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dijityesterday at 9:11 PM1 replyview on HN

> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe

Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.

According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]

Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...

FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!


Replies

abetuskyesterday at 11:08 PM

> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.

Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].

> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

This is a complete fabrication.

> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.

My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.

[0] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/commits/master/no_cop...