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General Discussion

Thoughts on balancing giving to the community and profit?

rabidsheep
Monday, June 25, 2012 - 12:32

I've recently started an indie game company after working for years doing terrible and tedious programming work, and I owe a lot to the open source community, from allowing me to learn from their code, use their art, etc.

 

We are making commercial games, but I want to balance it out by still providing back to the community by providing all of our assets as open source, including our code, art, music, etc. but my partners think that this is being too trusting to people.

Any thoughts on this?  If you're an indie game company, what is the best way to balance making a living with supporting the open source community that taught you?

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bart
joined 13 years 10 months ago
Monday, June 25, 2012 - 12:50
bart's picture

Greets!

This is actually kind of a difficult topic.  While there are plenty of people who are very quick to (rightly) point out that there's nothing stopping you from selling a FOSS game, it's worth noting that it's going to be a lot harder to make a profit if you're giving away the same thing that you're selling.  The real answer, unfortunately, is to not give away quite everything.

There are a couple of ways you could do this:

  • Start out propietary and open source later.  This seems to be the most common.  If you release your game for free too early, though, you might risk angering your customers, unless you warn them ahead of time that it'll be open source fairly soon (that said, if you do that, you could lose out on some sales).
  • Keep the art proprietary.  This is effective, but as someone who runs an art site for FOSS games, it's not the option that I would personally prefer.  A lot of games that start out proprietary and eventually go FOSS (like the above) do this as well.
  • Keep the engine proprietary.  You can always open up your art and media and keep your game engine proprietary.  The down side here is that it's not really open source or free software. :)
  • Keep the 'glue' code proprietary.  There aren't that many projects that do this, but I'd like to see it done.  Sell your whole game, and also put the engine source code and the art files up for free download, but sell the 'script' code.  Here, you have the advantage of creating buzz by encouraing people to make free 'fan' levels for your game, but you're still charging people for the full experience.
  • Kickstarter.  If you want to release your game completely and immediately as open source, you're going to take a big sales hit, so you'd pretty much need to make all of your money on the Kikstarter campaign (probably $100k+), which is somewhat unrealistic for an unproven company.  I'd love to see this work, but I doubt it's viable.

With all the thinking I've done on this subject, I'm pretty sure those are the only viable options I've come up with.  The holy grail would be to get people to pay for a game that's compeltely free and open, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. :)

Bart

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rabidsheep
joined 13 years 5 months ago
Monday, June 25, 2012 - 12:57

I actually hadn't thought of your fourth point, if I released games in such a way that the user could access code for the game, but not the custom engine that interacts with the computer itself, people could use all of the assets, still learn from the code, but still have to buy the full game.  All while allowing there to be a modding community around the project.

Thank you very much for your help!

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Myckel
joined 13 years 11 months ago
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - 06:12
Myckel's picture

There are other ways as well:

  • Ransom-ware add ons: Release a base game. Provide new features / art / missions if the community paid X amount, release the add on. It doesn't matter if one person pays everything or 10 people 1/10th each (or any other amount, as long the total adds up).
  • Sell stuff to pay development costs (art books, key hangers, mugs, t-shirts), as long as your game is successful.
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freemind
joined 14 years 9 months ago
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - 13:21

You can also add multiplayer mode to your game.

 

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CruzR
joined 14 years 3 months ago
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - 04:01
CruzR's picture

The fairware model might also be worth a try.

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Myckel
joined 13 years 11 months ago
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - 05:46
Myckel's picture

That looks interesting. Only not sure about the popup (nag-ware anyone).

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cemkalyoncu
joined 13 years 1 month ago
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - 07:33
cemkalyoncu's picture

Personally I like the fourth option, well even you could make the script opensource but the level data itself would be sold. As a sales mechanism you may even have more than one "premium" level. 

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nosycat
joined 13 years 7 months ago
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - 11:24
nosycat's picture

Re: option four, I'd like to mention an example from outside the gaming world. 37 Signals set out to create an online service (and later more), but the underlying framework proved so generally useful they open sourced it. Nowadays it's known as Ruby On Rails, and doesn't need any more introduction.

How to apply that to a game? I don't know. But the engine isn't everything -- parts of it could be useful in isolation. There are supporting tools that may be essential to the creation process. The art could be released in such a way that parts of it can be easily reused, but reassembling it into a complete build of the game is non-trivial.

All these schemes are quite complicated, though, and that's a bad sign. Maybe the question is wrong in the first place?

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rabidsheep
joined 13 years 5 months ago
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - 12:39

I really like the fairware idea, I might test that out for a bit and see how it goes.

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