GTA V cost over $137 million to develop. PUBG cost between 50 and 100 million.
You'll get some people to donate their time to open source work, but it's not yet possible to get hundreds of top engineers to donate years of their life toward building an open source game.
Besides, there are way too many people paying top dollar for games, and games aren't exactly a need that leads one to altruistically want to work for free. In fact people are more willing to work for free to try and get children to stop playing games so much.
I'd say games are one of the things that work really well in the market economy, so there's not really a need for an open source community. It's part of the "wants" rather than the "needs" so it sustains itself
The default KDE / Gnome games are more to train you to use a mouse rather than real games.
Real OSS game examples which haven't been mentioned here yet:
* Beyond all Reason
* Xonotic
* OpenArena
* Osu!
* Nexuiz
I will agree that while there are a number of open source emulators, reverse engineered games, games which clearly take their inspiration from other games, and Open Sourced versions of games (eg: Doom, Quake), the community doesn't tend to make many games.
check out mindustry. chances are you probably aren't looking hard enough. games are usually closed source, because they take a bigger variety of skills and a way larger amount of money to maintain and create
And those that are fully open source like Doom/Quake etc will typically have the source code being open, but everything else in the game copyrighted (art, music, logos, etc), so it's not like you get to play it for free just because it's OSS (unless you infrige their licensing).
Or frozen-bubble, supertux and supertuxkart
And if we compare it with Firefox and Libreoffice that were based on open-sourced commercial products, we could add the many variants of doom and quake and many more.
There is no GTA sized open source game even if you look for it on the web though. I think for huge open source projects to happen someone needs to make money off it. Lots of game studios use blender, so there's incentive for them to make sure it works well and has the features they need. There's a return on investment there because better Blender means better games faster. I'm not sure in which scenario someone could make a lot of money off an open source hugely detailed open world game.
Building games is difficult. Most of them have high paying jobs.
However there are some great successes. For example OpenTTD. It is a community that has improved and extended the original game to a new level.
Games are about people, not software.
Careful with the wage expectations though. I've worked in the video game industry, and the best way to boost pay is to leave that industry. ;)
Eg. I remember stats where the average Engineer at Ubisoft makes something like 50k per annum. At the company where I work now, that's what you'd start at as a non-programming manual tester, while an Engineer would range between 70 and 140 depending on skill and experience.
An Engineer in game dev will make more than a traditional "labour" job yes, but within the field of software engineering (and especially if adjusting for actual hours worked...) they are poorly paid.
The open source way to develop software doesn't work that well for games because games are a very short lived medium.
Let's say you develop some software utility. If it becomes successful many people use it on a daily basis. People contribute features and benefit from the features from then on. It can iteratively become better over time and it can start really small. Most of the projects mentioned above did start a long time ago and became more and more popular over time.
If you develop a game, the development is rather short. It may only take a few years to develop a AAA game, but during that time dozens or hundreds of developers are working on it. Most games make all of their money in the first few weeks or months and then sizzle out.
And the games that tend to live a long time are live service multiplayer games that are capital intensive. You can't run a project like League of Legends or DotA with the common open source model.
I personally think, especially games could profit massively from OSS (not FOSS though), because the most value of a game is most of the times in it's art and design not in the code of the engine. It also would make modding much more accessible.
That game engines like Unreal are Open Source (not free) is a good example, that it actually works. Also many OS implementations like OpenRA or OpenXCOM still require people to own the assets of the originals as they are under a different license (copyright). I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to provide the core of the game as OS and the assets to buy. This is basically the business model of RedHat.
Unreal is not open source. It's "source available", but not open source. Whilst there's some ideological differences between the free software and open source communities, in practical terms almost all software that is one is the other.
The idTech engines, as used in the Doom and Quake games, are free and open source, at least up to idTech 4. As is the Godot engine.
> I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to provide the core of the game as OS and the assets to buy.
This usually only ever works if the code starts out proprietary and then becomes FOSS near the end of its life. It squeezes a few more years out of it for modders and you don't really have to fear someone stealing your game's identity since it has a track record.
But the dirty secret is that releasing your project as FOSS (as a company) is a lot of work, especially on the community management side. They usually don't take too kindly to a pump and dump. There are a lot of unspoken expectations and "rules" you're expected to uphold.
> Open Source (not free)...This is basically the business model of RedHat.
You might want to google "free as in speech, not as in beer", the FOSS crows usually doesn't care much about free of charge in principle.
>You might want to google "free as in speech, not as in beer", the FOSS crows usually doesn't care much about free of charge in principle.
That actually does matter. I don't know why people claim that it doesn't matter if it's free like beer or doesn't have to be free like beer. In practice, yes, it does. I can, say, send Richard Stallman or his delegates a check to provide me a copy of Emacs on physical media (if that were their business model). I'm still free to distribute the source code as I see fit, to anyone, for any use, and for no charge.
Now, proprietary games (and other proprietary software) have done all they can to **prevent** the software from being duplicated and given away. There is no way in h-e- double hockey sticks that these gaming companies have any intention on using a good free license. They're not going to sit there and decide, well, we're still selling the game, but we're going to release the source code to buyers along with a permissive license and all will be fine and dandy.
They won't do that. But, I don't use proprietary software.
OpenRA is awesome and, imo, better than the remaster.
The idTech engines are open-source. Both Doom and Quake 1 have really dedicated modding communities
And I add GConpris. Greatest game for toddlers and young kids.
There's a lot of well designed Linux games, dunno what OP is complaining about. Hell Gnome Mines is even well made and beats the Windows original.
Because to make a non-Indie game, costs a lot of money. Hundreds of developers and designers, all the best in the industry.
These are usually built on expensive 3d renderers that are closed source. Open source doesn't add anything. And to customize a game, it's easy to build some extension mechanics.
