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Comment by winReInstall | Hacker News Reader

These "open source games" are the most brutal attack ont the gaming industry imagineable, eating the most rare ressource ever. Playtime and players.

Minecraft already took a huge chunk out of the industry. Which they then tried to solve by encoperating this and selling additions.

Now another game appears, that offers endless replay ability with fascinating stuff. If the onslought would be kept up, all those monetization schemes could collapse over time, by virtue of simply being boring compared to what the "indy" dev scene has to offer.

One starts to wonder, what could happen if a concentrated efforst started churning out ever better world generators and "deep" games, allowing others non "deep" players to join the world just as "action" heroes or adventurers.

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DF source is only open in that museum where it’s on display. And it appeared a very long time ago. This comment is so almost wrong it seems like GPT

Please, there's been "deep" games with random world generation since the beginning of gaming... The whole roguelike genre is called that because of the original, Rogue. Civilization games also fit the bill. And while Minecraft and Roblox have been hits, other genres are still doing just fine.

Also I think you're confused as to what open-source means...

In what sense do you mean “open source”?

I'm baffled by this usage of "open source" ... neither Dwarf Fortress nor Minecraft are open source.

I think they just mean indie rather than open source.

Yeah, sorry, the border betweeen indy and open source comunities are very blurry. Often times games released on steams might be even available in less polished versions on github or just stolen gpl versions of them, that nobody persecutes.

Its really not that clear of a distinctions as it used to be.

I'm sorry, how is Indie and Open Source even a comparable trait? They're two different ways of defining something.

Do you have an example of this happening short of blatant asset flips?

What are you talking about? There are very few indie games that are open source, especially if you filter for those with any real popularity.

The biggest issue I have with the indie scene is that so many of them are solid base engines or aesthetics with a general confusion of what to do after that, and end up with something fairly mediocre — which could be fixed with fairly minor changes. But there’s a very limited appreciation for modding, and even less for open source, so they die in irrelevance.

Where are you finding all these open source games?

This is not a zero sum game. Minecraft has lots of merchandising (including other video games) and has launched many youtube careers. It has created a big marketing cohort and businesses loves those.

Now dwarf fortress is a more interesting beast to me. It belongs to a niche where the ratio of players to developers is very small. Those games are in perpetual betas. The biggest ones are financed by patreon and by side jobs. The meat of those games is found in the complex systems that the players can interact with. The graphics are often dry and unappealing to the mainstream audience.

I recommend the grid sage games blog as an example of the dedication that those people put in their craft: www.gridsagegames.com/blog/

I don't think the big publishers are interested in this niche. Mostly designers will look at those game to study their innovations and try to replicate that in more polished games.

I don't see DF overtaking any meaningful amount of the Minecraft player base. Children have grown up with Minecraft in ways that Dwarf Fortress will never reach due to the difficulty of the game.

The DF demographic doesn't have the reach that Minecraft did. That was a veritable phenomenon. Notwithstanding that DF isn't new in the least.

But DF has the same thing minecraft did. A story to tell.

I'm not sure that's true. My limited experience with Minecraft is that it's like "virtual legos".

Would be a great comment if it ended with '/s'

These are not open source games.

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