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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 16th, 2024

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  • Yours is a flawed, extremist view.
    How impressive something is has nothing to do with whether or not its source is available. What, if they release it to the public it suddenly becomes impressive?
    You can disagree with the method of distribution, but it doesn’t affect the quality of the game.

    Piracy being a thing isn’t a strong argument for open sourcing everything, since the barrier of entry is higher than you may expect for non technical people, a barrier that would definitely be lower if any game was freely available and compilable by anyone. Someone will make a free, one click installer, guaranteed.

    Now, can you charge for open source software? Definitely.
    Will it generate significant revenue in most circumstances? No.

    Open source software relies on two methods for funding:

    • People’s good will, through donations
    • Paid enterprise licenses and training

    The former isn’t something one can stably rely on, the latter just isn’t applicable to games.
    Again, that model can work for some high profile projects, but in the vast majority of cases, it won’t. Especially not for games.

    One can make works of passion and still want to be compensated, that’s what artists do and games are a form of art. You clearly never had to put food on the table with the art you make.

    Your vision of everything being open source is a utopia. A noble idea, for sure, but reality is much more bleak.


  • Just open sourcing the actual engine wouldn’t do much. At best, you’d be able to make it work on newer hardware if problems arise, or port it to other OSs. Great stuff, but not enough when it comes to improving the game, preserving multiplayer, and so on.

    There’s a great amount of scaffolding on top of the base engine that any moderately sized game implements, be it through scripting or native code. That’s what I meant by the line between the engine and the game being blurry. If you want to make meaningful changes to the game, you need access to that framework portion, but releasing it would allow for easy reverse engineering of everything else. It’s a difficult balance to achieve.


  • I could see that being a thing, but the line between the engine and the game itself is a bit blurry in this context. Copyrighting just the assets and content would often not be enough. There will always be a good chunk of game code which isn’t strictly part of the engine but under this model should remain closed source, otherwise people could just bring their own assets.

    Frankly I’d be satisfied with companies open sourcing their games after they stop supporting and/or selling them, mostly for preservation and all that. I think that would be a great middle-ground.















  • People dislike JS because it’s packed full of moronic footguns and technical debt. The “standard library” is full of baffling decisions and, much like the language, rarely does what you expect. Even its creator agrees it’s a terrible language and should have been replaced by now.

    TypeScript is better, but at the end of the day it’s just an illusion. Add an any anywhere, which will happen, and you’re back to square one. It also still inherits some of the weirdness of JS, because it is just JS with fake types bolted on. Plus, the amount of work one has to do to create a proper library with TypeScript support completely undermines the few advantage of JavaScript. Might as well use a real statically typed language at that point, at least you’d be sure your types are actually enforced.

    Also, the whole web ecosystem is ass. The hoops one has to jump through nowadays to do web development are absolutely batshit crazy. And no, having a create-whatever that sets things up for you is not a real solution.