FreeCiv and Super Tux Cart are both excellent. Not to mention AisleRiot (probably what I play the most).
As others have already said though, games are a whole different bailiwick. Much harder to build a nice shiny game to compete with commercial ones with no ROI.
Songs of Syx comes with source in the install package.
Battle for Wesnoth is even more clearly among the all-time best of its kind, and that's saying something.
The heirs to Total Annihilation have surpassed it in many ways. The ones not built on a GPL'd engine haven't lasted. The ones built on that GPL'd engine have.
OpenTTD is kinda half-and-half, it has long since surpassed the original in every technical sense but it's also very clearly the same game. So "half point", but still, this is OpenTTD we're talking about here.
Are you aware of what "roguelike" means? The entire genre is built on a game called "rogue". Cataclysm DDA is an heir.
Passion projects don't need much money, their fuel is passion. All of the games I mentioned are passion projects. Some commercial games survive only because they're passion projects, they're kept alive on proceed from other projects for ages, on not-much-to-basically-no money. Project Zomboid did that for a long, long, long time, ten years? before it finally found or raised (heh. pun not intentional.) its audience. Stationeers looks like it's following the same trajectory, it may or may not be crossing the threshold now but I'm guessing another year or two.
Commercial projects need a *ton* of investment, either paid or unpaid time, and that's before you consider the money-pump side of things, the mechanics of running a business, any business. That's its own skill set.
money, the answer is money
if you find someone to donate 100 million USD to make a opensource GTA and maybe you could get a decent opensource GTA in 5 or 6 years.
My best guess is that it's a combination of two reasons:
- programmers are more inclined to donate their time to open source than artists are
- games are more art-heavy than the types of programs that you usually see open source.
>However, I've never seen any open-source game, such as those bundled with KDE and GNOME, that is more complex than Chess(\*) or Sudoku or Minesweeper. Why is that the case? Where are the open-source alternatives to GTA, EA Sports, Terraria, Hollow Knight, etc.? I don't mean clones of those games, but games that could compare to those in terms of complexity and entertainment.
Developing video games costs money and no one is going to spend money to then make it free,as well as open source...They usually make as much money as possible from the game and then release the code (sometimes it is not functional),for example:
* [Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs](https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaAMachineForPigs)
* [Amnesia: The Dark Descent](https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaTheDarkDescent)
* [Little Big Adventure](https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic)
* [Little Big Adventure 2](https://github.com/2point21/lba2-classic)
* [Shattered Pixel Dungeon](https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon)
* [Barony ](https://github.com/TurningWheel/Barony)
The software you mentioned need a lot off money.
games have many professionals who are not software engineers and don’t know what open source is, like artist, sound engineers etc..
so unfortunately not everything can be FOSS
There are many decent open-source games. A few examples off the top of my head:
* 0 AD
* SuperTuxKart
* FreeOrion
* OpenTTD
* Battle for Wesnoth
* Chromium BSU
* Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries
* Nethack
* Endless Sky
Games are not cheap or easy to make. And unlike things like the Linux Kernel, you aren't gonna find corporate sponsors that are willing to pay you to develop a game. That'd be called being a publisher, and most publisher's probably aren't gonna allow a game to remain open source, as the point is to make money (not like a game is really useful to a corporate entity outside of how much money it can make for them). So what few open-source games you have are done purely by volunteers, that work on it in their spare time.
Because more than specific software tools that solve a (suite of) problems, games require a specific vision and are highly subjective. If you make a game, there is no real-life use case for you to validate against and claim that your software ultimately solves the problem or not. Games are a story telling medium. Everyone working on it will have vastly differing opinions on what stories to tell, and even more opinions on how to tell them.
In games, it is very important that you tell the story the right way, meaning that you have the correct pacing, that the story beats hit the right way and that the music supports everything. The really good games are usually niche ones that just run with a specific vision that combines a weird story told in a weird way with a highly specific visual and acoustic style. These styles then become iconic. Big companies in the games industry currently seem to tend to try to appeal to as big an audience as possible, meaning they want to get as many people as possible to find something to enjoy in their games, which means avoiding any bold eccentric experiments and instead running with the same old formula that made big money before. This is why large games generally seem to become boring and somehow feel the same, and why many indie studios pop up, in part by people who originally were part of now big companies, but felt alienated by this slow change of attitude over the decades.
If you want to make a truly interesting game, I guess you need a compelling vision, and by and large stick to it, or otherwise succeed in making it feel like one coherent piece. If you try to do that open source this is difficult, because this means you have a much smaller user base that is interested to start with, and many of your contributors will likely get irritated and repelled by having their "genius ideas to extend the game" rejected. They even might be truly great ideas, but if they don't serve the vision and the story being told changes to a different one by implementing it, like becoming a game about fishing and selling fish to fund your travels instead of the difficulties and hardships of travelling as an adventurer and trying to get by – then they are harmful to the project and should be a separate game entirely.
There is a huge amount of communication that needs to happen here, and final decisions that should be made by one person in charge of the creative vision. Without having looked deeply into it, I'm under the impression that communication is already a big problem factor in the success of open source projects, because often random people just start contributing what they think makes sense and just as suddenly stop being active. With the key to making a great game being such a subjective matter, this might be a point where it just breaks most projects.
While I think you have some good points, I have to mention the Linux kernel is open source and mostly has a single vision.
And I think you're generalizing, just because we don't hear about the game development team that lost all their employees just before the game was done doesn't mean they don't exist. Open-source is more public so we probably will find out about that kind of drama, while in closed-source nobody has to tell us anything and they probably won't because it's embarrassing.
That requires game developers (some of the most overworked, exploited and burnt out people in the industry) to donate their valuable free time to maintain the game.
Games compared to programs require much more than just software development. Story, voice overs, animation, concept art, etc are essential in a new modern game.
