Were those golden times before?

mdtrooper

To give some context. I am a 44 year old Spanish computer scientist and of course a fan of free software.

I remember the times of HappyPenguin.org (maybe 2002) and although there were no games of similar quality to the commercial ones, there was new news and there were people trying to make new and better games.

I wonder, if it is a fallacy that the old times were always better. And that in those days we didn't have internet anytime, anywhere, and maybe we went on the internet a couple of times a week.

But it was a feeling that there were new projects more often (in the old sourceforge) or new versions.

When Godot came out in 2014, I thought that this tool was going to help an explosion of new games, as it happened a bit with LibSDL or pygame in the past. But there was no explosion with Godot.

Maybe I should take some free time to do a statistical study (because that's the good thing about free software, there is public data about release dates and other things) to know if it's my feeling or if it has some truth.

poVoq

mdtrooper Godot has been quite successful with commercial indie devs.

farrer

On the old forums this was discussed some times throughout the years, as far as I remember. Some personal thoughts:

The FLOSS game scene lost a lot of momentum back in the final 2000s and 2010s, imho largely due to some cases of indie games success, both on mobile market and / or on those then relatively new publisher platforms (steam and others). I do remember some people stopping working on FLOOS games and trying to make some on these markets (which soon became saturated, btw). I believe that the majority of new developers (those born on 1990s and 2000s) who before used to join the FLOSS scene (as we that born on the 1980s and before done), joined instead the indie scene.
In my view, this partially explains the Godot success among indie developers and the somewhat few doing FLOSS games on it.
Another point - and maybe this is a reminiscent one - that influence our feel of lesser gsmes is the lack of a central place of divulgating FLOSS games since the end of HappyPenguin: neither the old freegamer blog and the now long defunct lgdb.org took the place that HappyPenguin once had. The emergence of (anti)social networks platforms also aggravated this, with the generational gap of new people not being familiar with forums and other kind of systems outside those big-techs platforms.
An statiscal analysis would be great (I'm conjecturing based only on my feelings). But even if new great FOSS games do exists (some obfuscated and hard to find on github and others "free" repositories, and some great works shown here on this forum and its old archived encarnation), I also have the feeling that they are much less (in numbers) than they were on the 2000s. Which is sad, as the FLOSS libraries / engines today are so much more advanced (and easy) than what we had back on the 2000s and before...
And my last personal point: we that were active back than, as we became older, real life got in the way (at last in mu case), and we aren't (or I ain't) so active in the scene as before. With the new generations not arriving in the scene - going to the indie one, instead - the FLOSS game scene became even tinier throughout the years.

Anyway, how can we make the FLOSS game scene thriving (or emergent) again? I don't known... Everything that was tried here on freegamedev (and that's a lot, thanks afaik, to Julius) didn't change our scene decadence. Maybe with people desiluding with the indie scene (or a new generation more militant on FLOSS) could change that on the next years/decades, but unfortunately, it's something, for now, very far away from the current status of the FLOSS game scene.

(Ouch, too much to write when I finally registered on the new forums, although I was always anonymously reading the topics here every week or so).

Elouin

farrer I believe that the majority of new developers (those born on 1990s and 2000s) who before used to join the FLOSS scene (as we that born on the 1980s and before done), joined instead the indie scene.

Thats also how i would see it. And sadly only very few games try to do both and i dont really get why. In general i find it weird how many people think that something thats FOSS cant be "commercial".

Now that i think about it, Mindustry is the only one that i can think off, which has code and assets licensed freely and yet is something i would call a typical indie game sold on multiple platforms. Other Games like Kandria or Barony are FOSS, but have non free assets.

I would love to see more FOSS indie games, because why not have both?

Technopeasant

I would definitely say the early 2000s were the peak of the FLOSS gaming scene, partly because the commercial options on Linux were more scarce (and Wine was not what it is today), but also because the indie movement had yet to take over the retro hobbyist niche that a lot of FLOSS games were aiming for at the time. Sadly, we never truly kept up with that, though as is widely admitted there probably are just too many games out there now period, making it hard for any to stand out one way or another.

anaseto

Elouin Thats also how i would see it. And sadly only very few games try to do both and i dont really get why. In general i find it weird how many people think that something thats FOSS cant be "commercial".

Maybe most game devs who want to make "commercial" games fail to be interested by FOSS because most of their players don't care. Also, going "commercial" usually means the dev cares about benefits, so I'd imagine they are less likely to do it unless they see a benefit in going FOSS, like using FOSS as some kind of marketting label (and I'm not sure how that would work in the case of a game).

And doing a "commercial" game as a solo dev is not easy (doing all the coding, marketting, graphics, and so on). So ideally you'd need to find a more complete team with several people who truly care about FLOSS and those FLOSS teams generally only form over years after a project's first release.

Technopeasant

Yeah, there is absolutely no reason why indie games can't be FLOSS, it just is not pervasive in the culture.

TPW

Well, well, well.
I wasn't around in the early 00s, but from what I can tell, the "FLOSS-game-scene" clearly has shrunken quite a bit. Many of the points farrer made ring true to me - additional factors might be the increased complexity and expectations towards video games, the wearing out of the technical edge that the release of the Quake3-Sourcecode brought to the community, and the breaking away of the Linux community from FLOSS gaming.

But: If you only look at the source code/binary side of things, I'd say that there are more games with a FLOSS base than ever before; not just Godot, but also Twine, Bitsy, and various smaller game engines. Most of the people who use them do not identify with the FLOSS scene, though, but if we only take the fundamental definition of free software/games, I'd argue that there are much more now than in 2005.

If you ignore these, and only count games that were intentionally made as "Open Source" games, you can also find some within the whole indie space, and I've seen a few where the devs were convinced FLOSS-advocates - but most of them aren't connected to the scene here (this forum, the blog, the LibreGameWiki). "Fully Libre" games are, however, scarce (many small productions use assets that were either bought, are used with unclear licensing, or were made for the game - in the first two cases, they can hardly be rereleased under a new license, in the last case there is no clear benefit from turning them free for the devs, and thus it is seldom done).

All of these newer "free games" are usually smaller and less elaborated than the "old flagships", but are usually more unique when it comes to design and gameplay (which I consider overall a good thing).

I believe that one of the problems of FLOSS gaming is that most of the people who associate with it are mainly developers; there ain't much discussion about the games released, and multiplayer servers tend to be empty - which is a vicious cycle, as it reduces the attractivity for both new devs and players to interact with the scene. I think that things like the "OnFoss"-events are a good idea, although I didn't manage to partake at one until now :3.

Technopeasant

TPW The point that most of us are developers rather than players rings very true. I do try to play other people's games, but I honestly don't play games all that much or for that long. Granted since buying a house I have not had time to develop games either...