Discussion January 2022

discussion@lists.fsfe.org

7 participants
7 discussions

Re: [FSFLA] LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Ismael Luceno 14 Feb '22

14 Feb '22

On 18/Jan/2022 18:03, Dennis Payne wrote: > You did ask an actual indie game developer. I chose "We" in my > statement because I was including myself in the group of game > developers. I recently made Anagramarama available for sale on itch.io > to gain funds for free software game development. I also have a > merchandise shop where I've started trying to make money for free > software game development. > > If you want commercial closed source game developers, I've done that > two. I worked on the game Devil's Whiskey. I enjoyed the experience > and made money from it but don't particular enjoy closed source > development so I haven't done it since. <...> I meant, to make a large representative sample. I wish everyone was of your opinion, but I've been hearing otherwise from the majority of people I talked with; geography, environment, economy, and other factors might play a role in which groups are louder and/or larger. It would be important to understand who they are, their positions, and what might prevent their games from being free software.

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Re: [FSFLA] LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Ismael Luceno 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

On 07/Jan/2022 18:23, Dennis Payne wrote: <...> > Most people developing games would love to make a living as game > developers. However I disagree that most people developing games are > motivated by it. We are usually motivated by a game we want to make. We > might think it could make money but usually it is the desire for the > game first. > > People join National Novel Writing Month for the same reason. They have > an idea for a novel and want to write it. Some will pursue publishing > it. Some will self publish perhaps even knowing it won't be a giant > seller. Some will just give it away. Yes, it could be the case, but I wouldn't count on it. But instead of guessing, we could just ask actual indie game developers.

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Re: [FSFLA] LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Jean Louis 09 Jan '22

09 Jan '22

* Dennis Payne <dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com> [2022-01-08 17:23]: > On Fri, 2022-01-07 at 10:53 +0100, Ismael Luceno wrote: > > People who value free software would publish their games as free > > software... Why don't we have so many games then? > > We do have a lot of games. Obviously not as many as commercial games. > They tend to steer towards procedural or acade games rather than > complex story games. High quality graphics are less common but not > unseen. > > https://trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/statistics/index.html > Lists 519 linux games at the moment. Some may not be completely free > but a good chunk of them probably are. It has a backlog of games to add > as well. It is unclear what "open source" means, there are many "custom licenses" and "other licenses". > Most people developing games would love to make a living as game > developers. However I disagree that most people developing games are > motivated by it. We are usually motivated by a game we want to make. We > might think it could make money but usually it is the desire for the > game first. > > People join National Novel Writing Month for the same reason. They have > an idea for a novel and want to write it. Some will pursue publishing > it. Some will self publish perhaps even knowing it won't be a giant > seller. Some will just give it away. Great, keep it going. Jean Take action in Free Software Foundation campaigns: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns In support of Richard M. Stallman https://stallmansupport.org/

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Re: LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Richard Stallman 07 Jan '22

07 Jan '22

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] For practical success, it is desirable to make the game easy to install. To respect users' freedom, it is important to avoid dependence on any nonfree software. To let the community make sure the program is safe and not malware, we need to encourage users to package the program for distros. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.) It is important to achieve all three goals. The second is often ignored, but then the free software idea is forgotten. The third is one we often forget. Can you find a good way to achieve all three? -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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Re: [FSFLA] LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Ismael Luceno 06 Jan '22

06 Jan '22

On 05/Jan/2022 14:48, Dennis Payne wrote: > On Wed, 2022-01-05 at 16:10 +0100, Ismael Luceno wrote: > > Making it attractive would mean the prizes and frequency of the > > contests > > need to yield an average much higher than what would be possible by > > selling > > the game, which sounds unrealistic to me. > > > > A single top game can easily gross tens of millions, I don't think > > you can > > compete with the privative models this way; and even the average > > good-ish > > games makes 20k-25k USD on their first year. > > > > Making it work would require a different approach. > > I think you are misinformed. According to a 2020 study, over 50% of > indie games on Steam make less than $4000. > > https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-… I don't disagree with those numbers. Is your plan to have just mediocre games? <...> > $2000 prize pool for weekend or even a week of work isn't bad. Completely different dynamics from work, it's a competition, you don't give them money all year around, neither you guarantee it. If the median game makes about 4k USD, and you don't care about quality, just the number of games, you would still need to reward above that if you want everything copylefted. Also there's the problem of how you partition that, by voting? everyone gets 4k? I can't think of any sane option. > To sell a game you need to do a lot more work. Take Celeste > for example. It was made for on pico-8 for a game jam. It was a > "difficult platformer with 30 levels". The commercial game had > "over 200 rooms spread between eight chapters." That was a lot of > work to make it a commercial success. True; but I'm just pointing out we cut out that possibility if we really want libre games. It isn't about the time invested in the jam, that's meaningless, the problem is the alternative commercial exploitation model would need to be better, or at least equivalent. > A game jam game might lead to a bigger commercial game but the game jam > itself will not be a huge seller. Game jams require you to be able to > play the games of others to give ratings and comments. You are going to > get that if you have to buy them. On itch.io I believe the only thing > you can do is make it "pay what want". Unless you do something else, you'll still get privative games in the end of the chain, and just junk prototypes from the competition itself.

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Re: LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Jacob Hrbek 04 Jan '22

04 Jan '22

> I think it would quickly become unmanageable. I think you would need to display only those installed and allow a search for more to install. -- Dennis Payne I agree that showing a huge list of games would be unmanagable in which case each user should have it's "library of games" with option to add more games to it from some kind of catalog. On 1/4/22 04:01, Dennis Payne wrote: > I think it would quickly become > unmanageable. I think you would need to display only those installed > and allow a search for more to install. -- -- Jacob Hrbek

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Re: LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!
by Jacob Hrbek 01 Jan '22

01 Jan '22

> So by Libre Game development tournament! are we talking about a competition to see who can come up with the best game ? -- Paul Yes, That's how i see my idea.. Where the problems that i can see is how to make it fair, competetive and how to get sufficient amount of submissions while promoting the development of Free Software Games + how to decide who won. On 1/1/22 10:07, Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss wrote: > So by Libre Game development tournament! are we talking about a > competition to see who can come up with the best game ? -- -- Jacob Hrbek

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Discussion January 2022