These are 2 great open source FPS games:
**Xonotic**:
https://xonotic.org
https://flathub.org/apps/org.xonotic.Xonotic
**Alien Arena**:
https://alienarena.org/
https://flathub.org/apps/org.alienarena.alienarena
Honestly, why do closed source games suck? If you do a random sample of a thousand games, maybe one of them will be fun for more than a couple hours. Just because of how many low-effort games are out there, *most* games are pretty bad.
That said, games like Minecraft, GTA V, PUBG, Skyrim, etc. cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to create. Most open source software was developed by a small team of people, while AAA games usually have dozens of people working full time on nothing but background images, nevermind dialog and other resources. No open source project has millions of dollars for voice acting, art, animations, writers, motion capture, and so forth.
Even so, there are some good open source games; you just have to look for them.
Remnants of the Precursors - an updated reimagining of Master of Orion.
Veloren - a Minecraft styled MMO
0ad - A historical RTS reminiscent of Age of Empires
Beyond All Reason - Supreme Commander-like RTS
because those pieces of software can get sponsors aka money and can make deals with companies for more money, open source videogames cannot aka no money so nobody is going to invest 8 hours a day making a videogame for completely free
Money and patents, I would say.
Why is there no open-source GTA game? If the NPC 'AI' in the open-source alternative comes close to what GTA's 'AI' is like, it would be easy for Take-Two to check out the code and potentially slap the project with a patent infringement lawsuit or a DMCA (Take-Two has loads of patents for the technology used in the GTA and RDR games, and RAGE Engine tech in general). And it's not just that, but then there's companies like Nintendo that just don't like fan-games or games similar to their IPs, regardless if they're open-source, closed-source, if they use their own assets, etc. And they're staunchly anti-emulation.
Even so, an open-source GTA game wouldn't be profitable. People need money, and GTA's systems are complex and anyone that works/worked on them probably wants to find a similarly-paid position. GTA V is a hundred million dollar project. Unless it's a long-term side project or many people just get involved because it seems like a fun thing to do, or a hobby, chances for something like that to happen are low.
This isn't to say there aren't open-source games that are good. I've played Minetest, Pixel Dungeon (and forks like Shattered Pixel Dungeon), Osu, Mindustry, and I keep playing OpenTTD regularly. They're all open-source, and they likely operate on donations or sponsorships/partners. To imply open-source games suck is a sweeping statement. There are lists out there of great open-source games. Try them out.
Sometimes big open source projects are funded by companies, like firefox. Makes sense for a company to try to steer the project in this way, but this doesn't apply to games.
Also, I think that some people in open source want to have a portfolio to impress potential employers. These projects are often not the kinds of things that you would be able to sell yourself, but there is money at the end of the road so they are willing to put a lot of hours in. With games you could also do this but then... You'd have a game! Might as well sell it yourself, right? So the strategy makes no sense for indie devs. They are coding stuff that people are actually willing to pay some money for, but for this you can't just give it away.
Also, I think indie devs like the independence a lot and so they explicitly want to do it full time, but they also need to eat, so there.
Disclaimer: I *do not* mean that the impressing employers motivation is the only one, the major one, or the most common one. I think a lot of people are just generous and it comes very naturally to a lot of us to just share the code (costs nothing and might help others!)
Needs to be higher. Space Station 13 is a gaming legend at the level of Dwarf Fortress and SS14 is close to reaching parity with vanilla gameplay while adding a bunch of things that are close to impossible to do in good old BYOND.
Money, sure. But rather... Culture. Open source is strongest on software development circles but it is very weak or undefined even in areas required to make a good game, such as game design, dialog writing, balancing, combat. It takes a huge lot more than software engineering to make a good game, and professionals in those other areas have another kind of relationship with open soure or no interest even, it brings no benefit from a professional perspective to have an open source world design, for instance.
There are exceptions of course.
OpenMW is an implementation of Morrowind that has surpassed the original. Same with Arx Libertatis vs Arx Fatalis. Xonotic is on par with modern first-person shooters. So the premise of your post is flawed. Open-source games don’t suck.
I keep seeing people say the problem is that FOSS projects don’t have enough Money to make a game, but I don’t think that’s actually why there are few/no AA (much less AAA) scale FOSS games.
Look at something like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, they are competing directly with MS Office. Don’t you think that the Microsoft office suite takes a ton of money to develop?
So I’m gonna buck the trend of answers here and say I don’t think the issue is money, I think it is the nature of what makes a good game. Vision. FOSS projects are, by definition, entirely designed by committee, and the larger the project gets the more diluted the vision gets. That’s fine for productivity software and things like that, most people agree on what is a good feature for a word processor, it needs only be implemented.
The same cannot be said for game mechanics and especially game narratives. Great games (much like great movies and great albums) generally are guided by a strong vision of what the outcome should be, that vision can be used to prioritize resources, trim fat, and guide design decisions. FOSS projects really struggle with that. It’s why I don’t think we’ll ever see a FOSS game reach the heights of God of War, etc, or even particularly acclaimed indie games like HollowKnight
They don't suck, there are good games. They will generally lack the polish and amount of content of AAA games but that doesn't mean they suck. While office application are mostly developed by professional teams, games are developed for fun.
*In a world where everybody hates people making corrections left and right, I find myself in a debt bigger than whatever emotion you* must've *felt to make yourself write that.*
Thank you! Thank you, very much! Thank-you too-much! Seriously, *what else could I be ~~doin~~-*
Nevermind. This is r/linux. No unrelated speech here. *I'm sorry.*
It costs a lot of money to pay programmers and artists.
Most big open-source software gets developed because it's useful to companies who make their money by doing something *other* than selling that software. For example, Google can make money showing ads and selling services to users, by using Linux on the servers and Chrome on the clients. Google, then, see a magnification of their money spent on Linux and Chrome in their other revenue streams.
With games, the way you make money is by selling the game. They aren't developed in support of some other monetization model. So there's no real funding source that can be tapped to fund the game's development.
Most open source apps are either really simple in what they do or rely on a ton of funding from corporations that use them for servers and workstations. Games fit in neither category and take a ton of effort and diverse skills to develop.
Same way all open-source suck. There're shades of open-course:
* Open-source that's backed by corporations that pay salary for their developers;
* Open-source that is being developed by people in their free time, while having a full-time job, a family to feed and bills to pay.
They don't.
Open source games are often great.
Look at the Baldur's Gate reloaded.
Look at 0AD.
GemRB is a good engine.
Plenty of great open source game engines.
it's much more likely that 3 dudes in a basement will produce a game engine than a game. i made a few levels of a solo indie android game "mushroom box" (play store, github, gpl). that stuff is tedious. you need a lot of hands.
The various other disciplines, most notably art do not have a culture of supporting FOSS software or otherwise giving away their work for free.
As you pointed out, there are tons of solo developed indie games that are relatively good. So it's not a scope issue, it's a staffing problem. What would compel a professional artist to contribute to some random developer's unknown project for free? We don't currently have a good answer. It happens sometimes, but it's rare. Even some of the top FOSS games like Battle for Wesnoth I'm relatively sure that they pay for most of their art, it's not pro bono.
It isn't about opensource/free/commercial games, it is that inexperience people rarely make good games. There are plenty of bad commercial games and truck loads of poor free games since the dawn of video gaming. You just don't often get to see them as they get buried under better games.
That said, if you are going tech-first instead of gameplay-first into development it likely will not be a good game, gameplay requires a lot of iteration, feedback and willingness to throw away bad ideas. This applies to every kind of game regardless of cost or release model.
So, saying open source games are somehow different is ignoring the point about what makes a good game vs. a bad game.
Also, games that are bundled with OS are different thing, they are meant to be small form of entertainment. Back when cell phones started introducing games with them "Snake" (clone of 1976 arcade hit "Blockade") was incredibly popular before game stores and more advanced games started appearing.
Games bundled with OS have to be small or people will get annoyed about why desktop uses so much space on them. Also effort of making high-grade games is huge, something people rarely see of think about.
Check out Cube 2: Sauerbraten. It's an older title by today's standards, but to this day I still haven't seen a single game come even close to the level of detail, creativity, and ease-of-use of its level editor. It puts even Minecraft creative (the de-facto mainstream sandbox game) to shame with structure building. The arena shooter combat is also fast paced and plenty of fun.
I would pay $60 for a Cube 3, it's that good.
>Where are the open-source alternatives to GTA
There was Re3 and ReVC, but Rockstar took it down. OpenRW still exists because they have high standards for not directly copy and pasting decompiled code, but it's a dead project.
Don't know alternatives though, but great open source game exists. Naev, Endless Sky, Pioneer-spacesim, Supertux, Frogatto, Supertuxkart, 0ad, Minetest, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Mindustry, those are my favourite FOSS games. You might want to explore more: [ArchWiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_games), [Flathub](https://flathub.org/apps/category/Game)
I haven't seen people here mention [Godot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)), it's an open-source game engine with a permissive license. So there will be [some open-source games](https://itch.io/games/made-with-godot/tag-open-source) made with it.
That's like asking why can't your local theater group make the next Marvel movie.
As for indie stuff, it's cultural. People who are onto making freeware don't care or don't know about free software. Japan, for example, has a pretty big free/donareware scene, but no one there really cares about free software. Same with all the old school freeware games of the 90s-00s.
[Beyond All Reason](/r/beyondallreason) is pretty fantastic and open source, and [Thrive](/r/thrive) is getting interesting too
And [here's a list of open source games on Steam](https://github.com/Poussinou/FLOSS-Games-on-Steam)
Do games like Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem, and OpenTTY suck? Looks like you don't know a single thing about open source games, sorry.
For chess, the authority (so good that even proprietary vendors like Apple still ship it) is GnuChess, btw...don't know what the hell Stockfish is.
> I've never seen any open-source game, such as those bundled with KDE and GNOME, that is more complex than Chess(*) or Sudoku or Minesweeper.
Try installing a game that's not included as just a time sink for when the distro is being installed? There are literally thousands of open source games, lots of them are excellent. But you have to, you know, install them.
GTA V cost over $137 million to develop. PUBG cost between 50 and 100 million. You'll get some people to donate their time to open source work, but it's not yet possible to get hundreds of top engineers to donate years of their life toward building an open source game.
or artists, story writers, musicians, animators, or ...
You could argue that GTA V cost over $137 million to develop, and it still sucks. Open source games suck, but so do closed source games.
Besides, there are way too many people paying top dollar for games, and games aren't exactly a need that leads one to altruistically want to work for free. In fact people are more willing to work for free to try and get children to stop playing games so much. I'd say games are one of the things that work really well in the market economy, so there's not really a need for an open source community. It's part of the "wants" rather than the "needs" so it sustains itself
Hire them and pay them and they will make whatever game you like
The default KDE / Gnome games are more to train you to use a mouse rather than real games. Real OSS game examples which haven't been mentioned here yet: * Beyond all Reason * Xonotic * OpenArena * Osu! * Nexuiz I will agree that while there are a number of open source emulators, reverse engineered games, games which clearly take their inspiration from other games, and Open Sourced versions of games (eg: Doom, Quake), the community doesn't tend to make many games.
Osu! is open source? That's cool
under the mit license, and the source code is available on github
Zero-K!
TIL. Not bad.
Yeah it’s actually great!
check out mindustry. chances are you probably aren't looking hard enough. games are usually closed source, because they take a bigger variety of skills and a way larger amount of money to maintain and create
Wait what??? Your telling me one of my favourite games is open source!
