2 ms·

You show an awfully naive view of the games industry if you think that giving away games for free is going to generate enough income to feed yourself and your f

You show an awfully naive view of the games industry if you think that giving away games for free is going to generate enough income to feed yourself and your family. I learned to program on "proprietary" software(quake, half-life) among other things while I was growing up and it didn't hamper my ability to be an effective software developer.

mikegerwitz 11y ago
"Free" refers to freedom, not price. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. In fact, most people get their games today from online "marketplaces", and getting other games on consoles is incredibly difficult; that's a separate issue. With PCs, those games are often downloaded illegally. I understand how the game industry operates today; an ex-co-worker of mine used to work as a manager in the field.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Seriously, there's enough barriers to being successful in gamedev as it is, I don't see any reason to add another one on top of that.
  - mikegerwitz 11y ago
    > Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Yes, this is the long-standing problem with software freedom in general; not specific to game publishers. And I don't expect that to change any time soon; I'm hopeful for the indie developers. But a recognized problem in our community is the inability to compete with games with multi-million dollar budgets; it's simply not possible at this point.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      If you ask indie developers you'll find they're more concerned with paying their bills and building enjoyable games than opening up their software(and 90% of them use GameMaker, Unity or other platforms). Like I said, you don't really have a good grasp of the industry. 9/10 indies don't make it, and none of them make it to the level of Notch. I'm talking about people who know what they're doing, burned all their savings from BigCo so they could work for ~1.5 years and still didn't make it. Open source software is so at the bottom end of the scale, and you already have a bunch of frameworks out there if you want to know how the nuts & bolts work.
quadrangle 11y ago
Just an obligatory post whenever the "feed your family" argument comes up http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-children/ http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-childr... Not saying that the item in question is itself comparable to this, just there's lots of different ways to get by in the world…
- vvanders 11y ago
  It's more the fact that gamedev pays about ~40% of traditional developer work. Adding some sort of idealism on top of that means you'll probably do better flipping burgers than developing an open source game.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    Oh, I didn't know game dev paid much less. Thanks for the info. Anyway, it remains the case that making a living as a game dev is far from the only way to get by, and making proprietary software isn't ideal, so "I need to feed my family" remains a sloppy excuse that doesn't justify ignoring the issue. Not that it's irrelevant, but it's not itself adequate.

mikegerwitz 11y ago

"Free" refers to freedom, not price. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. In fact, most people get their games today from online "marketplaces", and getting other games on consoles is incredibly difficult; that's a separate issue. With PCs, those games are often downloaded illegally. I understand how the game industry operates today; an ex-co-worker of mine used to work as a manager in the field.

vvanders 11y ago
Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Seriously, there's enough barriers to being successful in gamedev as it is, I don't see any reason to add another one on top of that.
- mikegerwitz 11y ago
  > Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Yes, this is the long-standing problem with software freedom in general; not specific to game publishers. And I don't expect that to change any time soon; I'm hopeful for the indie developers. But a recognized problem in our community is the inability to compete with games with multi-million dollar budgets; it's simply not possible at this point.
  - vvanders 11y ago
    If you ask indie developers you'll find they're more concerned with paying their bills and building enjoyable games than opening up their software(and 90% of them use GameMaker, Unity or other platforms). Like I said, you don't really have a good grasp of the industry. 9/10 indies don't make it, and none of them make it to the level of Notch. I'm talking about people who know what they're doing, burned all their savings from BigCo so they could work for ~1.5 years and still didn't make it. Open source software is so at the bottom end of the scale, and you already have a bunch of frameworks out there if you want to know how the nuts & bolts work.

quadrangle 11y ago

Just an obligatory post whenever the "feed your family" argument comes up http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-children/ http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-childr... Not saying that the item in question is itself comparable to this, just there's lots of different ways to get by in the world…

vvanders 11y ago
It's more the fact that gamedev pays about ~40% of traditional developer work. Adding some sort of idealism on top of that means you'll probably do better flipping burgers than developing an open source game.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  Oh, I didn't know game dev paid much less. Thanks for the info. Anyway, it remains the case that making a living as a game dev is far from the only way to get by, and making proprietary software isn't ideal, so "I need to feed my family" remains a sloppy excuse that doesn't justify ignoring the issue. Not that it's irrelevant, but it's not itself adequate.