I think the main issue may be how much up-front investment games need that would never be recouped with an open source license, but I'd love to be shown an example to the contrary.
Maybe you could license the data for a fee and have the code as open source?
Of course this is low effort and you know way better than me.
Re only code: Game engines often tie code and data together and the code without the data won't even compile in many cases, or you won't be able to produce a new dataset because documenting the required settings is a monumental task.
Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money. There is no complementary product or service you can sell with it. Reviewing and incorporating community fixes requires work and potentially legal review as not everyone in the modding community is also necessarily well versed in IP law. All these things need funding which is not a given if the game is open source in any meaningful way. If a game is truly open source, a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you, so there is an incentive to make creating an alternative build as hard as possible, defeating the entire idea of open source.
I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones, but F-Droid's policies (most known alternative) make that impossible. (To be clear, it's a perfectly legit choice, I just wish there was a meaningful alternative to Google.)
> Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money.
the same thing can be said for pretty much all software (although it's not always actually true, sometimes open source is a selling point and/or have specific strengths beyond ethics)
> a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you
Isn't the data which is the most costly part in developing a game? Of course I realize you stated that separating the data is not practical.
> I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones
Still 100% with you on this. Also degoogled with some proprietary software is still a step in the right direction
Regarding the development costs, I'm not exactly an expert and I have never worked in a game studio (apart from the company my wife and I are running), but let's take StarCraft 2 for example. If you were to have the engine, but not the art, you could likely easily develop a very capable multiplayer RTS game. Heroes of the Storm was developed out of a StarCraft 2 mod[1]. As another example, Stormgate[2], made by ex Blizzard devs, is getting a whole lot of press coverage for their netcode. It stands to reason that a good engine and netcode are very real competitive advantages in the RTS space. Other game types, such as a walking sim or an adventure game will have a lot less "secret sauce" in the code and more in the art, voice acting, etc. (The Invincible[3] is great in this area) so the code/data split would likely heavily depend on the type of game. (Games can also become very messy between art, visual scripting, engine settings and code, which is what makes releasing the code separately tricky.)
My wife and I are (slowly, next to the day job) working on a Python programming/learning game and hopefully we'll manage to make a clean split between the engine and the art because it would be important for modding. However, I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing it under an open source license because it would cut off a potential source of revenue to license it to educators wanting to make their own challenges and courses. Maybe later we'll figure out that the base game makes enough money and it doesn't matter anymore, but it's really hard to predict success. As a game dev I would really like to make it possible, for example, for game archivists to do their work legally, for people to legally backup and rebuild their games for newer operating systems, or for their kids to be able to inherit their games[4], but carving out specific exceptions, especially for unknown future use cases 10-20 years down the line is exceptionally hard and I'm also not a lawyer, so for desktop the Steam Subscriber Agreement is governing our PC releases for now.
[1]: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes_of_the_Storm
[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/an-upcoming-rts-will-incorporate-the...
[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...
You do realize that many apps on F-Droid are developed by businesses? OSMAnd, Fennec, Jitsi Meet, Element, Telegram being big examples. We also had the Simple family of apps for a while.