In the Age of Free AAA Game Engines, Where Does Our Open Source Engine Stand?

New submitter erlend_sh writes The game development industry just got hit by a tidalwave of free: Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4 and Source 2 all give away their flagship product for free now. They're all different brands of 'free,' but who cares? The average game developer certainly won't. Which left us wondering: Are hobbyist-run open source game engines like jMonkeyEngine still relevant? From the linked article: This just in: Physically Based Rendering isn’t dark magic, cross platform publishing is not the thing of fairy tales, and a solid asset pipeline is not exclusive to a million dollar budget. They’re not easy; faaar from it. But as long as we can show that these things can be accomplished by a part-time hobbyist just for the heck of it, the end user gets a fair price (i.e. free!), and our fellow hardcore misfits will continue trying to solve the most difficult problems the industry has to offer. ... If this exciting new thing called “free” keeps going in the right direction, everyone still in the race gets a leg up.

Comments

never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[iggymanz]

looked it up, never heard of any the jMonkeyEngine based games or engine. It's not relevant, developers wasted their life

Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

If this exciting new thing called “free” keeps going in the right direction, everyone still in the race gets a leg up.

Everyone but the people who wrote it, that is.

The problem with winning one's "15 minutes of fame" is that it won't pay the bills.

Which is why this exciting thing called "free", outside of an economy of plenty where it costs nothing to live, or where the author(s) operate(s) under essentially the same conditions, isn't always such a great deal for the author(s).

I have a free [donations accepted, but not nagged for] product out there with about 15k of regular users, and the income from it is as near zero as can be without quite being zero. To date, thirteen people have stirred themselves to donate. The product, however, tends to be used every day or two by those I call "regular users." I know because when it starts, it checks in with my website to see if there is an upgrade [always free], and when it does, I log a "start" to that IP, so I can generate some excellent stats on usage.

There are quite a few competing applications that perform the key functions mine does; but all do it a bit differently, and mine is one of the most feature-rich ones out there. So I have at least some reason to think that the users continue to use it because they find it at least adequate. The feedback I get tends to be quite kind, though that may just be a consequence of not wanting to annoy the author, I suppose. In any case, the considerable work I put in seems to have some value based on all this, and that value has not come back to me in any significant proportion. I can afford it -- don't get me wrong, I was not surprised by this, nor am I inconvenienced -- but that is because I produced pure commercial products for years first.