- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
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Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.
Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren’t going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.
Well, one of the alternatives is what ID Software used to do, where they would sell the game for a period of time and then open source the code Once sales dropped off.
I have mentioned examples of games that saw commercial success while being open source. And of course, delayed open source is also an option as some other users have said here.
The open sourcing of the quake engine is where a lot of modern engines got their roots.
Can you explain that? Are you saying there are modern engines using parts of quake 1 source code?
The engine Can of Duty uses is effectively a heavily modified quake 3 engine.
By this point it’s so modified it may as well be a different thing, but make no mistake it has evolved from the quake 3 engine.
Half-Life Alyx still has some flickering light code from the original Quake. Couldn’t find a good gif that would include Alyx, but here’s a couple other games:
The first 3 or 4 used quake 3 engine for sure, but didn’t they switch it at some point?
Edit: nm I found the wiki page on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
Tldr; it’s what you said
The only one I can think of is that Source might still have some id code in it from the goldsrc days, but that was before it was open sourced.
The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.
These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.
Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.
The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.
Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.
Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.
It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.
I am old enough that already have lost some childhood (e.g. early iPod touch) games to time
Like all the donout games Or papi games Doodle jump …
Some still exist, but got updates that they not at all behaving like remembered or having tons of ads making it impossible to game
As an example:
I am so happy that they released Hill Climb Racing again without ads, sadly it is on Apple Arcade, but luckily my parents have a Apple One subscription that I am allowed to use through family sharing (for the time being)
But if this subscription is ended, I have no way on playing Hill Climb Racing in a version without tons of micropayments and ads.
Apps are challenging to preserve, but it’s the MMORPGs and online games that are almost impossible since there is no game without active servers and people playing the game. Hardware can be emulated and code preserved, so the apps you’re talking about could be preserved IF Apple, Google et al wanted to - which of course probably won’t happen, but still.
It’s an interesting article and I’m also starting to think more and more about game preservation.
I don’t understand why a company like Sony wouldn’t provide you a way to play ps1-3 games on your ps5. I would even be ready to pay for it.
There might be some technical problems I’m not seeing, but people can do it on older pc’s…
I guess the whole video game industry has to think about preserving its own history.
I don’t know if open sourcing games would help, but something needs to be done.
Even playing a game like Sim City 2000 on pc is proving challenging now on Windows. I would want to play it on Linux but I can’t imagine how difficult that would be as the game isn’t even listed in Proton DB. And the VM solution would probably not work as Steam wouldn’t support something like Windows XP…
PS3 in particular has very weird hardware. There aren’t any good PS3 emulators for PC. Basically the only way to play PS3 games is on an actual PS3.
Why would we need open source instead of just removing drm?
Most people aren’t going to compile old games for new hardware. That’s not an easy task.
Abandonware is a thing, and there are some websites dedicated to it. GOG has done some great stuff releasing drm free games. So long as we have drm free, we can always build emulators to run what can’t natively run on modern systems.
What do you guys think about releasing them on github for free but in official stores as paid?
I think it’d be good to release them under a timebomb license: closed source for 5 years, let the dev make money, after which they have to release their source under a permissive license.
Eh, that would disincentivize long-term updates.
Instead, 5 or 10 years of inactivity should be more than enough leeway.
On the other hand if the code from the 5 year old release was open source but the updates from today was still closed source for another 5 years that would encourage continual improvement addition content to differentiate from the community releases.
It wouldn’t be limited to community releases, though. Other companies could poach the source code for themselves, and I doubt that’s something easy to regulate.
True, “community” might not be the right term.
But nonetheless if the OG developer structures their license so that each version becomes open source after 5 years then people publishing that as is or creating forks will always be a few steps behind the official release.
Of course if the title has any kind of community support that crowd sourced effort has the potential to outshine the OG developer, its important they time their license to give themselves a head start.
I think Friday Night Funkin’ will turn into a cautionary tale here, by releasing their game with much hype and open sourcing their code the first 7 weeks in 2020-21 they allowed community to really flourish. The player community has created content and then content that builds on and responds to that content (both narratively and mechanically) for several cycles now. Much of this content is now viewed as core to the FnF experience by players but much of it is also now built around other people’s IP (video games, TV shows, music, etc)
At the same time The Funkin’ Crew has been quietly working on Friday Night Funkin’: The Full Ass Game but I suspect that as a commercial game bound by the resources of single dev team and the rule of law they will be hard pressed to compete with the community they spawned.
While this is a win for remix culture it might not turn out as being the most prudent business decision. On the other hand they pulled off a two million dollar kickstarter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For a company that is iterating on its products this is probably fine from a mechanical sense but would be a nightmare for their IPs.
Consider the early Super Mario series:
- 1985 - Super Mario Bros
- 1986 - Super Mario Bros: The lost levels
- 1988 - Super Mario Bros 2
- 1988 - Super Mario Bros 3
- 1990 - Super Mario World
- 1996 - Super Mario 64
If in 1990/people could legally make their own “lost levels”-esque remixes with the SMB1 engine that would be paltry competition with SMW.
