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Hmm, so is that 33,333 sales in total, or 33,333 sales from now? It'd be nice to have an idea of how far away that is (or at least how far away the countdown is).

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Quoting: "MyGameCompany, post: 4576, member: 68"That's not quite true. I went to GDC back in 2004, and I was pleasantly surprised at how open and helpful game developers are (both indies and AAA devs). I was at the IGF Pavilion, demonstrating my Fashion Cents game which was a finalist that year, and lots of devs came by, looked at the game, and offered great suggestions for improving gameplay in areas I hadn't thought about (e.g., a 2-click alternative to drag and drop for laptop users with trackpads, printing the colors of the pieces on tooltips for color-blind users, ideas for additional power-ups, etc). They also offered publishing tips, and in some cases introduced me to publishers they knew. Most game developers I met weren't at all like the reclusive basement/bedroom coders that I envisioned.

Some indies also collaborate together on various things of mutual interest. I worked with with Gianfranco Berardi at GBGames, Roman Budzowski at Anawiki Games, and Ilya Olevsky at Valen Games (which has since closed up shop) on our Linux ports - we all worked together over e-mail to figure out how to build distribution-independent binaries, and freely shared information we learned. Erik Hermensen over at Caravel Games put me in touch with Jerry Jo Jellestad, who spent many patient weeks over e-mail teaching me the ins and outs of building Linux binaries and installers - he certainly didn't have to do that, given his busy schedule. Gianfranco and I still frequently collaborate to this day, helping test each other's games, sharing new Linux tips we come across, marketing tips, etc.

Going open source would certainly help devs collaborate better, though I don't see devs jumping in and helping code each other's games. Rather, I see devs looking at each other's code to see how they made something work. But then again, the aforementioned guys and I have privately shared some code over the years help each other get something working, so we didn't necessarily need to publicly open our source for that.

I' m glad to know collaboration is happenning, at least between indie developers. Still, I'm not talking just about helping each with their code, opensource doesn't necessarily encourage this kind of collaboration between developers. I meant using more and more common code, I mentioned sharing libraries, tools and engines. Currently almost everyone is developing a lot of code from scratch, I suggest working on the same engine/tools/libraries, when it makes sense.

Why opensource it? If that's meant as an honest and truly collaborative effort, why not? If it's good, more and more people will start using your engine, you can get help from that people, your engine will run on almost everything and some of your users will praise you. It can be seen from the other side, you can benefit from using a good engine someone else made opensource, and you can help him make it better.

When I say engines I could say any library or tool that could benefit others and you could benefit getting some help from those others interested. You could do all this with your friends without opensourcing, but opensource can get you new friends.

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Not very exclusive when they have it on their official website, i pulled him up on it and he said they emailed him a few days ago and that it still wasnt up on their website...was on their website as soon as i saw it on Phoronix...so yeah not exclusive at all.

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Whohoo

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Quoting: "MyGameCompany, post: 4576, member: 68"That's not quite true. I went to GDC back in 2004, and I was pleasantly surprised at how open and helpful game developers are (both indies and AAA devs).

I think bararma was talking about the kind of user<->developer collaborative aspect that helps drive most non-game open source projects (I think I know what one of the major contributing factors for this is, but that's probably a discussion for another time), which is what an open source game would need to be able to have to thrive (at least so far as being an community driven project goes). You're right though - game developers are often (though not always, of course ;) ) awesome, open, genuine people.

Sofox, thanks for sharing that link. I hadn't come across it before. It's particularly interesting to see that they've had some small positive outcomes from bootleg versions.

An example that I find interesting is Jack Claw. Frozenbyte had hoped to build a community driven project that could benefit from a collaborative development model, but still fall back on direction and support from an established development studio, but it didn't quite reach critical mass and fizzled pretty early on.

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Quote[LEFT]CoreCode, the company behind the CoreBreach, has exclusively shared with Phoronix their plans to open-source this multi-platform anti-gravity racing game. The Core3D engine is also set to be opened up along with the game itself.[/LEFT]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExNDc

Hilarity ensues. :p

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and its done
$625,143
pretty much lastminute pledgers :)

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Quoting: "Sofox, post: 4574"A vital article on this theme: [URL='http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/open-sourcing-your-game-while-its-still-popul']Open Sourcing your Game while it's still Popular. [/URL]
It talks about the experience of open sourcing Canabalt.

Great link! Thanks for sharing that!

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Quoting: "berarma, post: 4554, member: 131"One reason for developers to go opensource is collaboration but this is where the game industry seams weak. There's a lot of competition and very little to no collaboration.

