On The Difficulty Of Developing Open Source Games 87
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.
Laxius Power (Score:3, Interesting)
The website is: http://laxiuspower.fr.st/ and its about 20 megs, and one of the best damn RPGs I have played. If you are a fan of SNES-era rpgs, check this game out. At times it is very difficult, but very fun and rewarding.
Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
Art and graphics and such take a lot of time, effort, work, etc. Nobody who has the ability to do that stuff well is going to do it for free and release the rights to it in a GPL style license. Especially if they design marketable new characters or make new amazing music. The talented folk who do that stuff well all have jobs doing it for a living. So they sure aren't going to want to do it in their spare time.
Look for open source game engines. You'll find a-plenty of high quality ones. But complete games need artists in addition to programmers. And these types aren't into the open source action. Old games work very well for open source because they are all pixely and you don't need to be a great artists to do them, just a decent one. A programmer who can wield the gimp well can make an old school game. But I'd like to see you make a modern fps at the Half-Life2/Doom3 level with just 3 programmers in a basement. Expensive artists are an absolute requirement.
More pro-Microsoft crap (Score:3, Interesting)
This "report" is filled with all sorts of wonderful crap, isn't it?
Furthermore, some of the political support for building preferences for open source into the process comes from anti-Microsoft sentiment...
Perhaps it's more a matter of the government being wary of being completely and utterly dependent on a company who makes products riddled with security holes and has already been found guilty of illegal market practices.
GMD
There is no "open source business model"! (Score:2, Interesting)
People can and do make money by centering their business on free software, but the success or failure of these companies is not the metric by which free software should be judged. Rather, it is entirely incidental.
The real question is, "Have we formed an alternative to proprietary software?" And I think the answer is Yes, we have. Now, I'll be the first to admit that most free games lack the sophistication of their proprietary brethren, but this is not very important for two reasons. First, these are games. It's not like forcing me to use proprietary products to submit a resume or file my tax return. Secondly, and this is related to the first point, most games lack "network" effects. You pick up the game, play it, and buy a better one a few months down the road. There is no vendor lock-in. Each game is a new creature.
Movies are a better comparison (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, it is true that open-source games lack a lot of the glitz and spectacle of closed-source games. But that's actually not relevant. Look at a great open-source game like armagetron [sf.net]. My non-geek friends love this thing. Everyone I've introduced it to gets hooked on it. But it's really nothing more than "Worms" done right with great gameplay.
Armagetron, in my opinion, is like "The Blair Witch Project". They are both the work of talented amateurs. Armagetron will never be Doom 3, but Blair Witch will never be Waterworld. The great thing about open-source games is the same as ultra-low-budget moviemaking: the barriers for entry are so low that anyone can cross over. No one will make Doom 3 or Waterworld that way. But I for one liked Blair Witch better than Waterworld. And while I'm not prepared to say I'll like Doom 3 less than Armagetron, I do think there is a strong niche for light, cheap, well-made games. I mean, honestly, if it were all about the frills, who would still bother playing chess?
Re:the reason IMO ... (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, I have been playing FreeCiv a lot lately. For those that don't know, FreeCiv is a free/open source game based on Sid Meier's Civilization series. I really like it, but let's face it, it's just a clone. Now, I'm willing to bet that when Sid Meier made the original Civilization, the majority of work went into gameplay & balance, not into coding. It's that kind of vision of how a game should *work* that most free/open game projects seem to lack. I'm not saying that they're all bad or unoriginal - it's just the nature of the free/open source community to be made up mostly of coders honing their skills rather than game designers.
Some other data: Linuz Journal's 2003 user choice awards [linuxjournal.com] picked out Frozen Bubble as their best game - a clone of an old arcade game. Second was Quake 3, and third was Tux Racer. Tux Racer at least seems to have an original concept and design, so at least it shows the community can come up with some original ideas.
Re:the reason IMO ... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why we see so many projects started to clone an existing game - you can get a group of people to, say, copy X-Com UFO Defense, or Civilization, or Dance Dance Revolution, because they know what the final product should turn out to be.
Trying to create a new game results in much more difficulty, as you have people disagreeing over what the design should be, each person gets their own features in and then wants to keep them in regardless of the game balance, and so on.
Open source works wonders when the end goal is understood by the participants. Trying to come up with entirely new features and ideas is a lot tougher, and more prone to disagreement. Creativity is a lot harder to collaborate on.
this is (Score:2, Interesting)
The best way to make money is to create a commercial game, and build an edit module so that the user community can build their own rooms and levels. Not unlike Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and others.
Thus, your game is not "disposable" when finished - the commercial game serves as an education for amateur developers, who then make new content (for free).
Next, develop a moderating system for the user-created content (to weed out the crappy stuff), and see what floats to the top.
Once people stop buying the commercial game, open source the engine. This would be ideal, as you would have:
1) achieved profitability
2) a large user base
3) alot of pre-developed content and artwork
4) an enhanced reputation among the gaming community (everybody loves Bioware after NwN and KOTOR. Just imagine how cool they would be if they open-sourced these games in a couple of years!!)
5) "ideas" from open source developers to use in your next commercial engine (or even hire the best developers outright)
Sell T-shirts and hats to cover your bandwidth costs after giving away the farm, and you are money.