Is this why no one ever heard of various open source games even though they are good and playable, because no one pasted gifs of the game all over the place and spammed people with them?
Yeah, I definitely think that’s part of it.
I imagine another challenge is that there’s usually no release date. I don’t think that’s insurmountable (early-access games have been very successful), but for example with OpenTTD releasing on Steam, it did generate some buzz, again.
And well, last but not least, there is that competition. Most players don’t have a particular interest in open-source and don’t mind paying a few bucks, so just being good and playable puts them on basically equal grounds with the vast majority of games.
Tbh an open source game should lean hard into modding. No other game setup makes it as easy to mod. Add a lot of support for mods and make it easy to edit source code and I think the open source part of the game will be a draw.
I agree that open-source games should try to focus on their strengths and stop chasing after commercial titles, but just being ultra-moddable alone is difficult, too.
Minetest is for example a very-easy-to-mod alternative to Minecraft. If you’re at least somewhat comfortable with tech, it takes like 15 minutes to make your first change to the game files.
Yet Minecraft still has a massively bigger modding scene, because there is just a lot more players (well, there might actually be a ton of players on Minetest forks which are being sold as Minecraft clones on the Play Store, but those players won’t make or install mods).
Another problem that Minetest faces is that because it is so ultra-moddable, there isn’t really a core set of items or even game concepts that everyone has and can include or modify in their mods.
Having said all that and coming back to the not-chasing-after-commercial titles: With a bit of setup, Minetest is fun. It can totally be a better Minecraft, depending on what you’re looking for.