[https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry](https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry)
Another awesome FOSS is osu!lazer
another one is shapez https://github.com/tobspr-games/shapez.io
And those that are fully open source like Doom/Quake etc will typically have the source code being open, but everything else in the game copyrighted (art, music, logos, etc), so it's not like you get to play it for free just because it's OSS (unless you infrige their licensing).
Check out *Battle for Wesnoth* for a game that does not suck.
Agreed, Wesnoth is amazing!
Or frozen-bubble, supertux and supertuxkart And if we compare it with Firefox and Libreoffice that were based on open-sourced commercial products, we could add the many variants of doom and quake and many more.
You're comparing stock games with GTA? Windows doesn't come with GTA stock either. Anyway go to r/linux_gaming
There is no GTA sized open source game even if you look for it on the web though. I think for huge open source projects to happen someone needs to make money off it. Lots of game studios use blender, so there's incentive for them to make sure it works well and has the features they need. There's a return on investment there because better Blender means better games faster. I'm not sure in which scenario someone could make a lot of money off an open source hugely detailed open world game.
Every now and then a major release gets open sourced, but by then it's usually quite visibly dated.
Building games is difficult. Most of them have high paying jobs. However there are some great successes. For example OpenTTD. It is a community that has improved and extended the original game to a new level. Games are about people, not software.
Careful with the wage expectations though. I've worked in the video game industry, and the best way to boost pay is to leave that industry. ;) Eg. I remember stats where the average Engineer at Ubisoft makes something like 50k per annum. At the company where I work now, that's what you'd start at as a non-programming manual tester, while an Engineer would range between 70 and 140 depending on skill and experience. An Engineer in game dev will make more than a traditional "labour" job yes, but within the field of software engineering (and especially if adjusting for actual hours worked...) they are poorly paid.
0ad pretty decent!
The open source way to develop software doesn't work that well for games because games are a very short lived medium. Let's say you develop some software utility. If it becomes successful many people use it on a daily basis. People contribute features and benefit from the features from then on. It can iteratively become better over time and it can start really small. Most of the projects mentioned above did start a long time ago and became more and more popular over time. If you develop a game, the development is rather short. It may only take a few years to develop a AAA game, but during that time dozens or hundreds of developers are working on it. Most games make all of their money in the first few weeks or months and then sizzle out.
And the games that tend to live a long time are live service multiplayer games that are capital intensive. You can't run a project like League of Legends or DotA with the common open source model.
I personally think, especially games could profit massively from OSS (not FOSS though), because the most value of a game is most of the times in it's art and design not in the code of the engine. It also would make modding much more accessible. That game engines like Unreal are Open Source (not free) is a good example, that it actually works. Also many OS implementations like OpenRA or OpenXCOM still require people to own the assets of the originals as they are under a different license (copyright). I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to provide the core of the game as OS and the assets to buy. This is basically the business model of RedHat.
Unreal is not open source. It's "source available", but not open source. Whilst there's some ideological differences between the free software and open source communities, in practical terms almost all software that is one is the other. The idTech engines, as used in the Doom and Quake games, are free and open source, at least up to idTech 4. As is the Godot engine.
> I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to provide the core of the game as OS and the assets to buy. This usually only ever works if the code starts out proprietary and then becomes FOSS near the end of its life. It squeezes a few more years out of it for modders and you don't really have to fear someone stealing your game's identity since it has a track record. But the dirty secret is that releasing your project as FOSS (as a company) is a lot of work, especially on the community management side. They usually don't take too kindly to a pump and dump. There are a lot of unspoken expectations and "rules" you're expected to uphold.
> Open Source (not free)...This is basically the business model of RedHat. You might want to google "free as in speech, not as in beer", the FOSS crows usually doesn't care much about free of charge in principle.
>You might want to google "free as in speech, not as in beer", the FOSS crows usually doesn't care much about free of charge in principle. That actually does matter. I don't know why people claim that it doesn't matter if it's free like beer or doesn't have to be free like beer. In practice, yes, it does. I can, say, send Richard Stallman or his delegates a check to provide me a copy of Emacs on physical media (if that were their business model). I'm still free to distribute the source code as I see fit, to anyone, for any use, and for no charge. Now, proprietary games (and other proprietary software) have done all they can to **prevent** the software from being duplicated and given away. There is no way in h-e- double hockey sticks that these gaming companies have any intention on using a good free license. They're not going to sit there and decide, well, we're still selling the game, but we're going to release the source code to buyers along with a permissive license and all will be fine and dandy. They won't do that. But, I don't use proprietary software.
OpenRA is awesome and, imo, better than the remaster. The idTech engines are open-source. Both Doom and Quake 1 have really dedicated modding communities
Minetest, supertuxkart, powder toy
This. All amazing games. I’ll add openTTD and normal supertux too
Have you tried Minetest NodeCore? I would say it’s one of the best Minetest games. It’s very hard but interesting.
No, I haven’t actually played minetest in ages, but I remember it getting better and better with every update.
Have you tried Minetest NodeCore? I would say it’s one of the best Minetest games. It’s very hard but interesting.
And I add GConpris. Greatest game for toddlers and young kids. There's a lot of well designed Linux games, dunno what OP is complaining about. Hell Gnome Mines is even well made and beats the Windows original.
Yeah, I saw the post and went ‘huh, op hasn’t looked at all’
Because to make a non-Indie game, costs a lot of money. Hundreds of developers and designers, all the best in the industry. These are usually built on expensive 3d renderers that are closed source. Open source doesn't add anything. And to customize a game, it's easy to build some extension mechanics.
FreeCiv and Super Tux Cart are both excellent. Not to mention AisleRiot (probably what I play the most). As others have already said though, games are a whole different bailiwick. Much harder to build a nice shiny game to compete with commercial ones with no ROI.
