I can’t believe indie devs like LocalThunk or Toby Fox don’t get any money when someone buys their games. It’s really bizarre.
Or do you mean, that there are open source game platforms out there that don’t pay the devs?
If all the money should go to the devs, every game would need to be self-published, and the store would not take a cut, which isn’t realistic, if you want the store or platform to have any features.
I mean that I don’t know of an opensource game store, let alone one that allows devs to get paid. There are stores out there where devs publish their opensource games, but the stores themselves are proprietary.
I’m not sure how an opensource game store could be monetized. It would probably be donations. A part of those could go to the game store devs. Probably the closest we’ll get to something like that is the Heroic Launcher. If they added an index of opensource games and had a distribution package (I assume it would be flatpak) and some method of payment or donation link, it could be possible.
The itch.io desktop app is open souce, but afaik the website isn’t. It does actually allow devs to get paid though, through charges or encouraged donations. There are some games you can get from flathub or the standard linux package managers, but they don’t have any built in features to pay devs.
The expensive part of hosting game files, pages, and mods isn’t really any different from what flathub or similar already does. I suppose cloud saves would require extra storage space, but I’d imagine an open source game store could charge for their cloud while also allowing p2p or a selfhosted cloud, which is a similar model to what a lot of open source projects with cloud features already do. That would be a fairly sustainable monetization scheme for the store I think, especially with donations on top of that.
Devs can be paid partially through donations, although I doubt that would be nearly enough without a system like Itch.io has where it always shows a payment screen that you have to click through before you can download the game. There are a couple more models, ArmorPaint is open source but you have to pay for binaries or compile it yourself, and Aesprite is source available (restrictive license) but takes a similar model. Overall though I don’t think open source games will ever become the standard, even for indie devs, and even if open source platforms do.
Fallout London currently has my attention. It's remarkable how it's possible to build a game that doesn't feel like a tiny playpark with the tech. London is BIG!
I’ve been boycotting CS2 (née CSGO) since November 2019 when they introduced Fortnite skins with annoying voices that you couldn’t turn off or disable.
I don’t think it has worked but I’m definitely never playing another Valve multiplayer game, they always turn out the same way.
Video game boycotts are an absolute fucking joke. Especially if organized here. I mean what % of consumers are on Lemmy? Like 0.00000000000000001%? For fuck sake.
I already do, but I’m also not as avid a gamer as I once was. Every FPS became borderline unplayable when loot crates became a thing. Call me old fashioned, but I liked when games had the same weapons for everyone, and there weren’t random cards or whatever that made people’s guns more powerful / reload /shoot faster, etc. It really brings an imbalance to the game, and enables these stupid gambling sites. The companies making the games are making money hand over fist, so they aren’t going to stop any time soon barring regulation, and looking at this administration, good fucking luck with that. Boycott away.
I'm in the complete opposite side of this spectrum. I just feel apathy towards people who call the PSX "PS1", even though I am not sure if they're talking about the real PS One or just being ignorant.
Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?
Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.
How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)
One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)
While I agree with the spirit of moat answers, I don’t think that the few of us boycotting such popular games will harm or affecg them at all. We are a very small minority.
However, I do think we can support a sustainable niche market of good and sensible games.
So I think a it’s a better use of anyone’s time to try and support good games than spend your energy on bad games.
Do what you think is right, but spend some time to consider whether you want to reward someone or some organization with your hard earned money if you consider what they are doing immoral or bad.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne