Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

People make side projects all the time that port "missing" software to new platforms, regardless of the reason that software is missing from that platform. There's a good chance OP didn't even know about the Epic backstory here.

Turn off ALL chat except tactical team quick chats, otherwise it's a toxic quagmire.

The ability of game developers to leverage licensing, contracts with orgs, etc. to lock down a competitive ecosystem with exclusivity results in inability for a "free market" to develop around running events and broadcasts. Rocket League and League of Legends come to mind here, where the competitive scene is almost exclusively eSports content produced by the developer itself and doing all sorts of tricks to establish lock-in.

If we look at how traditional sports work, it's much more organic. Leagues have the ability to negotiate their own game rules, TV rights, oversight, and more. Leagues compete with each other for viewership, because viewers naturally want to watch the best games (or their local games) and viewership drives revenue via sponsorships and TV licensing. Game developer lock-in prevents this economy from developing, prevents the competitive nature of leagues from working on improving the game from a viewership perspective, and the closed-source nature of the game prevents the game from being able to "move on" from bad rules, bad communities, bad design, etc.

Many (most? all?) of these online competitive games have toxic online communities and in-game interactions. The game developers don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you get is a simple heuristic. And these companies are not financially incentivized to ban bad actors. In fact, they're incentivized to ban _as few as possible_ without damaging the player base. Players will quit over toxic interactions and cheaters, but cheaters and toxic players can also be the most reliable spenders in a game, so there's to reason to ban any more of them than absolutely necessary.

But with an open-source game, communities can self-organize and self-moderate. If I play on a local soccer team and they're all racist or homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But at present there's no "find a new Rocket League".

So I think open-source games will have a big impact on the competitive online game industry. I think the resulting ecosystem has a lot more sustainability and player stickiness than current games do in light of the aforementioned toxicity and anti-competitive patterns, so there is much more money to be made than game developers are making currently.