I prefer the freedom to decide what’s good for me, and at least thus far have a better track record identifying what would benefit me than RMS has.
I don’t even care about video games, my go to is still winmine.exe but who is anyone to tell me I shouldn’t enjoy that?
I wish we would find a way to properly do this; I would insist on creating only Libre software, but for now, it is fairly random if it will make money while closed (saas) software is much more straight forward as in; if I have clients, I make money. With Libre software that I ask money for, I might have 100k stars and a lovely following while making no money at all.
> pattern emerge that are not Libre to pay back
I do not see this to be a pattern we will follow. We have a hosted offering which we earn revenue from.
The self-hosted offering always being free. All software is MIT, Apache2, or PostgreSQL licensed and we plan to keep it that way. We have the beneficial characteristic that we are a suite of tools, which limits the threat of competition from a cloud provider like AWS taking the software and offering it themselves. What would the offer from Supabase? Our Realtime server? PostgREST? The Dashboard? PostgreSQL? They already do. Our Postgres extensions? Hopefully they do, it will make it easier to run Supabase with RDS.
RMS should work backwards from that assumption and explain how to get such games into gamers hands while maintaining freedom. If he can’t then he should probably give up arguing that people should stop playing or switch to something completely different than what they consider a “game” is.
The main problem is that RMS lives in a world in which people care about freedom, when they only care about brand recognition - and that is in fact related to marketing and thus "millions of dollars".
There are other reasons than licensing and marketing that makes games cost hundreds of millions too. People expect games to be on the scale that they are, so the cost of developing these games will be astronomical.
It’s ok to care about freedoms of course but I don’t see how it’s a meaningful to argue that the most popular section of games should simply go extinct rather than work for making those more free or privacy conscious than they are.
> would AAA games be so popular without the millions spent on advertising?
Kind of a hypothetical, but I'm guessing yes. But to spend a billion on a game and then not tell anyone you did would be kind of silly. It's not like "advertising" or "marketing" is some kind of scam to get people to buy things they don't really like.