Link to the response: https://steamcommunity.com/id/takinalisa/recommended/1934780/
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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What makes games different to other types of software that it can't become the norm for them to be open source?
Mostly profit motive. Most open source software is free, mostly because it's really hard to profit from something anyone can build for free. As soon as the source is released, someone will make a free build of it available and undercut the devs.
Devs, artists, etc all need to eat, so the game needs to be profitable enough to cover that.
It's not like games can't be open source, and I've played plenty that are, they just won't likely be profitable.
Making profit is certainly easier by artificially limiting distribution (©️) but I am unwilling to deny my users their software freedoms to do it. Seems counter intuitive too; it's never been easily for the average person to copy media.
I aim to one day make money via a pateron model like Godot: getting paid before development.. that requires a good reputation via what I have already made. If paid enough at that point then it doesn't matter if I don't get more at distribution. Before that hopefully some donate (⌒_⌒;)
I also hope gamers one day have their equivalent of the recent Unity devs moment. See the potential for abuse of power and no longer tolerate untrustworthy proprietary options - thus moving profit motivate to open source/free software.
I also want to make games and distribute them for free. I want to follow something like the Dwarf Fortress model where development is funded by fans and I build it because I love it. However, I'm not at the point of my life where I can do that, so for now it's a motivator for me to retire early.
But that model is highly unlikely to become the most common distribution method for games, just like it isn't the most common distribution method for other end user software. People just don't donate nearly as much as they're willing to pay for equivalent software. Building software is expensive, so if you're in it to make back your investment, propriety software is the way to go.
And yet the devs, artists, etc of FOSS programs also need to eat, and the software is still FOSS.
(Sure we should all be donating, or rather, they should get their income from our taxes since oftentimes they literally are the backbone of the world, but that's one more convo to the pile)
But that's not at all how things work. Most FOSS devs do it as a hobby or as part of a day job working on proprietary software. Very few FOSS projects employ full time developers, and for those that do, it's rarely a majority of the code changes for the project.
But let's say we somehow convince governments to fund FOSS development, they're not going to want to fund game development, they'll fund one Linux distro and the software needed to fill government needs.
If a large game engine like Unreal Engine suddenly switched to the GPL, game devs wouldn't touch it with a10 foot pole. They'd either develop their own engine, switch to a different proprietary engine, or use something like Godot where they can keep their project under a proprietary license.