- cross-posted to:
- linux_gaming
- cross-posted to:
- linux_gaming
So I’ve been working on a crafting/exploration game for a while called Veridian Expanse. (I guess the details don’t really matter, so I won’t go into that, but check the links at the end if you’re interested) I have some unresolved feelings about making the game open source, and how/why to do it.
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The last game we released on Steam was up on pirate sites within hours, and showed up fairly high (second page maybe?) of a simple search result of the game’s name. It sold “well enough”, and since it was a pretty small game so we suspect that there probably wasn’t any “rampant piracy”. Certainly not enough to bother to reduce it anyway. We didn’t even bother to implement the (trivial to break) Steam DRM.
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From a sales point of view, I don’t think the source code is valuable. Nobody wants to pirate the source for some random game, they want the binary that’s already been made for them. Also, I’ve written some blog articles about how some of the game’s threading, hot-loading, rendering, and soft shadowing works. At some point when people started asking questions, I would just send them the code because “why not?” Eventually I just mirrored it on Github without the assets.
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The assets… While I have rights to all the data and graphical assets, the sounds and music are all royalty free items that I’ve purchased. Even if I wanted to release them, I can’t. I’m not sure I want to either.
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I use Linux to develop the game, but I know most of my sales will come from Windows or console versions. In a way I don’t care about the Linux market financially and have been considering just publishing it on Flathub because “why not?” It also runs pretty well on the Pi 4, and I even automated the build for it because “why not?” I certainly don’t hate the idea that people might like the game and tell their friends to buy it on other platforms. :p
My current thought is that I should just OSS the code, but leave the assets as proprietary. If someone really wants to pirate the game, there will be some easy way to do that a few search terms away. Even if I give away a Flathub or RPi version it’s not going to change the difficulty for someone that wants a Windows version for free. On ther other hand, maybe someone will find something useful in the code or get it running on *BSD or Haiku or something. (It already compiles/runs fine on them, but I don’t really want to spend time maintaining those builds)
There’s certainly plenty of games with open sourced engines (like the Id games), but closed data. Then there’s a few like Mindustry or 0AD that seem to be trying both, but are there other example of games that people can think of for comparison?
Some further Veridian Expanse links if you want to figure out what the heck I’m even talking about:
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I’ll give you my point of view on it.
- People who pirate games are generally young and have no money. (like me a long time ago)
- People who have work and money, will buy games to support the devs. (like me right now)
- People who still pirate games (or any content) are trash, maybe you can just ignore them?
Pirating is not a bad thing, since people will discover your “brand” and when they can, they might buy your games. (I remember playing Starcraft 1, D2 and AOE, all quakes pirated when I was young, now I have all of them in my steam library)
OSS your game but the assets could be a great way, it feels similar to openTTD in a way.
But supporting Linux is great thing, (Fedora user here) and I try to buy games to support devs that support Linux natively. I have about 900+ games on Steam (Mainly Win titles), and I have finished only 30 or 40 of them. Now that Linux is getting more popular and because Steam makes playing windows games so seamless, it’s not worth the assle of pirating IMO.
But that just me. I am sure there are many others with similar opinions out there ;)
Yeah, I have a fairly ambivalent view on it as well. I totally pirated things as a kid with more time than money. Now that I have a job it’s the other way around and Steam and friends are way less effort to just spend money on. :p That and the whole “can you really turn a pirate into a customer” thing.
I think it should be fine to sell on steam and also be open source, ppl would rather pirate the compiled version than compile themselves, maybe some license that disallows redistribution or something, so other ppl don’t change a few things and compete with you on steam… Also if it catches the attention of some linux youtubers (more likely if it’s OSS i think) it might give you some extra sales.
Basically taking the Mindustry route. It’s open source but you can still buy it
@slembcke In my opinion, by releasing the source code, two things will be possible:
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People with enough programming experience will be able to build it an play it for free (although they might not be, since it’s missing some assets)
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Evil-minded people will be able to copy your work and market it as their own.
…and this second point is where I see the danger. You don’t want your work to appear as some chinese clone.
So… I’m not sure either. Maybe just try it as an experiment?
I guess I’m not really that worried about either. We are of the opinion that DRM is pointless. It wastes our time chasing sales that will probably never exist, and wastes players’ time too. Even if we did DRM it, small games like ours get cracked anyway when people get bored and look for things to crack. So there will always be a more trivial way to get a free copy than compiling the code yourself and finding somewhere to source the assets from. As for #2, the same thing applies. You don’t need the source code to modify something and claim it’s your own, and that happens all the time. Like pirate copies of the game, it’s inevitable, and probably not worth our time to deal with it.
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I don’t currently write mods or anything (partly because reverse engineering stuff is way more work than I want to do), but if a game I was interested in was also open source I would be really tempted to play around with some. If the base is cool I could see building out a solid mod community that way.
I wishlisted to keep an eye out, but personally, I don’t take much from screenshots and really need gameplay clips to make decisions on buying games. Adding one to the store page is pretty important IMO. It doesn’t need to be long drawn out cutscene heavy. A couple 5 second clips stitched together or a 15 second clip of one area that showcases the action we’ll go a long way.
