this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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If programming is how one earns a living then the perceived risk of earning lower (if that's generally true, or not) will make moral arguments for free software less receptive.
Earning at distribution is not the only possible time to get funding. Godot engine gets grants from companies that request features, then devs implements them after already being paid. If that method would work for game devs, and earn enough, I can't say.
Free software being more difficult to earn profit is the other side of the coin of proprietary software being easier (for bad reasons). Artificially limiting the availability of software so users can only get it from you makes it easier. Being able to force changes that help you financially at the users' expense is easier. It's my hope that proprietary software is not viable long term as users will demand software freedom, but that's just my wish. In the short term I hope people switch from Unity to Godot.
A patron model is my personal future hope; "pay me if you want to see this game continued to be developed and get more games by me". In the meanwhile I have a full time job, wish we had a universal basic income!
The problem with patron model is that most people don’t want to pay for something they might get some time in the future. We have tried things like gofundme and it generally has been a disappointment. Patron models works for some things, like I might pay for an entertaining content creator to keep making content, at least if the stuff isn’t also available for free, but games are not like that. It’s generally considered stupid to pay in advance for games and seeing how expensive making big games is it would require millions of people being stupid per game.
In the end the patron model in game development would mean mostly big well established companies could make money. Who would pay for an unknown new company with no well established track record? Investors wouldn’t because there would be no return later. Only idiot users would.
I hope users see a difference between preordering the lastest AAA studio's game and donating to a community developed game {e.g. a multiplayer RPG like Veloren }. I'm an idiot who has donated a couple of times :)
As an amature game dev I have no expectation that I will get paid enough to live off. Even if I did that wouldn't prove to others that it can be the norm. I find this preferable to joining the games industry as it is now.
Nickel and diming, dark patterns, gambling to children, rootkit anti-cheat, tying games to consoles, attacking emulation of no longer sold games, shutdown servers required to play the game you paid for. The design is very different from the coin-operated arcades days. I want to make games that repect users' software freedom and for now I bet on users learning to value their software freedom too.
Yeah... "community developed game" very rarely turns out well. Especially if they attempt something resembling AAA content. Perpentual alpha state is the most common outcome. And when they work they typically just recreate some existing game with little creativity in terms of IP. Maybe Veloren will be the exception but nothing they show is in any way special. It seems they have already rewritten the engine entirely once. Edit: and of course it looks a lot like cubeworld and minecraft.
It's not really difficult to create some graphics content and moving characters on some engine engine, but that's like 5% of what it takes to make a good game. Communities are very good at the former but not so good at the remaining 95%.
Users generally want games that are fun to play and that actually work. Software freedom is very very much secondary even among those who even know what it means.
Could it be said many game companies attempts end in alpha but communities' failures are just more transparent? A lot of games are clones of others games with just some differences? I feel the desire to create something new but don't mind creating clones if that can work.
I've focused a lot on implementation but if you're right then I think I aught to learn more about game design. It has been fun to think about designing gameplay in the past but I've never studied the basics.
I've recreated a game myself as I'd outgrown what I wrote (and rewrote it in an incompatible updated language). It's just "connect the dots" game as a few learning experiences but I will be posting the first alpha release soon, and hopefully isn't much after that (if one was harsh it's basically an asset flipper).
Maybe but it's rare for a company to put out products at alpha level unless they go bust before the game is finished. Sometimes games are launched at beta level and fixed later but that's not the same than the eternal development limbos of open source projects, where something almost playable is released to keep people engaged but it never really gets much better than that.
I'd say the most important thing about making games is gameplay design. While good game engine design is a big thing, what actually makes a good game is the user experience, not the technical details of how they implement things. It's also what is the problem in a lot of open source projects. I had a friend who implemented a very nice javascript browser based game engine. There were very cool features like particle physics and complex light effects in it. But in the end nobody wrote an interesting game with it. What matters is the content of the game, not so much which engine implements the content.
Good game design is also something that PhD theses are being written about. Not simple at all. I found the nintendo talk about designing zelda botw world very interesting. How much thought goes into things like the psychology of the player and how he reacts to what he sees and how to steer the player where the story wants him to go while giving him the impression he makes the choices himself is mind blowing.