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.

the reason IMO ...

[Dreadlord]

... is that the open source mevement lacks good artists, you know, open source apps are usually well-coded but lack a good GUI, in games, good graphics / sounds greatly affect the gaming experience, so developing a good open source game requires programmers (already available) and artists (aren't there yet unfortunately).

Re:Laxius Power

[Vaevictis666]

Looks nice, I'll need to check it out after work.

Unfortunately, it's offtopic a bit, as it's not open source. It's made with a (nice proprietary) RPG creation program called RPGMaker.

Just because it's distributed for free doesn't make it open source. However, if I'm wrong and the download is an editable module for RPGMaker that someone could load up and tweak the hell out of just for kicks, then I'll accept it as being on-topic.

Two minutes of Googling...

[Damien Neil]

http://www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.a sp?Org=CEI200

The CEI appears to be a pro-business lobbying organization. Their donors list is a who's-who of US automobile and oil companies.

The article referenced can be summed up as: "There aren't very many open source games, therefore governments shouldn't open source code they pay to have written and shouldn't have procurement policies that prefer open source code." No real effort is made at connecting the thesis and conclusion. (Governments don't buy many games--America's Army aside.)

I'm not certain why a very minor article from a propaganda organization would be considered newsworthy.

Additional reasons

[dtfinch]

In addition to the extreme cost of producing media for games such as artwork and sound, there's also the problem of legal threats. A lot of game companies try to bully small and open source game producers into shutting down their projects. Hasbro has done this dozens of times, taking their small competitors to court, losing because ideas aren't protected by copyright, and appealing until the defendant gives up or go bankrupt.

An example of an open source game being bullied to death is FreeCraft, a great WarCraft II clone developed by fans primarily because WarCraft II doesn't run on Linux or Windows, and Blizzard showed no intention to port it. Despite the fact that it encourages you to buy a copy of the game to rip the tilesets from, Blizzard shut them down earlier this year by threatening to sue. Since most non-business oriented open source projects aren't backed by money, the developers had no choice but to give up on the well matured project, despite having a a good chance of winning if they had gone to court.

Unless you're inventing an entirely new genre, you'd be taking a big risk developing an open source game these days.

Creative differences, not talent

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of creative conflict present in a team increases exponentially with the number of people on the team; thus, without a clear leader who can hire and fire, large "open source" teams will never be able to resolve their creative differences.

Image 25 people trying to paint a painting. Without a single vision, such an effort is doomed to fail, which is why knockoffs are common among open source and freeware games; they're easy to agree on, and have a functioning prototype sitting right there. Game mods succeed for the same reason; it's easy to agree on how to take something and vary it, much harder to agree on what to build from the ground up.

It's creative differences, not talent or tech needs, that keep open source teams from succeeding.

Re:Duh

[TwistedGreen]

The talented folk who do [art and graphics design] well all have jobs doing it for a living. So they sure aren't going to want to do it in their spare time. ...as opposed to the programmers who program in their spare time?

I think it's primarily a difference in mentality and subculture. A lot of these design artists don't have an 'open-source community.' Why this is, and why the two communities are different, is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:Duh

[Frequanaut]

Wtf? This is modded up?

Yeah, us programmers. Easy work with lots of free time. Why just yesterday I rolled out of bed around 11AM, scooted off to work for an hour or so, then came back home to work on my open source project.
Ahhh, drawing, that's hard work my friend. Manly work. Many is the day I've seen tortured, broken, artists rubbing their nubby, dirty, worn fingers; sore from the back breaking illustration marathons.

In my experience, as a programmer married to an artist, they're not too different.

The fact is *most* open source projects are done by students or the unemployed. There are exceptions to that where there is a business supporting the product (i.e. apache or the linux kernel) but the majority of projects are done by students.

Artists would release their work into the public domain for the same reason people writing GPLd code do. Recognition, enjoyment, chicks, whatever.

However I think the concept of open source, giving something away that could be sold is pretty unique to software development right now. I find it humorous that people just give away all their work myself.

Can a single-player open source game make money?

[Who Man]

This could be its own Ask Slashdot post, but it seems relevant enough here. It's clear why Linux makes people money. Because it's not trivial to put together a distribution, people will pay for one. People will also pay for support. And Linus gets paid to do speeches. It's clear why things like Zope or JBoss make money. Because it's not trivial to build a website, people will pay someone else to do it or they'll pay for training. It's clear how a multiplayer game could make money. Sell subscriptions to access the servers hosting the game. But a single-player game seems the most contradictory to an open source model. People buy the game and essentially throw it away (as a couple other posters have mentioned). If others can just redistribute the game for free and undercut the cost of the original developer, then the developer has no incentive to produce the game in the first place. And the better the game is, the less money you would make, because the game would spread that much faster. I'm trying to get into game development, and I can see only three reasons for making open source software: I think I can make a game that's so great that other people want to advertise on my site. I think I can make a game that's so great people will want to buy t-shirts and hats. Or I think I can make a game that's good enough that a company will hire me--to help make a proprietarty game! Can someone dispute this?

