I think a game in a very popular genre, with a proven gameplay formula, and support for a well-known scripting language, would benefit the most from being open source from the very start.

Such a game may benefit even more if the game is a spiritual successor to a very popular game that was abandoned by the developer due to an overwhelmingly demanding fandom.

Minetest and Veloren are, IMHO, perfect examples of the above. Both were open source from the start, both were based on the incredibly-popular voxel game genre, and Minetest had support for Lua from the very start.

AAA games would benefit the most, because then we could just remove all the awful shit added to them - microtransactions, DRM, stupid launchers, could downscale textures and clean up 3d models - and be left with an actually good game. xD

Procedural and systems games. Also the kind of thing that's otherwise a good fit for UGC.

Narrative games are a bad fit for iterative development in the open - you want something where people will keep coming back & stay engaged, rather than something that's one & done once you know the ending.

Anything that relies heavily on moddability and user-generated content. Games that are designed to be tinkered with.

Live service games. The developers would be forced to treat customers with respect and keep it going as long as possible or risk having their game ripped away from them by people who actually care about it.

When they're done with it, it won't just wither away, someone can fix all their little mistakes when the developers leave and then set up a new master server and community lobbies.

Of course, thanks to triple-A devs having an affinity for MTX and being deathly alergic to mods and dedicated decentralized server browsers, that's wishful thinking.

I also think blockchain should be leveraged to keep MTX purchases ownable offline and transferable to a community server for the same game, but seeing as NFTs are prettymuch exclusively used to exploit people who know nothing about money, and considering the others above, I doubt any developer will ever try such a thing in the near future.

Last edited by bonkmaykr on 14 July 2024 at 6:08 pm UTC

Esports of all kinds need it most desperately. You want your game to be on the same level as tennis or chess? Better be open source, no hiding the ruleset, let us do whatever we want with it just like we can with the rules of soccer.

Server software too, hand it over. We won't be having people's livelihoods relying on hoping the developer keeps the servers up and that they don't ruin it in an update.