A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.
Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren’t going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.
Shoutout to Frictional Games (known for Penumbra, Amnesia, Soma) who publish many of their older (commercially successfully) games on their GitHub: https://github.com/FrictionalGames
The open sourcing of the quake engine is where a lot of modern engines got their roots.
Can you explain that? Are you saying there are modern engines using parts of quake 1 source code?
The engine Can of Duty uses is effectively a heavily modified quake 3 engine.
By this point it’s so modified it may as well be a different thing, but make no mistake it has evolved from the quake 3 engine.
The first 3 or 4 used quake 3 engine for sure, but didn’t they switch it at some point?
Edit: nm I found the wiki page on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
Tldr; it’s what you said
The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.
These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.
Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.
The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.
Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.
Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.
It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.
I am old enough that already have lost some childhood (e.g. early iPod touch) games to time
Like all the donout games Or papi games Doodle jump …
Some still exist, but got updates that they not at all behaving like remembered or having tons of ads making it impossible to game
As an example:
I am so happy that they released Hill Climb Racing again without ads, sadly it is on Apple Arcade, but luckily my parents have a Apple One subscription that I am allowed to use through family sharing (for the time being)
But if this subscription is ended, I have no way on playing Hill Climb Racing in a version without tons of micropayments and ads.
What do you guys think about releasing them on github for free but in official stores as paid?
I think it’d be good to release them under a timebomb license: closed source for 5 years, let the dev make money, after which they have to release their source under a permissive license.
For a company that is iterating on its products this is probably fine from a mechanical sense but would be a nightmare for their IPs.
Consider the early Super Mario series:
- 1985 - Super Mario Bros
- 1986 - Super Mario Bros: The lost levels
- 1988 - Super Mario Bros 2
- 1988 - Super Mario Bros 3
- 1990 - Super Mario World
- 1996 - Super Mario 64
If in 1990/people could legally make their own “lost levels”-esque remixes with the SMB1 engine that would be paltry competition with SMW.
Similarly if people started remixing SMW in 1995 it wouldn’t have stopped SM64 from defining the 3d platformer genre and presenting a very strong argument for the analog stick being required for any 3d console.
But if people could tell their own Mario stories, that might tarnish the brand. If that happened we might not still be getting Mario games today.
I’m not sure how you open source both engine and assets without losing control of the narrative.
Easy – Nintendo simply has to release innovative Mario game after innovative Mario game to keep the community efforts at bay.
Why maintain a 20 year old game, when you can play the latest game with the knowledge that it too will be open sourced in X years?
Yeah as far as gameplay mechanics go they would be fine, most main line Mario games have a unique gimmick.
I wonder if the family friendly branding would be as strong if people could publish rom hacks in retail channels.
Eh, that would disincentivize long-term updates.
Instead, 5 or 10 years of inactivity should be more than enough leeway.
On the other hand if the code from the 5 year old release was open source but the updates from today was still closed source for another 5 years that would encourage continual improvement addition content to differentiate from the community releases.
It wouldn’t be limited to community releases, though. Other companies could poach the source code for themselves, and I doubt that’s something easy to regulate.
True, “community” might not be the right term.
But nonetheless if the OG developer structures their license so that each version becomes open source after 5 years then people publishing that as is or creating forks will always be a few steps behind the official release.
Of course if the title has any kind of community support that crowd sourced effort has the potential to outshine the OG developer, its important they time their license to give themselves a head start.
I think Friday Night Funkin’ will turn into a cautionary tale here, by releasing their game with much hype and open sourcing their code the first 7 weeks in 2020-21 they allowed community to really flourish. The player community has created content and then content that builds on and responds to that content (both narratively and mechanically) for several cycles now. Much of this content is now viewed as core to the FnF experience by players but much of it is also now built around other people’s IP (video games, TV shows, music, etc)
At the same time The Funkin’ Crew has been quietly working on Friday Night Funkin’: The Full Ass Game but I suspect that as a commercial game bound by the resources of single dev team and the rule of law they will be hard pressed to compete with the community they spawned.
While this is a win for remix culture it might not turn out as being the most prudent business decision. On the other hand they pulled off a two million dollar kickstarter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