Similarly if people started remixing SMW in 1995 it wouldn’t have stopped SM64 from defining the 3d platformer genre and presenting a very strong argument for the analog stick being required for any 3d console.
But if people could tell their own Mario stories, that might tarnish the brand. If that happened we might not still be getting Mario games today.
I’m not sure how you open source both engine and assets without losing control of the narrative.
Easy – Nintendo simply has to release innovative Mario game after innovative Mario game to keep the community efforts at bay.
Why maintain a 20 year old game, when you can play the latest game with the knowledge that it too will be open sourced in X years?
Yeah as far as gameplay mechanics go they would be fine, most main line Mario games have a unique gimmick.
I wonder if the family friendly branding would be as strong if people could publish rom hacks in retail channels.
Similar way is how I ended up finding out about Mindustry. Found it on F-Droid and liked it enough to buy it on Steam when I found out it’s available there. Definitely a good idea if done right.
They could potentially release source only with no art assets. Then you wouldn’t be able to compile the game without either owning the game or pirating the assets elsewhere. But it would allow community members to update the game when it breaks or to add new features. Similar to the Mario 64 decompile.
While all this would be great for consumers it would probably take legislation to get publishers on board with something like this. Publishers have a financial incentive to let the games languish then force you to pay to get a “remastered” version.
I have purchased every single open source game that I’ve seen listed on steam as paid. Examples:
- Shattered pixel dungeon (and also the original Pixel Dungeon)
- TOME
- Shapez
- Open Hexagon
- Mindustry
- Lugaru
- Mega Glest
- Marvellous Inc
- Hydra Slayer
- HyperRogue
For more FOSS games on steam, there’s a decent list collected on this curator (also pointing which ones are only partially open): https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38475471-Libre-Open-Source-Games/?appid=1769170
I really enjoyed “Veloren”
I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a “5 year FOSS promise” or something similar, but you have to realize that the gaming community would never adequately financially support most development endeavors if the choice was as easy as downloading it from place A vs place B.
I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a “5 year FOSS promise” or something similar
Yes, that is one of the options I mention in the article. But there are games that are open source from day one, such as Mindustry, which have seen commercial success.
Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.
People still buy the games.
That’s not accurate. It’s far easier to purchase the game currently than it is to pirate it. You get things like automatic updates, server support, verified software, library management, etc with almost every single point of sale where as with piracy you get none of those and likely a little bit of malware as a treat. If you moved games to a completely open source model, you’d see this paradigm shift dramatically with gray markets spinning up seemingly overnight offering similar features.
Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.
Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.
You and I know very different gamers. I can’t even talk people into going pc instead of console/mobile phone. (Which is 90% of the gaming market).
Descent, Freespace 2, these two games open sourced a long time ago. They’ve been updated by the community over the years, and ascended far beyond where they started.
I didn’t know about thrive. That game looks cool! Mindustry is a lot of fun! I am not a gamer but that game is really cool. And KGoldrunner is a classics
I agree
Not challenging, what good open source games do we have so far?
Super Tux Kart is actually great. Open Arena is just Quake 3 with original art. IMO Open Arena is criminally underrated
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is great, actively developed, and was only possible because the original Pixel Dungeon went OSS. [email protected]
- Endless sky
- Battle for Wesnoth
- Warzone2100
- Simon Tatham’s puzzle games
- Widelands
- OpenTTD
- OpenRCT2 (needs assets from original game)
- SuperTuxKart
Off the top of my head
Mindistry is a best in class game that is FOSS
Here are some that I’ve liked (haven’t played them in years though):
- Warsow
- Red Eclipse
- Speed Dreams
- OpenTTD
- LinCity
- FreeOrion
- Oolite
Your nostalgia is a bad reason for starting anything really. Most hopefully you won’t push your nostalgia on your children and force them to play outdated games.
It would be great if game developers would open source games when they sunset them, sure. But also this might make it impossible for them to make a remaster of the game and sell it.
You mention doom. But this is a 0.1% case. Thousands of games from that era vanished not because you cannot run them on modern hardware, but because they’re utter garbage by modern standards.
https://dos.zone/ exists, and you can play a lot of iconic games in your browser. What’s exactly the player count there? And those are the best games from that era.
Dunno, player count has been +1 since you posted this comment though!
Great. In order to prove your commitment to the cause, get to level 8 in dangerous dave.
Your nostalgia is a bad reason for starting anything really. Most hopefully you won’t push your nostalgia on your children and force them to play outdated games.
It’s a dark path. Next you might start making them watch outdated films, maybe even reading outdated books. Before you know it you’re teaching them pre WWII history and Newtonian mechanics.
History is important, although more recent history books have better evidence and data than old ones. Literature, generally, ages well, although it’s mostly survival bias. A lot of it perishes without any loss to the society. Movies sorta age well. Again, only some. Games don’t age well.
Games don’t age well.
- football
- “the floor is lava”
- chess
- nibbles/snake
- myst
- snakes and ladders
- age of empires
- skyrim
