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You don't have to give your game away for free. I urge you to look into how prominent open source companies are actually making money and think about how it can

You don't have to give your game away for free. I urge you to look into how prominent open source companies are actually making money and think about how it can be applied to games. It's not an impossible reality. You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with and instead try to route around everybody and ship an untestable blob then that's your fault. The reason everyone tells you to just support Ubuntu LTS is because they are the only ones who have the resources to support all these random binary blobs for X amount of years, and that comes with all the pains associated with it, as you are well aware of.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with Alternative view: distros don't provide a stable platform that developers can target.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Some do provide that, such as Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Others don't. Expecting every distro to have the exact same release & support cycle is nonsensical.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Linux LTS releases are not particularly stable from the perspective of someone who wants to distribute applications as binaries. Its API can change with every release, i.e. every two years. It's incredibly unlikely that a binary compiled for Ubuntu 18.04 will be able to run on Ubuntu 20.04 (as in Python etc.). To contrast, if you take a Win32 game from 2003 that targets DirectX 9, it probably runs fine on the latest Windows releases. (You might have to enable some compatibility mode.) "BUT BUT BUT if it's packaged with the distro it's no problem." Remember we're talking about proprietary applications (mostly games) here. Having these packaged with distros for years after the devs moved on to the next project is just a pipe dream.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      My original statement was that if this is really a problem for you then you need to stop writing and distributing proprietary binaries and open source your game. I know this is a hard pill for game developers to swallow but there is no other way. Open source communities move fast, they are not going to slow down just to support some opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute or fix bugs in, and that the original developer doesn't even care about anyway. It is nonsensical to expect these communities to work exactly like Windows. These are not fortune 500 companies with billions in the bank like Microsoft that can afford to keep innovating while also supporting every single legacy program in existence forever. The only way open source communities can provide the same level of support is if you provide source code that other interested parties can keep up-to-date without worry of being sued.
golergka 6y ago
These prominent open source companies that you're taking about make money from consulting or cloud services. There's no well understood and well rested way to do that as a game company. It doesn't mean that there's no such way, but it does mean that attempting to find it is very risky. Making games is already a very high-risk, high-reward industry, do adding this amount of risk to the equation is advice that's insane for all but most successful companies.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. And a game that allows a certain degree of customization is analogous to a consultancy. Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. If you don't have any business customers/partners then get some, not having them is a much bigger risk than choosing any specific development model. One of the ways these companies can reduce risk is actually by using other proven open source components. If they won't even make an effort to try to expand this, then there will never be a well-understood way.
  - golergka 6y ago
    > A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. No, it's not - this is an absurd statement. Cloud services get most of their income from big and medium companies, billing tens and thousands of dollars in privately negotiated agreements. Digital Ocean and AWS don't live on single developers paying them $5. All their real money is on B2B. Multiplayer games either get a flat subscription from all their playerbase, or rely on micropayments. Either way, they spend much less on account management where they interact with customers as individuals, and much more on analytics, where they measure and work with their customers in aggregate. These are completely different business models, that completely shape companies that operate on them. > Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. Games are not solving any problems - they are entiertainment product. I've seen people who have tried to reason about games in the terms you're using, and it always yelded hillarious (but also sad) results.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with Alternative view: distros don't provide a stable platform that developers can target.

cycloptic 6y ago
Some do provide that, such as Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Others don't. Expecting every distro to have the exact same release & support cycle is nonsensical.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Linux LTS releases are not particularly stable from the perspective of someone who wants to distribute applications as binaries. Its API can change with every release, i.e. every two years. It's incredibly unlikely that a binary compiled for Ubuntu 18.04 will be able to run on Ubuntu 20.04 (as in Python etc.). To contrast, if you take a Win32 game from 2003 that targets DirectX 9, it probably runs fine on the latest Windows releases. (You might have to enable some compatibility mode.) "BUT BUT BUT if it's packaged with the distro it's no problem." Remember we're talking about proprietary applications (mostly games) here. Having these packaged with distros for years after the devs moved on to the next project is just a pipe dream.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    My original statement was that if this is really a problem for you then you need to stop writing and distributing proprietary binaries and open source your game. I know this is a hard pill for game developers to swallow but there is no other way. Open source communities move fast, they are not going to slow down just to support some opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute or fix bugs in, and that the original developer doesn't even care about anyway. It is nonsensical to expect these communities to work exactly like Windows. These are not fortune 500 companies with billions in the bank like Microsoft that can afford to keep innovating while also supporting every single legacy program in existence forever. The only way open source communities can provide the same level of support is if you provide source code that other interested parties can keep up-to-date without worry of being sued.

golergka 6y ago

These prominent open source companies that you're taking about make money from consulting or cloud services. There's no well understood and well rested way to do that as a game company. It doesn't mean that there's no such way, but it does mean that attempting to find it is very risky. Making games is already a very high-risk, high-reward industry, do adding this amount of risk to the equation is advice that's insane for all but most successful companies.

cycloptic 6y ago
A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. And a game that allows a certain degree of customization is analogous to a consultancy. Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. If you don't have any business customers/partners then get some, not having them is a much bigger risk than choosing any specific development model. One of the ways these companies can reduce risk is actually by using other proven open source components. If they won't even make an effort to try to expand this, then there will never be a well-understood way.
- golergka 6y ago
  > A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. No, it's not - this is an absurd statement. Cloud services get most of their income from big and medium companies, billing tens and thousands of dollars in privately negotiated agreements. Digital Ocean and AWS don't live on single developers paying them $5. All their real money is on B2B. Multiplayer games either get a flat subscription from all their playerbase, or rely on micropayments. Either way, they spend much less on account management where they interact with customers as individuals, and much more on analytics, where they measure and work with their customers in aggregate. These are completely different business models, that completely shape companies that operate on them. > Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. Games are not solving any problems - they are entiertainment product. I've seen people who have tried to reason about games in the terms you're using, and it always yelded hillarious (but also sad) results.