That's not quite true. I went to GDC back in 2004, and I was pleasantly surprised at how open and helpful game developers are (both indies and AAA devs). I was at the IGF Pavilion, demonstrating my Fashion Cents game which was a finalist that year, and lots of devs came by, looked at the game, and offered great suggestions for improving gameplay in areas I hadn't thought about (e.g., a 2-click alternative to drag and drop for laptop users with trackpads, printing the colors of the pieces on tooltips for color-blind users, ideas for additional power-ups, etc). They also offered publishing tips, and in some cases introduced me to publishers they knew. Most game developers I met weren't at all like the reclusive basement/bedroom coders that I envisioned.

Some indies also collaborate together on various things of mutual interest. I worked with with Gianfranco Berardi at GBGames, Roman Budzowski at Anawiki Games, and Ilya Olevsky at Valen Games (which has since closed up shop) on our Linux ports - we all worked together over e-mail to figure out how to build distribution-independent binaries, and freely shared information we learned. Erik Hermensen over at Caravel Games put me in touch with Jerry Jo Jellestad, who spent many patient weeks over e-mail teaching me the ins and outs of building Linux binaries and installers - he certainly didn't have to do that, given his busy schedule. Gianfranco and I still frequently collaborate to this day, helping test each other's games, sharing new Linux tips we come across, marketing tips, etc.

Going open source would certainly help devs collaborate better, though I don't see devs jumping in and helping code each other's games. Rather, I see devs looking at each other's code to see how they made something work. But then again, the aforementioned guys and I have privately shared some code over the years help each other get something working, so we didn't necessarily need to publicly open our source for that.

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A vital article on this theme: [URL='http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/open-sourcing-your-game-while-its-still-popul']Open Sourcing your Game while it's still Popular. [/URL]
It talks about the experience of open sourcing Canabalt.

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Soooooo close ! $591,974 with 7 hours left, I will be surprised if it doesn't hit it!

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they will port it anyway
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation/posts/241390

pledged instantly after i saw that update :)

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Frozenbyte and Introversion examples removed since they aren't very good ones.

Will look up frogatto forgot all about it :P

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Woohoo! Another license thread!

Oh well. I guess I'll chime in on BSD vs. GPL. I've had to program and do systems administration on UNIX in the bad old days when the most basic tasks had to be documented and coded a dozen different ways since there was the BSD way, the SysV way, the Solaris way, the Irix way, the AIX way, OSF-1 way, the HPUX way ... and on and on and on. Just look at an old version of the Armadillo book. Every example had to have several variations. It wasn't that one vendor did it better (and there certainly wasn't one that did everything better). It's that everyone started with the same basic source code and had to "differentiate" (aka try to obtain a lock-in). It was killing UNIX.

Life before the GPL was a PITA for UNIX users and developers alike. Now I look at Apple, Google and Apache trying to push everything BSD-like licenses and I dread we will return to those days. The fact that it's easier and perhaps more profitable to not contribute code back will encourage history to repeat itself. Then add the likes of Canonical & Lennart regularly saying "Screw compatibility with the standards. We know better!" We're cursed by smart people with short memories.

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Sorry, Liam - I should have mentioned that stuff like Frozenbyte's source releases were done so under non-free licences.

As berarma says, the big thing is making sure that a source release (or a Free Software release) must be in line with a developer's goals and visions, and they need to understand the implications are as well as what the impacts (both positive and negative) will be for their users/communities.

It's relatively unexplored territory, and understandably, many of those developers who are aware of and see positive aspects are still wary of the unknowns (mostly relating to whether or not it's possible to draw a revenue stream from an open sourced game). For most developers who have gone down that path (again, as berarma has pointed out), the way to mitigate those unknowns is to wait until a game has either recovered its development costs or passed its peak of profitability, and then release source. I'd be very interested to see how Doom 3's sales have been after their source release - I know that's when I bought it ;)

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Good summary, but you didn't mention the Frogatto case, very interesting IMHO.

I don't think any developer should go open source without making sure it would be good for him/her. Free software should be a win for everyone, as much for the user as for the developer. It's worked for others, it could work for games too.

One reason for developers to go opensource is collaboration but this is where the game industry seams weak. There's a lot of competition and very little to no collaboration. Great amounts of collaboration could go on the technical level, I mean game engines, and the competition should be taken to the creative level. I think specially indie games could benefit from that collaboration. One way for indies to go opensource could be considering the use of free engines, tools and libraries and collaborate in their development, that way they're helping each other and saving money on licenses, making users happier and earning more money from their sales.

