On The Difficulty Of Developing Open Source Games

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Competitive Enterprise Institute essay for discussing lessons learned by looking at the history of open-source games (PDF link, text version as posted to Politech list.) The piece suggests that "generally, games have not been a success story for the open source community", arguing that "...the consensus among gamers and developers is that open source games still lag behind proprietary games in originality, sophistication, and artwork; many are clones of earlier proprietary or shareware games." It notes that "...the open source business model seems to have trouble coming up with large initial investments at the cutting edge of innovation, where risks are greatest", and then suggests some larger lessons for governmental public policy on open-source software.

Not Suprising

[Prien715]

Most people can't afford to develop games full time without getting paid. The software industry has become more mature in figuring out ways to make people buy games. People who do want to develop games as a hobby tend to use ready made editors. The Warcraft 3 editor is extremely powerful and can make games well beyond the RTS genre. These "new games" are open source by default but can be protected if you really want to (most people don't). Many people downright encourage manipulation of source (check out wardraft [wardraft.org] for example).

Artists have many "scratch an itch" outlets

[Paolomania]

... they draw in sketchbooks [piselli.com], paint [piselli.com], sculpt, design web pages [piselli.com], or any other of a variety of personal artistic projects.

now the question then becomes: "well what of the CG artists who have an itch to scratch?" well, many of them opt to create their own highly detailed renderings, or digital paintings [piselli.com], or even make their own animated shorts. there is far more artistry at your fingertips when you are not constrained by the limitations of a realtime graphics engine.

"ok, ok, but what about the miniscule subset of artists who both work on computers and have some odd fixation on creating graphics for games, and have an itch to scratch because they aren't working in the games industry?" Well, they have their outlets, such as making add-on [polycount.com] artwork [piselli.com] for professional quality games [quake3world.com], or perhaps contributing artwork to one of the many many mod projects out there.

"ok, ok, but what about the hypothetical subset of artists who work on computers, have some odd fixation on creating graphics for games, have an itch to scratch because they aren't working, don't mind subjecting their creativity to my ideas while working on my pet OSS game project, and share in the ethos of open source software?"

So is this starting to make sense to you guys yet?

Discalimer: I am a computer scientist and a former professional video game artist, so I might know what I'm talking about.

Originality

[Beolach]

"...the consensus among gamers and developers is that open source games still lag behind proprietary games in

originality, sophistication, and artwork"

I disagree with OS games not being original. Liquid Wars [ufoot.org] won Happy Penguin's [happypenguin.org] "Most Original Linux Game 2002", and is IMO on of the most original games I've ever played.

Just my 2 cents