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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

A friend explained to me that the real benefit of foss is the community building huge things together, faster and better than any individual. So, you don’t make your game foss, but rather, you build a set of foss tools for everyone to benefit from, and the community eventually begins to contribute back, and you end up with a huge machine that does really cool things. Everybody then uses these tools to make amazing things, yourself included. It’s win win. He’s had some cool experience with this stuff, mostly outside of gaming.

But pure source code dumps, besides being valuable to students, usually isn’t that worthwhile. It’s a lot less win-win as well

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The tools thing seems to be the right approach.

A lot of huge gaming genres came to be from modding, level editors etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_derived_...

ARTS (Dota, LoL) to battle royale (PUBG, Fortnite, Apex), Tactical shooters (CS), team/hero shooters (TF, OW) and more…

All of these genres came from making modding accessible and are some of the most successful genres to date.

The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.)

Free software might be an appropriate answer to this.

> The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.)

I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and would have likely been blocked even if they tried.

It's true though that live service games are quite antithetical to modding because of their need to control player progression and sell it.

Still, I would say the divide between games which supported modding and games that didn't has always existed, with much fewer games in the first category, and there are still huge games coming out today that do. It's even become possible to create mods for console games, so it's not all doom and gloom.

Every single game that's available on GOG has no DRM. Including very popular ones like Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series.

Sure, but GoG is a relatively new player and an exception in the market. Not to mention the vast majority of those games have had DRM removed by GoG, they originally shipped with it - including Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher games where this was done to prevent pre-release leaks.

Games much, much older than GoG used to have various ways of doing DRM, though to be fair some were laughably easy to bypass (codes printed in the manual and such).

>I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and would have likely been blocked even if they tried.

Warcraft 3 (2002, 2003) was infamously lax on IP, leading to e.g. several big DotA clones that employed the modders (Dota2 for Icefrog, LoL for Guinsoo) and legal disputes on who owned which properties [1][2]. Blizzard revised their EULA in 2020 to prevent similar cases. [3]

[1] https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91202572&pty=OPP&eno...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/05/does-valve-really-own...

[3] https://dotesports.com/general/news/warcraft-iii-reforgeds-u...

League of Legends never stepped on Warcraft trademarks as far as I know, even though they were a clone of DOTA. Valve and others battled it out legally with Blizzard over the DOTA name and eventually won, but this was definitely not Blizzard's intention - and of course they didn't use any Blizzard-created art in the final game.

Note that I don't think anything in the W3: reforged terms of service would prevent a new game being created based on a W3 mod, it would just prevent it from using the same name and art as the mod. This is exactly what happened to all other successful mods, with Dota2 being pretty much the sole exception.

Also, Riot mostly proved that you don't actually need the artwork or names to be massively successful - you just need to recognize a good idea and be the first to market with a polished implementation of it.

> Valve and others battled it out legally with Blizzard over the DOTA name and eventually won, but this was definitely not Blizzard's intention - and of course they didn't use any Blizzard-created art in the final game.

Had Blizzard owned DotA IP, I believe Valve would've had to steer much further away from the map, character and item design. IP extends beyond just art and naming, see e.g. Tetris vs Mino [1]. The case wouldn't have been a guaranteed win for Blizzard, but the early releases of Dota 2 were really closely copied from late releases of DotA, so the argument is there.

> Note that I don't think anything in the W3: reforged terms of service would prevent a new game being created based on a W3 mod, it would just prevent it from using the same name and art as the mod. This is exactly what happened to all other successful mods, with Dota2 being pretty much the sole exception.

Keyword being successful. Many maps have standalone ports that kept their predecessor's name [2][3][4][5], but only Dota 2 is really successful. And again, I believe these wouldn't exist or would've made large changes if Blizzard owned the IP of Warcraft 3 mods.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/defining-tetris-how-c...

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/578350/Element_TD/

[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/537680/Sheep_Tag_2/

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/469600/Legion_TD_2__Multi...

[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/676580/NEO_Impossible_Bos...

Given that League of Legends, Dota 2, and Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm all share virtually the same map today, and are not engaged in any IP battles over it, I don't see any reason to believe Blizzard owning the original IP of the DOTA mod would have made any difference in terms of blocking the map design from being reused in other games. If anyone could have owned this map design, either Riot or Valve would have already sought to block the others from using it.

That's really stretching the meaning of "virtually the same map". LoL and Dota 2 maps look similar on the minimap (HotS not so much), but they're drastically different when you start looking at points of interest and juke paths. In contrast, Dota 2 used to have almost exactly the same map as DotA (differences being shops and hero selection, which were changed from ingame units to actual UI menus).

Not to mention that Dota 2 also copied the exact skillsets of heroes and items. Not just likeness, but even most silly bugs that were due to the Warcraft engine.

Edit: Anyways, this is getting sidetracked. My point is that Warcraft 3 was lax with intellectual property for the longest time, and mods like DotA most certainly leveraged that.

Sure, and I am contesting that point by showing that League of legends succeeded in creating a game based on DOTA that didn't need any of the DOTA-related IP. So, while it is true that the DOTA team / Valve from Blizzard's laxness at the time of W3, their succes didn't hinge on it, as Riot proved.

Note that they're all multiplayer competitive games. That's the easiest kind of game to make and where the creativity part matters least, with the exception of fine tuning the game mechanics.

I’d you think they’re easy to make, I invite you to make one. Multiplayer is hard, and you have to do a really good job in your execution to make any money

You're only thinking of the technical part.

The devil is in the details with these games. They need to balance a complex system of interactions, features, economies. They have to adhere to "easy to learn, hard to master", to remain accessible and reward active players at the same time. They are also genres with a ton of competition and only the most engaging and well designed come out on top.

I would say those things are all hard.

Rabbit hole warning!

The video "The History of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead" (35 minutes) desmonstrates how an open source community can make great games! In this case, a post-apocalyptic roguelike game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nHtcmnQQvU

For an, exoctic, 11 minute review of the game watch "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead Review | Don't Drink Toilet Water" by SsethTzeentach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyoj4-niEPc

Sseth turned me onto this game, as he has turned me onto many. His content isn't for everybody, but for it's target demographic, it is top of the line. I look forward to checking out the first video link.

I would describe his style as "4chan chique".

>A friend explained to me that the real benefit of foss is the community building huge things together, faster and better than any individual.

Any example of a highly successful video game developed from start as open source by the community as opposed to a company releasing their source code for free after launching a game?

The only ones I'm familiar with that people actually play for reasons other than the novelty/political statement of playing a FOSS game are ASCII roguelikes (most notably Nethack) and a menagerie of remakes of commercial games that have now surpassed the originals in features, graphics, and system compatibility (OpenTTD, OpenXCOM, etc.)

Not sure what qualifies as 'highly successful', 'from the start', etc. but Mindustry[0] is GPL, is actively updated, accepts and includes contributions from third parties and is available commercially.

[0] https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry

Also it's fun, addicting, and pretty polished.

Space station 13 is the best example.

It technically started closed source, but has been open source with countless forks existing in parallel for at least 90% of its lifetime.

AFAIK, SS13 had a number of source code leaks that resulted in popular forks as well. Not exactly the spirit of FOSS.

Not really. No servers based off of leaked source code have really lasted - they get nuked by the larger community.

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