Making Money As An Open Source Game Developer?

Fastball asks: "I have a couple ideas for some web-based games that I'd like to develop. I'm an avid Linux, Perl, Apache, and MySQL user, and I believe in the GPL. However, I'm trying to figure out how I can develop these games as open source and still make a buck. It would be rewarding to produce them without seeing a profit, but I'd like to make enough money to get a company going and quit my current, uninspiring job. Can I get there via open source, would I be more profitable going closed source, or should I forget about make money altogether?"

Comments

The short answer

[billcopc]

Don't even bother. If you want to _start_ in game development, do it for fun. It's not something you can pick up from a 21-day book and sell your skills immediately. Making a game takes TIME, as you'll be doing graphics, audio and pure design work, which are each much more demanding than the code itself.

This isn't to say you can't capitalize on a novel idea, but those are hard to come by and most likely you'll get over-excited about your own project and release pure crap. Yes it happens to every one of us; you fall in love with your pet project so damned much that you fail to see how ugly and unfinished it really is. Then you expect everyone to wet their boxers the instant they witness your creation, and then you fall in a deep depression and start doing heroin when it's 2 years later and you haven't seen a dime from it.

Like anything in computers, if you want to do it right, do it for the hell of it. People who jump in "for the money" usually don't get very far, just think of all your former co-workers who had lame CS degrees from "ICS Remote learning" and you'll quickly remember the difference between a 'hacker' and a 'consultant'. Now which generalized term would you attibute to a game developer ? Ah-ha!

A strategy for open source game development

[Pierre Phaneuf]

The basic strategy I would see for open source game development would be to keep the data proprietary, similar to the current situation with Doom and the first two Quakes (and I think some others).

This is based on the idea that game engines resemble each others to some degree and that the differentiating factor will be the maps/levels/artwork/scripting and so on. You can thus get improvement done on the engine contributed back to you, and others can make their own original games with your engine, but nobody is playing your exact game for free.

This strategy, of course, supposes that there is some significant amount of non-code data involved. If this is a puzzle game whose's only non-engine resources are backdrop images, this strategy is not effective.

Remember to mark down contributions from the outside somehow, because you might want to relicense the engine under a non-open license (or maybe just change the license to another open source one), and you'll have to ask permission from the copyright owners of these patches (remember what is happening to Mozilla!). Having them assign copyright to you, having a "clean" codebase branch or keeping contact information are three possible approaches.

Also, if you have some truly innovative technology in the engine that you think nobody else has, it might make sense to hold off the release a bit, so that you can build a market lead on that technology, then as competitors come up with equivalent technology, you can then release the source code.

See Software Secrets: Do They Help or Hurt?.

Here's the approach I was going to make.

[Joe Tennies]

You are talking about making "web games," so I'm assuming you are going to make a suite of games, not just one. My approach I was going to use, was to release a suite of games for free under the GPL. Then use a updater program that would automatically update the games when new versions (bug fixes) come out. Then, I was going to charge for "exclusive rights" to certain games. It would be written in that the money would also support the creation of another GPLed game. I know this means that it's not ALL GPL, but it's a way to do it. Perhaps you could say that the "exclusive rights" would only be for a year, then the program goes GPL.

Advertising

[bmalia]

You should put some commercials in your game.. After each level is complete -> "And now we pause for a message from our sponser..."