shy_mia

shy_mia, 3 miesiące temu

Absolutely not. Compiled code is small, really small. I’d be surprised if the engine* itself as a whole was more than a gigabyte in size. It’s all about the assets that are included, how badly they’re compressed and how uselessly detailed some of them are.

*The embedded one of course. The editors are unruly beasts that’ll guzzle up your disk space, but then again it’s probably a similar situation…

shy_mia, 3 miesiące temu

Oops I’m stupid. I didn’t notice this was about Balatro, I lost track of the comment indentation and thought it was a general discussion. Yeah it’s probably the runtime and the other stuff then, my bad…

shy_mia, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Ah yes, closed source, such a dealbreaker, as if 99% of the other games weren’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against open source games, it’s just not a viable monetization strategy for most projects, and people gotta eat. There’s reason why most open source games are either passion projects or old games that have been open sourced simply as an act of kindness towards the community since they generate pretty much no revenue.

shy_mia, 7 miesięcy temu

I could see that being a thing, but the line between the engine and the game itself is a bit blurry in this context. Copyrighting just the assets and content would often not be enough. There will always be a good chunk of game code which isn’t strictly part of the engine but under this model should remain closed source, otherwise people could just bring their own assets.

Frankly I’d be satisfied with companies open sourcing their games after they stop supporting and/or selling them, mostly for preservation and all that. I think that would be a great middle-ground.

shy_mia, 7 miesięcy temu

Just open sourcing the actual engine wouldn’t do much. At best, you’d be able to make it work on newer hardware if problems arise, or port it to other OSs. Great stuff, but not enough when it comes to improving the game, preserving multiplayer, and so on.

There’s a great amount of scaffolding on top of the base engine that any moderately sized game implements, be it through scripting or native code. That’s what I meant by the line between the engine and the game being blurry. If you want to make meaningful changes to the game, you need access to that framework portion, but releasing it would allow for easy reverse engineering of everything else. It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

shy_mia, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Yours is a flawed, extremist view.
How impressive something is has nothing to do with whether or not its source is available. What, if they release it to the public it suddenly becomes impressive?
You can disagree with the method of distribution, but it doesn’t affect the quality of the game.

Piracy being a thing isn’t a strong argument for open sourcing everything, since the barrier of entry is higher than you may expect for non technical people, a barrier that would definitely be lower if any game was freely available and compilable by anyone. Someone will make a free, one click installer, guaranteed.

Now, can you charge for open source software? Definitely.
Will it generate significant revenue in most circumstances? No.

Open source software relies on two methods for funding:

• People’s good will, through donations
• Paid enterprise licenses and training

The former isn’t something one can stably rely on, the latter just isn’t applicable to games.
Again, that model can work for some high profile projects, but in the vast majority of cases, it won’t. Especially not for games.

One can make works of passion and still want to be compensated, that’s what artists do and games are a form of art. You clearly never had to put food on the table with the art you make.

Your vision of everything being open source is a utopia. A noble idea, for sure, but reality is much more bleak.

shy_mia, 7 miesięcy temu

Very mature