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Spurn the computer game industry

naughtycomputer.uk

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Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#11

Post by xabotage »

>Most commercial computer games require very powerful computers. This means that a less-wealthy person cannot play online games with their more-wealthy friends. This is especially a problem for young people, for whom gaming is an important social activity.

This. I'd love to try out a variety of fun Half-Life 2 or Quake 3 mods (which all work just fine on an old, low-end laptop running Linux), but everyone I could conceivably play them with is too preoccupied with Overwatch, Battlefront, Call of Duty 36, or whatever closed-server, walled-platform, resource-intensive game came out within the past year or two. Open Arena? These graphics look old, it must suck.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#12

Post by jim-greer »

Why does it matter if games are free software?

I don't see why they should free as in beer - developers need to get paid.

As for being open source, it depends on why you think that’s important. To me, the goals of open source are:

- Make sure that you aren't building your business on top of proprietary software. This isn’t relevant for gamers.

- To increase the productivity of all software developers. This is achieved by open source engines.

The author might as well say that we shouldn't use any proprietary platforms (like, say, Hacker News).

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#14

Post by etiam »

While I sympathize heavily with the rallying cry for freedom and accessibility, I rather like that the gaming industry is helping to drive demand for powerful, cost-efficient hardware.

Development of GPGPU has been transformative for some areas of science and technology, but that development arguably has been paid for and made feasible only as a side effect of building what is mostly entertainment systems.

Also, I prefer desktop PC:s to laptops and (by incredibly wide margin) to those glitzy slates the general population seems to be poking for their limited computing need the last decade, so I'm actually pretty happy about incentives to keep desktop PC:s available and more or less affordable, at least in rich countries.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#15

Post by aaron-lebo »

jim-greer wrote: post #12

Why does it matter if games are free software? I don't see why they should free as in beer - developers need to get paid. As for being open source, it depends on why you think that’s important. To me, the goals of open source are: - Make sure that you aren't building your business on top of proprietary software. This isn’t relevant for gamers. - To increase the productivity of all software developers. This is achieve…

Because it makes for better games.

To me the golden era of gaming was about 10 years ago. Game engines weren't designed to make Hollywood blockbusters (see the current Battlefield engine and series). They were easily moddable. Maybe not surprisingly from that era came Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Desert Combat (the precursor to Battlefield 2) and mods you've never heard of like Tribes Football which anticipated Rocket League by 2 decades.

In other words, almost everything that exists today existed a decade or more and probably had more features. The current business model favors locked-down engines that have semi-regular releases of DLC or an entirely new game every year or two. This is horrible for building communities and pushes publishers to neglect games.

A more open view of game development would avoid a lot of this constant reinvention of the wheel and should create better content.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#16

Post by OliverJones »

Yeah but, yeah but, the game fetish krewe's demand keeps x86 computers available at retail.

I can get relatively cheap used laptops for my little computers-for-poor-kids project partly because the gaming people spend a lot of money at the high end.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#17

Post by xabotage »

BoorishBears wrote: post #9
qume wrote: post #7

The fundamental problem with OSS games: Many people who contribute to OSS are doing it because they use it in their work. No one uses games in their work. More significant, all - every single one of them, professional game developers are up to their eyeballs in work. It's the nature of making games, they are never finished and there is always more to do. Professional game developers are very unlikely to have any side…

I don't get why the author is so fixated on OSS games as opposed to more open (or at least easily accessible) tools. I mentioned something similar in my comment, but I don't see why a publisher spending millions on development is going to allow the developers to open source their game. What's more realistic is that money that's being spent on development also funnels into tools so that everyone can reap the benefits…

I agree with a focus on open tools. Luckily, there seems to be quite a few OSS game development tools out there, which is why Unity and Unreal now give away their full platforms for "free". That being said, I'm highly skeptical of the "openness" of those platforms, which is why I can't quite bring myself to abandon Blender as a game engine, even though it is somewhat inferior.

The problem is, now that Unreal and Unity are so readily accessible to anyone, a FOSS competitor is unlikely to spring up: from my experience, game developers and artists are paradoxically so willing to shackle themselves to proprietary software (and actively deride anyone who opts for the "inferior" open-source alternatives), whereas I can make a lot more money as a software engineer using FOSS languages, libraries, and platforms.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#18

Post by grogenaut »

GDC made it so that games were mostly open like research and parent communities (without the encumbrance for the most part). Why not push for this instead so more and more knowledge and understanding is shared and the community improves.

Games greatly improved as people shared the effective techniques they used. The game engineers didn't really worry about this lost of proprietary info because they're showing techniques not code and because in a quid-pro-quo relationship they expect that people who learned from their technique at one gdc will be presenting 2 years later at a time that the original presenter is really digging in on their next game.

This happens internally at large companies like sony. For instance the facial mocap tech that backs Uncharted 4 went through early iterations at other studios as well. This works for big companies. I'm not sure if they talked about it at GDC.

Apparently a few things have harmed the information sharing at GDC. Studios might be getting more paranoid. The pure/deep technical talks aren't as popular as "monetization strategy" talks. Really you might need 100 people in the world in one of the deep technical talks.

Also games like overwatch play well on 10 year old computers and $50 graphics cards.

Devs spend millions even on a simple game. It's a lot of bespoke software.

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#19

Post by detaro »

xabotage wrote: post #17
BoorishBears wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why the author is so fixated on OSS games as opposed to more open (or at least easily accessible) tools. I mentioned something similar in my comment, but I don't see why a publisher spending millions on development is going to allow the developers to open source their game. What's more realistic is that money that's being spent on development also funnels into tools so that everyone can reap the benefits…

I agree with a focus on open tools. Luckily, there seems to be quite a few OSS game development tools out there, which is why Unity and Unreal now give away their full platforms for "free". That being said, I'm highly skeptical of the "openness" of those platforms, which is why I can't quite bring myself to abandon Blender as a game engine, even though it is somewhat inferior. The problem is, now that Unreal and Unit…

> game developers and artists are paradoxically so willing to shackle themselves to proprietary software

Why is that paradoxical?

Re: Spurn the computer game industry

#20

Post by mlinksva »

Another reason is addiction. We have an industry set up to collect rents from creating the most addictive entertainment they can.

Some other largely overlapping lists of games whose creators collect no rents:

http://freegamedev.net/wiki/Complete_open_source_games

https://libregamewiki.org/List_of_games

https://wiki.debian.org/Game / https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Game (site linked to in post, but not the relevant category)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game...

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