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Comment by vhgyu75e6u | Hacker News Reader

He seems so out of touch with reality, advocating for everything being free open source, specially games would have stopped many of the now cultural references that exists. Making games is hard, making good games is harder and needs a team both motivated and financially compensated.

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RMS does not mean free as in free bear but as in Libre.

He sure does but that still would form many issues with compensation as we have seen, many times, with open source companies. Everyone shouts red hat or something but that’s one exception; most other people who make Libre software, die of hunger under a bridge, or, more likely, have a day time job and simply will drop the Libre project when things get too busy. This is why companies now go from Libre to something quasi Libre to try to make money. There are some Libre (supabase for instance) projects now getting fairly large amounts of VC cash to get going, but once they have to ‘stand on their own legs’ usually pattern emerge that are not Libre to pay back (provide ROI to) the investors and then some.

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.

supabase ceo here

> 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.

That is fantastic to hear; you are doing very good work. But history tells a story for most companies. I hope you keep it going; I might apply for a job!

But a game costs hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Just royalties to sports leagues etc can be massive, for a sports game for example.

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.

No. A game does not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Some games choose to burn hundreds of millions of dollars, for very little return. Some of the best games were a lot cheaper to produce. License costs are elective: Noone forces you to plaster Football players names and team logos on your Football game (and some of the best (and creative) Football games choose not to)

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".

> 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.

Mobile games are more popular than AAA games, and would AAA games be so popular without the millions spent on advertising?

Mobile games are popular on mobile. The medium is somewhat limited, but there at least there is still a theoretical chance you can develop a blockbuster without a massive bugdet.

> 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.

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