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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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