A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.
Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren’t going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.
Well, one of the alternatives is what ID Software used to do, where they would sell the game for a period of time and then open source the code Once sales dropped off.
I have mentioned examples of games that saw commercial success while being open source. And of course, delayed open source is also an option as some other users have said here.
The open sourcing of the quake engine is where a lot of modern engines got their roots.
Can you explain that? Are you saying there are modern engines using parts of quake 1 source code?
The engine Can of Duty uses is effectively a heavily modified quake 3 engine.
By this point it’s so modified it may as well be a different thing, but make no mistake it has evolved from the quake 3 engine.
The first 3 or 4 used quake 3 engine for sure, but didn’t they switch it at some point?
Edit: nm I found the wiki page on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
Tldr; it’s what you said
The only one I can think of is that Source might still have some id code in it from the goldsrc days, but that was before it was open sourced.
Why would we need open source instead of just removing drm?
Most people aren’t going to compile old games for new hardware. That’s not an easy task.
Abandonware is a thing, and there are some websites dedicated to it. GOG has done some great stuff releasing drm free games. So long as we have drm free, we can always build emulators to run what can’t natively run on modern systems.
I’m not against it, but it’s not a silver bullet for game preservation. All game engines are unique. Some are heavily optimized for their target hardware. Just because you have access to original source code doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy to preserve it for future hardware.
I mean, there are games that got terrible ports despite dedicated teams working on it full time with access to original source code. It won’t be much easier for the fans taking this on as a hobby project during their evenings.
Only the games with most dedicated fans will get preserved for future generations.
That was true when every studio had their inhouse engine, optimized for their game types.
Today we have 100.000 times more power and “everyone” goes with a prebuilt engine so I don’t think your point is valud, any more at least.
That’s true, but there are still many games using in-house game engines.
God of War, Spider-Man, Elden Ring, GTA, Tears of the Kingdom, Doom Eternal, Halo Infinite, Destiny, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, The Last of Us, Diablo 4, etc.
These are popular games that game into my mind. I don’t think game preservation should be limited to Unreal games.
And also, modern gaming platforms are all very similar. Since last gen XBOX and PlayStation have very similar hardware to both each other and to normal PCs and the Switch is very similar to many Android devices. The wild times where console manufacturers designed crazy custom chips that were hard to port to and from are over and thus the engineers tend to also be more agreeable with different platforms.
I really enjoyed “Veloren”
Descent, Freespace 2, these two games open sourced a long time ago. They’ve been updated by the community over the years, and ascended far beyond where they started.
I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a “5 year FOSS promise” or something similar, but you have to realize that the gaming community would never adequately financially support most development endeavors if the choice was as easy as downloading it from place A vs place B.
I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a “5 year FOSS promise” or something similar
Yes, that is one of the options I mention in the article. But there are games that are open source from day one, such as Mindustry, which have seen commercial success.
Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.
People still buy the games.
That’s not accurate. It’s far easier to purchase the game currently than it is to pirate it. You get things like automatic updates, server support, verified software, library management, etc with almost every single point of sale where as with piracy you get none of those and likely a little bit of malware as a treat. If you moved games to a completely open source model, you’d see this paradigm shift dramatically with gray markets spinning up seemingly overnight offering similar features.
Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.
Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.
You and I know very different gamers. I can’t even talk people into going pc instead of console/mobile phone. (Which is 90% of the gaming market).
I didn’t know about thrive. That game looks cool! Mindustry is a lot of fun! I am not a gamer but that game is really cool. And KGoldrunner is a classics
I agree
Not challenging, what good open source games do we have so far?
Super Tux Kart is actually great. Open Arena is just Quake 3 with original art. IMO Open Arena is criminally underrated
