Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by thomasqbrady | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

thomasqbrady

How does licensing work, here... could you use this to develop an indie game and sell it?

View on HN

Yes. Only requirement is that your game code is Free Software (GPLv3).

Not sure what the question is. The License is clearly stated.

No, it’s GPL3, so your game must be open-source.

If the authors wanted to protect engine development while allowing indies to sell games made on it, they would have picked LGPL or a more permissive license.

since when do people not sell GPL games?

You are technically correct, and I believe the GPL doesn't cover the assets for the game (levels, art, audio, etc.), but I suspect there aren't many GPL licensed games out there for sale that have sold enough copies to make developing them worthwhile financially.

I'd love to be wrong, so if you have a few examples, I'm all ears.

Remember the GPL only applies to the code you can make a great game with beautiful artwork and distribute the source code to anyone who wants it. Nobody playing the game will have much fun without the artwork.

That's literally the first sentence I wrote in my comment. ;)

Sorry, you're right. I somehow missed that. There's some indie boomer shooters using the Doom engine that are commercially licensed IIRC.

Carmack has a post from ages ago wondering why no one does that with the ID engines they open sourced, which were pretty current back then. He was talking about the quake (2?) source code dumps i think.

Edit: ohh i found it:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/641/641662p6.html

The GPL license will allow people to take the Quake 3 engine and even go so far as to release a commercial product with it - provided that the source code is published alongside. Nobody has done this with any of the Quake engine games yet, but he hopes to see it happen someday.

Probably not much in the AA/AAA space, but plenty of indies. The Doom engine (and GZDoom, which is the most common Doom engine derivative) is GPL and there have been multiple commercially successful games released using it. I know at least Hedon[0] and Hands of Necromancy[1] sold enough copies to warrant a sequel.

GPL vs LGPL definitely isn't a blocker for a commercial game, in any case.

[0] https://github.com/madame-rachelle/hgzdoom https://store.steampowered.com/app/1072150/Hedon_Bloodrite/

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1898610/Hands_of_Necroman...

Plus the truly excellent Selaco! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1592280/Selaco/

Selaco is one example, its quite popular

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1592280/Selaco/

https://github.com/TheCockatrice/GZSelaco

You can sell them on PC, but any dream of console releases are dead in the water as Sony,etc forbids distribution or even code using their SDK's to be shared publicly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com