On The Difficulty Of Developing Open Source Games

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Competitive Enterprise Institute essay for discussing lessons learned by looking at the history of open-source games (PDF link, text version as posted to Politech list.) The piece suggests that "generally, games have not been a success story for the open source community", arguing that "...the consensus among gamers and developers is that open source games still lag behind proprietary games in originality, sophistication, and artwork; many are clones of earlier proprietary or shareware games." It notes that "...the open source business model seems to have trouble coming up with large initial investments at the cutting edge of innovation, where risks are greatest", and then suggests some larger lessons for governmental public policy on open-source software.

Comments

Re:the reason IMO ...

[identity0]

I disagree. Everyone here is taking the opinion that all that goes into games is programming and art, forgetting the one thing that makes games great: design. I don't mean the design of the code, I mean the ruleset by which the game operates, and the game mechanics. Programming is about implementing that design, and art is about giving it a coherent look. Unfortunately, I think most open-source games come from a programming pradigm where the coder starts writing stuff, and plugging problems as he goes, with no real 'feel' for the overall design and game mechanics.

For example, I have been playing FreeCiv a lot lately. For those that don't know, FreeCiv is a free/open source game based on Sid Meier's Civilization series. I really like it, but let's face it, it's just a clone. Now, I'm willing to bet that when Sid Meier made the original Civilization, the majority of work went into gameplay & balance, not into coding. It's that kind of vision of how a game should *work* that most free/open game projects seem to lack. I'm not saying that they're all bad or unoriginal - it's just the nature of the free/open source community to be made up mostly of coders honing their skills rather than game designers.

Some other data: Linuz Journal's 2003 user choice awards picked out Frozen Bubble as their best game - a clone of an old arcade game. Second was Quake 3, and third was Tux Racer. Tux Racer at least seems to have an original concept and design, so at least it shows the community can come up with some original ideas.

Re:the reason IMO ...

[Saige]

I think you hit on one of the key points here.

This is why we see so many projects started to clone an existing game - you can get a group of people to, say, copy X-Com UFO Defense, or Civilization, or Dance Dance Revolution, because they know what the final product should turn out to be.

Trying to create a new game results in much more difficulty, as you have people disagreeing over what the design should be, each person gets their own features in and then wants to keep them in regardless of the game balance, and so on.

Open source works wonders when the end goal is understood by the participants. Trying to come up with entirely new features and ideas is a lot tougher, and more prone to disagreement. Creativity is a lot harder to collaborate on.