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CodeCombat in Y Combinator

blog.nickwinter.net

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Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#41

Post by highCs »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

Hi, gamedev here. At one point on stage, you brought up the possibility of open sourcing your code, and Paul cautioned you that you may want to follow game industry conventions. There are two reasons the game industry tends to keep their code closed-source. 1) It has been lucrative for game studios to sell licenses to their closed-source engine. Some game studios, such as Id Software, have made hundreds of millions o…

Id Software, have made hundreds of millions of dollars (if not $1B)

They didn't make that much, far from that. Id Software has been sold to zenimax with all its assets including their IPs and their people for only (edit: and around) 1 hundred million dollar - because they were runnning out of cash.

My advice to the codecombat devs is at the opposite of pg's one: don't talk to the game industry. Most of all those said big players of the game industry aren't at all. They are actually bad software companies with poor revenues. Ubisoft for example never made more than a dozen percents a year or similar - I mean they never made 300%. You could be worth more than Id Software and even Ubisoft "easily" following the valley advices instead of the game industry ones. Really it's a myth the game industry is making well. At least, nothing comparable to the web startups. Only a very very few of them actually does like Valve, Riot and Blizzard.

Edit - a source about Id Software acquisition: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092835/0001092835090...

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#43

Post by spicyj »

gsaines wrote: post #38
fizx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the level editor open source, and the main site closed source? Make the core game engine open source, but keep the surrounding infrastructure closed? Let people modify and run forks of the game engine (different art, physics, perhaps) on your main site? Open source your last generation work (as applicable)? Just thinking out loud here.

Yeah, those are all definitely on our radar, especially the idea to keep some surrounding infrastructure closed. That might be motivated by the wrong reasons though, if we don't have to open source it, we can keep it at "internal use tool" quality and devote our time elsewhere. :)

If it works, who cares what the code looks like? It can even be inspiring for others to see that code doesn't need to be "perfect" in order to get things done, and it's unlikely that people will think less of you just because there are some unfinished ends.

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#44

Post by sillysaurus2 »

gsaines wrote: post #38
fizx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the level editor open source, and the main site closed source? Make the core game engine open source, but keep the surrounding infrastructure closed? Let people modify and run forks of the game engine (different art, physics, perhaps) on your main site? Open source your last generation work (as applicable)? Just thinking out loud here.

Yeah, those are all definitely on our radar, especially the idea to keep some surrounding infrastructure closed. That might be motivated by the wrong reasons though, if we don't have to open source it, we can keep it at "internal use tool" quality and devote our time elsewhere. :)

To be clear, the newbie gamedev community is starved for examples of codebases that actually work. Don't worry about whether it's ugly. If it works, then newbie programmers can run it and learn from it, which is more than what's available to them currently.

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#46

Post by 6ren »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

Hi, gamedev here. At one point on stage, you brought up the possibility of open sourcing your code, and Paul cautioned you that you may want to follow game industry conventions. There are two reasons the game industry tends to keep their code closed-source. 1) It has been lucrative for game studios to sell licenses to their closed-source engine. Some game studios, such as Id Software, have made hundreds of millions o…

FWIW, Notch hasn't open sourced Minecraft.

Id did open source some games, but only well after the main burst of sales had dried up.

Counterpoint: reddit and HN are open sourced (are they games? they have points...)

Just some data points, not advice.

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#47

Post by gsaines »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #40
gsaines wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Sillysaurus, thanks a lot for the feedback. We've been talking to gamedevs and VCs and so far nobody has raised a flag about opensourcing everything, which is what we're thinking we're going to do. In the words of one VC we spoke to "it's all about the branding and community, who cares who has the code?" It feels risky, but we really think that it's consistent with the intention of the game to make it easy for peo…

we spoke with a YC alum that has open sourced 90% of his codebase and recommended keeping a small subset of it proprietary. He said that when he was out fundraising it defused a lot of tension when VCs and angels would ask about his open source policy and he could say "well, I keep some of my hardest algorithms in a closed repo." As a game, we have the art, which I agree is a pretty substantial barrier to copying us…

That's a very useful 2c, we haven't worked in the game dev industry, so it's extremely useful to get the opinions of folks that have that experience.

If we have our druthers, we'll release 100% of it and include the game art under a noncompetitive license so that anyone (and here we're hoping that includes teachers, professors, tutors, etc) can clone and release their own versions with different content. In a perfect world we would also be able to sync the content created like that back to our servers so that 1) we can give it more attention from the larger community and 2) let others benefit from their experience.

One of our primary interests is in releasing a game that CAN be cloned and is functional from the ground up because that's something we would have loved to have around. We didn't know it was rare for such things to exist, only that we thought it would be a cool thing to do.

Again, we really appreciate the advice, we're still learning this game dev stuff. :)

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#48

Post by gsaines »

6ren wrote: post #46
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

Hi, gamedev here. At one point on stage, you brought up the possibility of open sourcing your code, and Paul cautioned you that you may want to follow game industry conventions. There are two reasons the game industry tends to keep their code closed-source. 1) It has been lucrative for game studios to sell licenses to their closed-source engine. Some game studios, such as Id Software, have made hundreds of millions o…

FWIW, Notch hasn't open sourced Minecraft. Id did open source some games, but only well after the main burst of sales had dried up. Counterpoint: reddit and HN are open sourced (are they games? they have points...) Just some data points, not advice.

We're not really open source zealots or anything, but Quake did score points in my book for being cross platform back when everything was released only for windows.

For most projects/businesses, there's always a tension between open sourcing and making money, I really hope that we're at a market intersection where it actually makes monetary sense to keep things open.

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#49

Post by gsaines »

highCs wrote: post #41
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

Hi, gamedev here. At one point on stage, you brought up the possibility of open sourcing your code, and Paul cautioned you that you may want to follow game industry conventions. There are two reasons the game industry tends to keep their code closed-source. 1) It has been lucrative for game studios to sell licenses to their closed-source engine. Some game studios, such as Id Software, have made hundreds of millions o…

Id Software, have made hundreds of millions of dollars (if not $1B) They didn't make that much, far from that. Id Software has been sold to zenimax with all its assets including their IPs and their people for only (edit: and around) 1 hundred million dollar - because they were runnning out of cash. My advice to the codecombat devs is at the opposite of pg's one: don't talk to the game industry. Most of all those said…

That's useful feedback highCs, but open sourcing doesn't necessarily select our industry or business prospects. It seems to me we could be open source and high growth, or closed source and slow growth and the two factors are not necessarily causative. Would love to know if you have data to the contrary!

Re: CodeCombat in Y Combinator

#50

Post by gsaines »

imron wrote: post #45

Hey, it's the Skritter guys :-) I knew I recognised the names from somewhere. Best of luck with this new venture!

Thanks, just for the record, Skritter is still a going concern, but we have shifted our attention over to CodeCombat.
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