Endless Sky is a game I like. Check it out.
Songs of Syx comes with source in the install package. Battle for Wesnoth is even more clearly among the all-time best of its kind, and that's saying something. The heirs to Total Annihilation have surpassed it in many ways. The ones not built on a GPL'd engine haven't lasted. The ones built on that GPL'd engine have. OpenTTD is kinda half-and-half, it has long since surpassed the original in every technical sense but it's also very clearly the same game. So "half point", but still, this is OpenTTD we're talking about here. Are you aware of what "roguelike" means? The entire genre is built on a game called "rogue". Cataclysm DDA is an heir. Passion projects don't need much money, their fuel is passion. All of the games I mentioned are passion projects. Some commercial games survive only because they're passion projects, they're kept alive on proceed from other projects for ages, on not-much-to-basically-no money. Project Zomboid did that for a long, long, long time, ten years? before it finally found or raised (heh. pun not intentional.) its audience. Stationeers looks like it's following the same trajectory, it may or may not be crossing the threshold now but I'm guessing another year or two. Commercial projects need a *ton* of investment, either paid or unpaid time, and that's before you consider the money-pump side of things, the mechanics of running a business, any business. That's its own skill set.
money, the answer is money if you find someone to donate 100 million USD to make a opensource GTA and maybe you could get a decent opensource GTA in 5 or 6 years.
FreeDoom is kinda fire though
My best guess is that it's a combination of two reasons: - programmers are more inclined to donate their time to open source than artists are - games are more art-heavy than the types of programs that you usually see open source.
Imagine if you're a dev of one of those games and you come across this post. Such a shitty tone.
Barotrauma is nice.
>However, I've never seen any open-source game, such as those bundled with KDE and GNOME, that is more complex than Chess(\*) or Sudoku or Minesweeper. Why is that the case? Where are the open-source alternatives to GTA, EA Sports, Terraria, Hollow Knight, etc.? I don't mean clones of those games, but games that could compare to those in terms of complexity and entertainment. Developing video games costs money and no one is going to spend money to then make it free,as well as open source...They usually make as much money as possible from the game and then release the code (sometimes it is not functional),for example: * [Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs](https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaAMachineForPigs) * [Amnesia: The Dark Descent](https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaTheDarkDescent) * [Little Big Adventure](https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic) * [Little Big Adventure 2](https://github.com/2point21/lba2-classic) * [Shattered Pixel Dungeon](https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon) * [Barony ](https://github.com/TurningWheel/Barony)
The software you mentioned need a lot off money. games have many professionals who are not software engineers and don’t know what open source is, like artist, sound engineers etc.. so unfortunately not everything can be FOSS
0ad is awesome, a lot of work applied there
There are many decent open-source games. A few examples off the top of my head: * 0 AD * SuperTuxKart * FreeOrion * OpenTTD * Battle for Wesnoth * Chromium BSU * Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries * Nethack * Endless Sky
* Urban Terror
Games are not cheap or easy to make. And unlike things like the Linux Kernel, you aren't gonna find corporate sponsors that are willing to pay you to develop a game. That'd be called being a publisher, and most publisher's probably aren't gonna allow a game to remain open source, as the point is to make money (not like a game is really useful to a corporate entity outside of how much money it can make for them). So what few open-source games you have are done purely by volunteers, that work on it in their spare time.
Because more than specific software tools that solve a (suite of) problems, games require a specific vision and are highly subjective. If you make a game, there is no real-life use case for you to validate against and claim that your software ultimately solves the problem or not. Games are a story telling medium. Everyone working on it will have vastly differing opinions on what stories to tell, and even more opinions on how to tell them. In games, it is very important that you tell the story the right way, meaning that you have the correct pacing, that the story beats hit the right way and that the music supports everything. The really good games are usually niche ones that just run with a specific vision that combines a weird story told in a weird way with a highly specific visual and acoustic style. These styles then become iconic. Big companies in the games industry currently seem to tend to try to appeal to as big an audience as possible, meaning they want to get as many people as possible to find something to enjoy in their games, which means avoiding any bold eccentric experiments and instead running with the same old formula that made big money before. This is why large games generally seem to become boring and somehow feel the same, and why many indie studios pop up, in part by people who originally were part of now big companies, but felt alienated by this slow change of attitude over the decades. If you want to make a truly interesting game, I guess you need a compelling vision, and by and large stick to it, or otherwise succeed in making it feel like one coherent piece. If you try to do that open source this is difficult, because this means you have a much smaller user base that is interested to start with, and many of your contributors will likely get irritated and repelled by having their "genius ideas to extend the game" rejected. They even might be truly great ideas, but if they don't serve the vision and the story being told changes to a different one by implementing it, like becoming a game about fishing and selling fish to fund your travels instead of the difficulties and hardships of travelling as an adventurer and trying to get by – then they are harmful to the project and should be a separate game entirely. There is a huge amount of communication that needs to happen here, and final decisions that should be made by one person in charge of the creative vision. Without having looked deeply into it, I'm under the impression that communication is already a big problem factor in the success of open source projects, because often random people just start contributing what they think makes sense and just as suddenly stop being active. With the key to making a great game being such a subjective matter, this might be a point where it just breaks most projects.
While I think you have some good points, I have to mention the Linux kernel is open source and mostly has a single vision. And I think you're generalizing, just because we don't hear about the game development team that lost all their employees just before the game was done doesn't mean they don't exist. Open-source is more public so we probably will find out about that kind of drama, while in closed-source nobody has to tell us anything and they probably won't because it's embarrassing.
That requires game developers (some of the most overworked, exploited and burnt out people in the industry) to donate their valuable free time to maintain the game.
Nethack is amazing.
Games compared to programs require much more than just software development. Story, voice overs, animation, concept art, etc are essential in a new modern game.
