So, as someone who has worked on both commercial and open-source video games, I can say this: You're wrong in a way that is non-obvious without getting really d

So, as someone who has worked on both commercial and open-source video games, I can say this: You're wrong in a way that is non-obvious without getting really deeply inside the creative perspective. The thing that games accomplish is to allow a study of some idea. The idea can be frivolous like Mario's jump and run, it can be a grim war simulator, it can be a portrayal of biographical experience or a mathematical exploration. But the intent of the vision, whatever it is, is negotiated between the author and audience as with every experience. This is why players of online games fret so much over small balance patches: is the game going closer to, or further away from, their vision? When it's open-source, author and audience are nearly the same, and so the loosely encompassing visions with broad-sweep productions that tend to be produced by commercial teams are mostly filtered out: in their place is a sense of evolving play to the extent that the game can encourage further study and development. Open game projects that are positioned to allow study through the development itself do well: People like contributing to Nethack because it's intrinsically interesting to work on, and the basic gameplay is such an established formula that it's not hard to accumulate more on top - development just extends to new scenarios indefinitely. On the other hand, visual novels are best suited to open engine tooling, because the study goal is not accumulative - you don't add more characters and subplots to develop a story - it's to use a common framework of storytelling and fill it up with a specific kind of study of your choosing, a mode of portrayal and thematic content. It would be like if Nethack supported alternate gameplay models that happen to share the style of graphics and menus. Even though visual novels tend to have simple rulesets, they all differ from each other. And I do agree that where proprietary stuff succeeds most is in that "singular new vision" context: but the moment you start generalizing and adding configuration knobs, it loses steam, and in the perspective of study, gaming often needs some configuration so that the space is further explorable.