Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

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> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

Pretty dismissive, no?

Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].

I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.

To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?

I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.

If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.

[0] https://onehouronelife.com/

[1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri...

[2] https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446

[3] https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/

> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe

Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.

According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]

Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...

FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!

> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.

Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].

> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

This is a complete fabrication.

> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.

My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.

[0] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/commits/master/no_cop...

This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.

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