Hrm. So people bring up the mods angle, though it’s going to be a story driven single player game. I’m not sure mods make sense for it, and the way I’ve written the game they’d even be pretty hard to do. In the past I was pretty keen on making things “scriptable”, but after years of writing things to be extensible and then never extending them I kinda gave up. I actually had a bunch of Lua stuff in the game originally, but eventually ripped it all out and replaced it with hot-loadable C code. 10 years ago me wouldn’t have believed it, but it’s just way easier that way. >_>
Yeah… I haven’t updated the screenshots for almost a year now. That’s probably a mistake as the Steam page seems to be the only place people are discovering the game right now. Any marketing I’ve tried to do has been a complete flop. There is a playable alpha on itch if you are interested in playing a half finished game. :p
Hey, thanks for writing your thoughts on this.
Although my game is, er, not started, I’ve been asking myself similar questions. Your thoughts make a lot of sense. Hope it works out well for you.
I can’t think of a game however I do know that aesprite is open source and also sells on steam. The incentive to buy it on steam is you don’t have to compile it yourself. It does fairly well on steam too so it certainly can be done
Yeah! I use Aseprite for most of the graphics in the game actually. :) It’s great because it’s scriptable and can be automated from the command line. That let’s me split up the effects layers (derivatives, glow, etc) when building the spritesheets. Being source available means I can build it as part of my automated build setup too. :)
I feel like you could open source the game after 5 years or something and sales have petered out.
This is what I would do as well. Sure it’s pirated, but getting more money for my work is good.
Although most will still buy it on steam even if open source, just out of ease of use. Anyone who seriously wants to dev on the open source will buy it anyway, or is some random kid who really can’t buy it.
If your working on a next project, I’d say open source this when the next is published. Its a good promotion for a new item and a nail in the coffin for your own work on the old(current) game.
The problem isn’t that one would compile it for themselves, it’s that one would compile it to sell copies as if they had made it.
Sounds like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. The code is open source (since it’s a port of the original Pixel Dungeon which is also open source) and a Java version and .apk are freely available to download from github. But it is also being sold on mobile/Steam/GOG, and I think the dev is making a bit of money of it (enough to go on developing, in any case).
Ok so similar to Mindistry then it looks like. The license seems to be just straight up GPL. I don’t see a separate license for the assets. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to just email the dev and ask their opinion…
I think the biggest risk is people repackaging and selling it as a different game, like what happened with paint.net, but with games on steam it may be less of an issue?
Interesting, I’ll probably buy a copy just because it’s open source lol
Just leave the pirates be. People who’ll buy the game will buy the game regardless. Even the strongest DRM won’t get you more sales if people don’t want to buy the game. Piracy can also allow for word of mouth marketing though take that with quite a bit of salt as I don’t have the resources to back me up.
The “free code, proprietary assets” model seems to be the best option so far, as far as I’m aware. Of course this raises the issue of scripts in assets, like Godot’s GDScript. Do you consider them code or assets? It’s up to you of course.
I agree with this, in fact as someone who pirates but also has a MASSIVE library on steam I gotta say, I’m much less likely to pay for something if it has denovu or something, on the other hand I really want to support more open source games (partially becouse I’m obsessed with modded games, and partially becouse I like open source)
Absolutely go for it.
Just be aware that people will take it as an invitation to report bugs, scrutinize your code and make PRs, which strangely enough many game developers feel is an extra burden and not something that helps them. I guess it boils down to the release and forget mentality so common in game development.
Probably, hah. I’ve maintained a few OSS game tools over the last decade or so I’m familiar with what I’m getting into from that perspective. Just not open sourcing something I intend to actively sell. Broadly speaking my experience was that Windows devs were often upset that their favorite version of MSVC wasn’t supported, Mac/iOS devs were great at reporting bugs and suggesting features, while Linux devs usually jumped straight in with pull requests with fixes and features. Hehe.
Cool question, and hopefully there are some insightful answers.
More Linux games would be great, and if free or donation for them, that helps.to drive Linux and gaming.
Either way, good luck!
Nothing wrong with selling FOSS. The GPL doesn’t even require you to give it out for free, just that your buyers have access to the source code.
For the art and assets, you could consider a Creative Commons license, perhaps with the NC clause.
Really, are they free to give bit away without your permission?
Oooo, you’re the Verdant Skies devvycritter! I got that in an Itch bundle and thought it was neat . Don’t remember why I stopped partway in… probably got distracted by roughly three million other games in that bundle @.@ Never quite finished most of them .;
Is always nice to have source available. Monetization… is not really a fun thing to think about :-\ I think you’re right, though, with the general idea. Seems like source is valuable to learners and tinkerers (and critters like me trying to get the thing running in n years when some library gets a version bump :-\ ) but not really as commercially valuable as the binary and assets. … Though maybe some of that’s just me wanting more source floating about in general ;P About giving away a *nix version, maybe. Could encourage more critters to try *nix >:3 'Course, that could also cut into sales too. Totally your choice but perhaps an interesting one to make.
Also, hello! Welcome to federated-not-Reddit-thingle! And good luck with Veridian Expanse! (Are all of your games going to be named "Ver-"something? Hmmm… maybe it’s a riddle! :D ! )
Hah! Yes we are. Verdant Skies was mostly a creation of my business partner and his wife. I was contracting on a fishing game for XBone/PS4 at the time to help fund it, though I helped with some of the game’s effects. :) I joking said that my game and his should take place in the same game-o-matic universe because… obviously of course. It kinda stuck though, and we then joked that probably only people that knew us would ever get the joke. I guess we were wrong. :p
I mean giving away a versions for smaller non-proprietary OSes probably will cut into sales… but it’s such a niche market I’m not sure it matters in the grand picture. Going by the Verdant Skies numbers anyway, trading a few percent of our sales for some goodwill might be a pretty good trade?