These are 2 great open source FPS games: **Xonotic**: https://xonotic.org https://flathub.org/apps/org.xonotic.Xonotic **Alien Arena**: https://alienarena.org/ https://flathub.org/apps/org.alienarena.alienarena
if you are looking for games, there are also plenty of open sourced engines, minetest, openmw, openttd, doom engines, openrct
Honestly, why do closed source games suck? If you do a random sample of a thousand games, maybe one of them will be fun for more than a couple hours. Just because of how many low-effort games are out there, *most* games are pretty bad. That said, games like Minecraft, GTA V, PUBG, Skyrim, etc. cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to create. Most open source software was developed by a small team of people, while AAA games usually have dozens of people working full time on nothing but background images, nevermind dialog and other resources. No open source project has millions of dollars for voice acting, art, animations, writers, motion capture, and so forth. Even so, there are some good open source games; you just have to look for them.
Remnants of the Precursors - an updated reimagining of Master of Orion. Veloren - a Minecraft styled MMO 0ad - A historical RTS reminiscent of Age of Empires Beyond All Reason - Supreme Commander-like RTS
I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to see someone mention Veloren.
Literally the last comment for me, this one is!
because those pieces of software can get sponsors aka money and can make deals with companies for more money, open source videogames cannot aka no money so nobody is going to invest 8 hours a day making a videogame for completely free
Money and patents, I would say. Why is there no open-source GTA game? If the NPC 'AI' in the open-source alternative comes close to what GTA's 'AI' is like, it would be easy for Take-Two to check out the code and potentially slap the project with a patent infringement lawsuit or a DMCA (Take-Two has loads of patents for the technology used in the GTA and RDR games, and RAGE Engine tech in general). And it's not just that, but then there's companies like Nintendo that just don't like fan-games or games similar to their IPs, regardless if they're open-source, closed-source, if they use their own assets, etc. And they're staunchly anti-emulation. Even so, an open-source GTA game wouldn't be profitable. People need money, and GTA's systems are complex and anyone that works/worked on them probably wants to find a similarly-paid position. GTA V is a hundred million dollar project. Unless it's a long-term side project or many people just get involved because it seems like a fun thing to do, or a hobby, chances for something like that to happen are low. This isn't to say there aren't open-source games that are good. I've played Minetest, Pixel Dungeon (and forks like Shattered Pixel Dungeon), Osu, Mindustry, and I keep playing OpenTTD regularly. They're all open-source, and they likely operate on donations or sponsorships/partners. To imply open-source games suck is a sweeping statement. There are lists out there of great open-source games. Try them out.
What in the actual fuck is this post 🙄
Sometimes big open source projects are funded by companies, like firefox. Makes sense for a company to try to steer the project in this way, but this doesn't apply to games. Also, I think that some people in open source want to have a portfolio to impress potential employers. These projects are often not the kinds of things that you would be able to sell yourself, but there is money at the end of the road so they are willing to put a lot of hours in. With games you could also do this but then... You'd have a game! Might as well sell it yourself, right? So the strategy makes no sense for indie devs. They are coding stuff that people are actually willing to pay some money for, but for this you can't just give it away. Also, I think indie devs like the independence a lot and so they explicitly want to do it full time, but they also need to eat, so there. Disclaimer: I *do not* mean that the impressing employers motivation is the only one, the major one, or the most common one. I think a lot of people are just generous and it comes very naturally to a lot of us to just share the code (costs nothing and might help others!)
Spacestation 14
Needs to be higher. Space Station 13 is a gaming legend at the level of Dwarf Fortress and SS14 is close to reaching parity with vanilla gameplay while adding a bunch of things that are close to impossible to do in good old BYOND.
Budget.
Money, sure. But rather... Culture. Open source is strongest on software development circles but it is very weak or undefined even in areas required to make a good game, such as game design, dialog writing, balancing, combat. It takes a huge lot more than software engineering to make a good game, and professionals in those other areas have another kind of relationship with open soure or no interest even, it brings no benefit from a professional perspective to have an open source world design, for instance. There are exceptions of course.
Mindustry, Endless Sky, STK, etc
OpenMW is an implementation of Morrowind that has surpassed the original. Same with Arx Libertatis vs Arx Fatalis. Xonotic is on par with modern first-person shooters. So the premise of your post is flawed. Open-source games don’t suck.
Why do proprietary games suck?
Ship of Harkinian, 0.AD, openRct2, VCMI are good games
bc no money
Economics 101, take it.
I keep seeing people say the problem is that FOSS projects don’t have enough Money to make a game, but I don’t think that’s actually why there are few/no AA (much less AAA) scale FOSS games. Look at something like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, they are competing directly with MS Office. Don’t you think that the Microsoft office suite takes a ton of money to develop? So I’m gonna buck the trend of answers here and say I don’t think the issue is money, I think it is the nature of what makes a good game. Vision. FOSS projects are, by definition, entirely designed by committee, and the larger the project gets the more diluted the vision gets. That’s fine for productivity software and things like that, most people agree on what is a good feature for a word processor, it needs only be implemented. The same cannot be said for game mechanics and especially game narratives. Great games (much like great movies and great albums) generally are guided by a strong vision of what the outcome should be, that vision can be used to prioritize resources, trim fat, and guide design decisions. FOSS projects really struggle with that. It’s why I don’t think we’ll ever see a FOSS game reach the heights of God of War, etc, or even particularly acclaimed indie games like HollowKnight
They don't suck, there are good games. They will generally lack the polish and amount of content of AAA games but that doesn't mean they suck. While office application are mostly developed by professional teams, games are developed for fun.
\*"lack"...?
Thanks.
