Same deal with Skyrim, you can add 2B, Game of Thrones character, etc, and sometime even assets directly ripped from other copyrighted game, doesn't mean that the copyright holder could sue Bethesda.

>doesn't mean that the copyright holder could sue Bethesda.
they could and it has happened, you just have to prove the devs aren't taking reasonable steps to stop it happening

it has nothing to do with individual devs, it happens any time a team makes a promise about API/ABI compatibility

that's good, only the code needs to be open source, not the game content, you should charge as much as you can for it

They can't legally use your original assets in their server. The engine is FOSS, the assets are not free. Of course they can potentially replace them and still fuck you over.

you can't make game content non-open source, the images have to be on your computer for the game to load them in, unless you want to be a real fag and encrypt it but you can break that
open source isn't required for good mods, most modded games are closed source

>only the code needs to be open source, not the game content
How do you differentiate between content and code in something like video game? Sure textures, skins, etc are content, but some content interact specifically with codes. For example character X is holding a gun. I want to turn the gun into a laser gun and have the laser gun have special properties. That means that the content (laser gun model) is linked with a code (special property of the gun). One cannot exist without the other to make a coherent game.

The code is what is compiled into the executable. Many games have lua scripts and stuff which aren't compiled, they're considered "content" even though they're code