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!