Interview suggestion: OpenGameArt and/or FreeGamer admins

General Chit Chat
1

Videogames are usually seen as the little black duck in the open source family. They can’t stand the comparison with AAA titles, they develop at a very slow pace, they are ugly, you-name-it…

I think it could be interesting to have the point of view of people who stand by for open source games, namely Charles Goodwin of FreeGamer blog and/or Bart Kelsey, admin of the OpenGameArt community website.

Topics that could be interesting to discuss about:

  • With Steam and other major titles finally arriving on Linux, is it the death of open source games?
  • Open source games are usually cool but ugly, is it because the philosophy of open source/creative commons is not understood by artists?
  • Modding of commercial games is very popular, is it something that also happens for open source games?

What do you think, people of Bad Voltage?

1 Like
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Sounds like a good topic to me.

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I think part of the problem with open source games is the business model. The normal open source business model is charging for support. Charging for support won’t work for games.

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Yes. Speaking as someone who ran game companies for several years and earned a living off games for Linux for a (much shorter) period of time… Yes.

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I think that the arrival of Steam for Linux has been discussed extensively but only from the POV of Linux as a whole ecosystem. I remember how Valve said that they worked with hardware developers to improve the drivers. But its effect on the open source gaming is interesting, and I haven’t read anything about it.

Certainly, Open Source games sounds cool, but are not sustainable. Most gamers don’t care about the development of the game, neither if they have access to the source code. And the support point that @xi11ix pointed is certainly true.

1 Like
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There is the new flavour of the month and that is games that can be played freely, TF2 and Dota 2 are examples of this. Money is made via in-game purchases which sometimes gives more functionality (perhaps you can play with more characters) or cosmetic additions (new skins, voice packs etc.).

This model may be a way to monetize a free as in freedom game, and if spin-offs of the game do happen as is the tendency with FOSS it is possible it may foster the same growth and calibration. Then again seeing as money is involved it my very well not >.<

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Well, those games aren’t Open Source. They are free now (TF2 started being a paid game). That’s another possibility for revenue and sustainability for devs. The issue is how to introduce the Open Source factor into the equation

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In fact, I was not even thinking about making money out of open source games… that could be an interesting topic to discuss with the aforementioned people.

What about using a model like Ardour (especially with mobile games)? The source code and assets would be available in an open license, but a pre-compiled version would be available to download from the apsstore of your choice for a very modest price…