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I doubt that's an issue. The pirated game is usually already available on day one.

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Quoting: "toor, post: 4546"I must say that every exemple you are refering, where games whose the source code was released much later after the game launched.

Considering all the DRM they are adding to prevent copying, releasing the source code while the games are relevant will just make them a whole lot easier to crack.

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I must say that every exemple you are refering, where games whose the source code was released much later after the game launched.

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Re-reading your initial post oak, I'm a bit confused. It actually sounds like what you're arguing for is a lot more GPL-like rather than the opposite? Keep in mind that the GPL is a hack around copyright, it uses the system but for its own purposes.

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Quoting: "oak, post: 4538, member: 152"If people really valued the user, they would never have created the GPL and adopted the philosophy of whatever data gets onto your harddrive, you own it, so use it as you see fit. That is freedom, not forced contracts requiring you to share, etc. People aren't free or protected because the GPL says so.

Like Whizse says, the GPL was done with the final user in mind. If you want to redistribute modified binaries without source code you're not allowed, you're not the final user, you're someone who wants to benefit from the source code and take away freedom from your users.

The GPL doesn't force you to release any source code if the modifications are only used by you, it does just in case you're distributing to your own users.

The BSD license says you can do whatever you want, even closing the source code and hiding the modifications you made, effectively taking away the freedom from the final user to do what it wants with the source code.

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If a developer only used BSD licensed libraries for a game and then decided to ship it as a proprietary product I as a user would have no source code, less rights to do anything with it and thus less freedom.

If the libraries where (L)GPL this wouldn't be an issue. This is the problem the GPL was designed to solve. Not to make life easier for the developer, but for me, the user.

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Quoting: "whizse, post: 4531, member: 126"oak: I think it's important to note that the GPL is and was designed with _the user_ in mind, not the developer. Which is why some people seems to like to call it names and make it out to be a big and scary beast, it's really not though.

If people really valued the user, they would never have created the GPL and adopted the philosophy of whatever data gets onto your harddrive, you own it, so use it as you see fit. That is freedom, not forced contracts requiring you to share, etc. People aren't free or protected because the GPL says so.

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So, something I've been thinking about for a while, might as well ask what you all think:

If there was a Windows game that for some reason couldn't be ported for a bundle, and didn't work in Wine. Would you prefer it if the Humble guys paid someone to improve Wine (not just package up the game) so the game could run, or would you prefer it if they ditched the title and selected another game for a native port? (Keep in mind that improving Wine would be a contribution to open source and might improve Wine compatibility for other games as well.)

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[LEFT]This is very interesting concerning licences for tools and libraries and the open source vs proprietary software developers[/LEFT]
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

I never got this gospel-like ideas of FOSS, like there's a war going on. LGPL or less restrictive style licenses seem more ideal to me and feel "free-er" as in "free to do whatever you want with it".

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oak: I think it's important to note that the GPL is and was designed with _the user_ in mind, not the developer. Which is why some people seems to like to call it names and make it out to be a big and scary beast, it's really not though.

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whoops, that post was by me(didn't realize I wasn't signed in).

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This sums it up for me:


Licenses reject freedom. Ideas and code are not property. To own ideas or any other form of thought is to control minds and the free flow of information. Code or any other idea is the opposite of land or tangible goods. To own land is reasonable because land is scarce; no two people can occupy the same exact space - it's physically impossible. In the world of computers, or the world of ideas, we can occupy the same place. There is no scarcity behind information or knowledge because we can create it infinitely. Copyright(often regarded erroneously as theft) is therefore also practically unenforceable.

So what would be a wonderful, realistic future market based on freedom? [URL='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_buy']Group buying[/URL]. Group buying is the future, it's what propelled crowd-sourcing platforms like Kickstarter. If controlling your product(an idea or code) is practically impossible(or immoral too), the best we can do is to demand the money you need upfront and release it to the public. No legal battles ensue because if you have an idea you own it. If you have data you own it. Do what you want with it - safeguard it, share it, build on it, whatever!

In my view, the man who releases his ideas to the public sphere has given up any privacy or right to those ideas thereof.

Well, there you go. If you find my prattling useful or interesting you can check this out: http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html

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Good article. Thanks for collecting all the issues/discussion in one place. And sorry for derailing your other thread! :oops:

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Technically I don't think neither Frozenbyte nor Introversion has released any games as FLOSS. The license for these is still non-commercial, and in the case of Introversion you can't even redistribute.

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