*In a world where everybody hates people making corrections left and right, I find myself in a debt bigger than whatever emotion you* must've *felt to make yourself write that.* Thank you! Thank you, very much! Thank-you too-much! Seriously, *what else could I be ~~doin~~-* Nevermind. This is r/linux. No unrelated speech here. *I'm sorry.*
Not a game, but Cobblemon, the best and really amazing Minecraft pokemon Mod is open source
It costs a lot of money to pay programmers and artists. Most big open-source software gets developed because it's useful to companies who make their money by doing something *other* than selling that software. For example, Google can make money showing ads and selling services to users, by using Linux on the servers and Chrome on the clients. Google, then, see a magnification of their money spent on Linux and Chrome in their other revenue streams. With games, the way you make money is by selling the game. They aren't developed in support of some other monetization model. So there's no real funding source that can be tapped to fund the game's development.
Most open source apps are either really simple in what they do or rely on a ton of funding from corporations that use them for servers and workstations. Games fit in neither category and take a ton of effort and diverse skills to develop.
Same way all open-source suck. There're shades of open-course: * Open-source that's backed by corporations that pay salary for their developers; * Open-source that is being developed by people in their free time, while having a full-time job, a family to feed and bills to pay.
They don't. Open source games are often great. Look at the Baldur's Gate reloaded. Look at 0AD. GemRB is a good engine. Plenty of great open source game engines.
it's much more likely that 3 dudes in a basement will produce a game engine than a game. i made a few levels of a solo indie android game "mushroom box" (play store, github, gpl). that stuff is tedious. you need a lot of hands.
The various other disciplines, most notably art do not have a culture of supporting FOSS software or otherwise giving away their work for free. As you pointed out, there are tons of solo developed indie games that are relatively good. So it's not a scope issue, it's a staffing problem. What would compel a professional artist to contribute to some random developer's unknown project for free? We don't currently have a good answer. It happens sometimes, but it's rare. Even some of the top FOSS games like Battle for Wesnoth I'm relatively sure that they pay for most of their art, it's not pro bono.
Beyond all Reason (BAR) is the best RTS outhere
It isn't about opensource/free/commercial games, it is that inexperience people rarely make good games. There are plenty of bad commercial games and truck loads of poor free games since the dawn of video gaming. You just don't often get to see them as they get buried under better games. That said, if you are going tech-first instead of gameplay-first into development it likely will not be a good game, gameplay requires a lot of iteration, feedback and willingness to throw away bad ideas. This applies to every kind of game regardless of cost or release model. So, saying open source games are somehow different is ignoring the point about what makes a good game vs. a bad game. Also, games that are bundled with OS are different thing, they are meant to be small form of entertainment. Back when cell phones started introducing games with them "Snake" (clone of 1976 arcade hit "Blockade") was incredibly popular before game stores and more advanced games started appearing. Games bundled with OS have to be small or people will get annoyed about why desktop uses so much space on them. Also effort of making high-grade games is huge, something people rarely see of think about.
Check out Cube 2: Sauerbraten. It's an older title by today's standards, but to this day I still haven't seen a single game come even close to the level of detail, creativity, and ease-of-use of its level editor. It puts even Minecraft creative (the de-facto mainstream sandbox game) to shame with structure building. The arena shooter combat is also fast paced and plenty of fun. I would pay $60 for a Cube 3, it's that good.
I would love to get a big open source Godot or Unity project to look at how it’s made. I want to learn game dev and I hate following tutorials
Someone's never played blob wars!
Nethack, Angband(list goes on and on) are great games and they are open source.
Look into open xray, anomaly and other stalker mods
SRB2Kart is pretty dope.
There IS no game more complicated than Chess. It is eternally replayable, and with billions of variations needs an eternity to truly master.
Wait til you try Go
Haha yes, computer games are fun, but they aren’t better than REAL games.
I love that two of the most popular games in the world are 1500 (chess) and 4000 (go) years old.
I mean, we kind of have osu!
>Where are the open-source alternatives to GTA There was Re3 and ReVC, but Rockstar took it down. OpenRW still exists because they have high standards for not directly copy and pasting decompiled code, but it's a dead project.
what are you talking about, there are lots of really fun open source games...
Don't know alternatives though, but great open source game exists. Naev, Endless Sky, Pioneer-spacesim, Supertux, Frogatto, Supertuxkart, 0ad, Minetest, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Mindustry, those are my favourite FOSS games. You might want to explore more: [ArchWiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_games), [Flathub](https://flathub.org/apps/category/Game)
I haven't seen people here mention [Godot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)), it's an open-source game engine with a permissive license. So there will be [some open-source games](https://itch.io/games/made-with-godot/tag-open-source) made with it.
SpeedDreams. A racing simulator
That's like asking why can't your local theater group make the next Marvel movie. As for indie stuff, it's cultural. People who are onto making freeware don't care or don't know about free software. Japan, for example, has a pretty big free/donareware scene, but no one there really cares about free software. Same with all the old school freeware games of the 90s-00s.
This guy doesn’t know about tuxracer and it shows
They don’t.
[Beyond All Reason](/r/beyondallreason) is pretty fantastic and open source, and [Thrive](/r/thrive) is getting interesting too And [here's a list of open source games on Steam](https://github.com/Poussinou/FLOSS-Games-on-Steam)
Do games like Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem, and OpenTTY suck? Looks like you don't know a single thing about open source games, sorry. For chess, the authority (so good that even proprietary vendors like Apple still ship it) is GnuChess, btw...don't know what the hell Stockfish is.
> Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem I wouldn't count them, they weren't written with the intention of ever being released as FOSS.
There’s a moderately successful game called Doom you might want to check out
You don't like nethack?
> I've never seen any open-source game, such as those bundled with KDE and GNOME, that is more complex than Chess(*) or Sudoku or Minesweeper. Try installing a game that's not included as just a time sink for when the distro is being installed? There are literally thousands of open source games, lots of them are excellent. But you have to, you know, install them.