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:
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 ;)
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.
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 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?
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
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.
@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?
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When I first saw this title, I wrote the concept off. People like free things, selling FOSS is hard and most won’t buy it. Then I started thinking of Friday Night Funkin’. Disregarding ALL the drama or how people feel about that game, it was free, open, and so many people loved it that it made millions on a Kickstarter. Of course the game was super popular, but still. It just made me rethink the possibility of open sourcing games. Most people will buy or contribute to something they love, as long as they are able. It made me realize I should be a little less cynical sometimes, so thanks for posting your thoughts.
Cheers, and good luck with whatever you choose to do in the future!
