As platforms evolve, old games become unplayable. Open sourcing them will help us preserve them for future generations.

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.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    5•5 months ago

    Devil’s Advocate:

    FOSS is basically an endless development cycle. Anyone who wants to pick up and keep developing can. This has benefits and drawbacks.

    I would say the main drawback is that you might be expected to work longer on this code than you plan to. The gaming community can be pretty demanding while also not stepping up to contribute themselves.

    Further, it means some games can end up in unintentional “development hell” because there really isn’t an end-state for the game. The nature of the game keeps changing because the person in charge can’t decide what they want to go with long-term. The Duke Nukem Forever problem.

    Now, indie titles like Terraria and Stardew Valley stand as examples that show an eternal development can be a good thing, but they’re truly in the minority and they’re really both driven by auteurs, which is why the themes are so crisp and well placed throughout the games. It’s kind of hard to have a single brilliant auteur in charge of a giant game involving lots of people and have it work out. Look at the shitshow of an aftermath of what happened to the auteurs behind Disco Elysium. When you’re part of a big team, some things always become a shadow of their original intent. Things become anodyne not on purpose, but simply because not everyone is on the same page. Designing a horse by committee results in a camel, etc.

    It could work for small indie games, I don’t think it would work for anything AAA-level.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•5 months ago

      You’ve laid out one potential development cycle: FOSS from the get-go, and open collaboration welcome.

      However, that’s not the only way that a FOSS game might be developed. The code could be freely licensed, but the upstream developers refuse to accept outside patches. In that case, there’s one “original” and then if you don’t like it, build your fork.

      Alternatively, a game could be developed entirely in-house under proprietary licenses, and then only made FOSS upon commercial release. Contributor patches could improve the project, but conception of the game would be entirely the domain of its original developers.