Easy answer (not trolling!)

[billcopc]

The reason why open source games can't compete with big-budget titles is because corporate game houses have a small army of best-of-breed artists, designers and coders (and marketing sheep). The OSS collective has a handful of genius kernel hackers and network engineers, and a bazillion lazy perl/php monkeys. Let's face it, we're better than the unwashed masses but we suck as a whole when it comes to coordinated effort. Look at the biggest most successful OSS projects: most were made by a single person slaving for weeks/months, the rest of us just provide feedback, occasional patches etc. And then there's a hundred clones that never seem to get finished.

There's also the issue of survival: game developers get paid to work 80+ hours a week exclusively on their title. We have day jobs and do this stuff as a hobby. A true indie game programmer has to be either a 16 year old that doesn't go to school and lives with his parents (no job), or someone in-between jobs that has enough savings to live for a few months. Even then, just one person can't create Quake 4. It takes years of man-hours to get it done, and it happens to be quite difficult to get a bunch of unemployed talented game developers and artists together at any one time.

Another important factor.

[Yaztromo]

Games aren't like any other piece of software, in that, as a class of software, they exhibit two qualities that most other software doesn't:

• Most people who play games on their computers (or consoles or whatever) want/have significantly more than one game. Constrast this with operating systems, office suites, or web browsers, where a typical user will have one, maybe two. But they might have 20 - 30 games (or more).
• Game as software typically have a much shorter lifespan than any other type of software. An office suite or a web browser might go through dozens of revisions over the span of a decade, being reworked to improve upon its deficiencies, and improve it for new eras in computing. But games typically get tired after a year or two -- you might have a few minor patches, and maybe one or two "add-on packs", but after that you pretty much have to bring out something new, designed more or less from the ground up.

Writing big games as Open Source typically doesn't work out for the above two reasons. Developers want to sink their time into software development projects that are going to be somewhat lasting -- something they can contribute to over long periods of time, and continually refine.

But you can only refine a game so much. I'm sure there are all sorts of optimizations you can add to Pac Man, but no matter how much you debug it and modify its routines, in the end it's still the same game, and won't ever hold the same popularity it did in the early 80's. Pac Man with cutting edge graphics is still Pac Man. Gamers want something new to play -- constantly and consistently.

Most Open Source developers, in my experience, want to work on more important software -- stuff that will be useful to people for years to come, to which they can add new features and continually improve upon. Games simply don't fit will into this sort of development model.

(Plus, of course, I completely agree with all the previous posters who pointed out that artists and musicians/audio engineers are typically exceedingly difficult to find for Open Source development. Heck, for my project I once asked a graphic artist I knew who owed me a favour to put together four 40x40 icon graphics -- and they refused because I wasn't going to pay them (nevermind the fact that the week before I starred in their art film for nothing...grumble grumble grumble...)).

Yaz.

Eh...maybe

[tigermonkey]

Maybe...but then again, one could argue that Shakespeare synthesized new plays from material that was available then; from what I've seen from at least some of the sources for some of his plays, there are enough differences between what Shakespeare wrote as a play, and what the sources Shakespeare probably used actually said, that Shakespeare's stuff comes across as mostly original and unique.

Music has a similar problem: yes, musicians can borrow either theme or sample from an existing work (or body of works), but generally their new syntheses of those themes and samples turn out to be different and unique from the original source(s).

I do think it's a difference in mentality between artists and OSS, but I think it's less to do with artists not having their own 'open soucre community' and more to do with them not realizing the benefits of doing things for free. :-)

Advertising, being one of the biggies: I'm sure there are more than a few 'starving' artists who would not be 'starving' if people saw their work...but, if the galleries in the artists' city don't display their work for whatever reason, what are the artists to do?

Alternatively, if those same 'starving' artists did some original artwork for a OSS game or two, their work would be more visible quicker than if they waited for some gallery to display their work. True, the artists might not hit the right audience, but they would be more likely to hit any audience...

(Besides, the artists-in-question might find they like drawing dragons and gun-toting demons more than they like drawing portraits and bowls of fruit. :-) )

Same goes for music. Yes, you aren't going to be monetarily compensated for the work created for OSS (at least, not typically); on the other hand, you get increased visibility and potentially new legions of fans and word of mouth...:-) Fair trade, I think.

And advertising's just one example; there are a lot of things you could do within a trade/barter system. Money is not the only way to pay for things; maybe an OSS game programmer/designer could offer the artist computings services (website design, e-mail account, server space, etc.) in exchange for some original artwork for the programmer's game. That stuff is useful, and doesn't come cheap. Again, I would think that's a fair trade...

OSS needs to do a better job of playing up the values of 'free as in beer'. :-)

My $0.02...

tigermonkey