I wasn't really around at the time but I think around 10-15 years ago there was a lot more optimism around open source games since that's where a lot of these [

I wasn't really around at the time but I think around 10-15 years ago there was a lot more optimism around open source games since that's where a lot of these [abandoned] projects come from. The dream of an open-source utopia probably died out for a few reasons but one fact is that many of those open source games were shit. Imagine being a kid whose friends all have a DS and mario kart but your dad is a big FOSS advocate and only lets you play SuperTuxKart.. Another reason is direction. The idea of having many random people contribute whatever they come up with works well for a lot of boring "practical" software but probably not very well for games, except things like Nethack and CDDA where having everything including the kitchen sink is one of the main points