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Yeah so to clarify my bit about open source I have two points: 1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game.
by larsiusprime 5y ago
Yeah so to clarify my bit about open source I have two points:
1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game. If you scan social media you'll see that this is what keeps the community excited and engaged when the authors themselves are not putting out updates.
2) I mention it because many people see being open source as a liability because of concerns about cloning. Seeing a FOSS game like this pull in literal millions shows that at least in this one case, FOSS games aren't literally doomed to failure because of being FOSS, is all.
So my position is, no actual players care that you have a github repo with source available, unless that actually affects them somehow, and in FNF's case I argue it does affect them by enabling the community to keep making more weird content for the game (though it could be achieved in other ways, like using a modding API like [polymod](https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod), which it has been integrating with recently).
- utzucto 5y agoI totally agree. It can have a lot of upsides that people ignore because they're afraid of someone eating their lunch with a 5min clone job. If it sounded like I was implying that no one actually thinks going FOSS is a bad idea, I wasn't. I totally believe you, I'm just not in the games industry so I wouldn't know first hand what people think about it. I just brought this up since it's something I've been thinking about as I work on my own projects which may or may not involve any monetization. My first instinct was to default to closed source and open up if I had a compelling reason to, but I've come around to starting open. Even without the benefits of easy modding and that stuff, I think there's also a bit of good will that you gain from being open source, although I'm sure most players don't care whether its FOSS or just has a modding API.