Comment by lenerdenator 2 days ago
I think the same thing. Metroid is good, but is it $250+ good? Meh.
Microsoft more-or-less does the same thing with Windows in the personal consumer market. With Office being online these days, the primary motivation for a lot of people to buy a Windows license for a computer instead of using Linux or buying a Mac is gaming, along with pure inertia.
This will be a problem with everything until games are FLOSS.
I actually don't think there is a big obstacle to this. Most people don't care about FLOSS and don't even know what it is, so I think that shouldn't really affect sales. I think companies are just worried about people stealing their code to use it for more "undesirable" (to them) things like cheating and mods, and then having to go after them for it because you do actually have to try to defend your copyright/trademarks if you want to keep them.
People will know and care instantly when there's an easily accessible storefront like app with those games one click away and perfectly legal. Same reason excellent tools like Aseprite are no longer floss - it got packaged (legally) in Debian and others and why on earth would you go way out of your way to buy it, or even think that they might be trying to charge.
I don't think games companies are against mods generally, many have steam workshop support built in. Nintendo as the big exception here ofc.
Cheating is ofc a huge problem for multiplayer games and can absolutely tank some genres. Very mixed feelings about the kernel level rootkit type spyware but there's no denying that games companies are paying big money to put them there for the players benefit.
I don't think a majority of people will even go to alternative storefronts to get the software in big enough numbers to matter. I think it's more of a legal concern than a monetary (sales) one, but I could be wrong.
I think you're right, as it stands now, especially for platforms like Android with one canonical store that already has many free offerings. I use fdroid because i love the philosoply and am willing to put up with it but to be clear, the apps there are unprofessional and ugly and I get why most people don't.
But if this became a common practice I think people absolutely would. Tons of professional quality games instantly available for free is such an incredibly good value.
You could probably get away with a purely volunteer effort on... eh, how to describe this... like Super Mario 64 for Mac/Linux/PC.
And I do mean Super Mario 64 with respect to the technology/artwork level. Which is fine by me.
But the big AAA games and the multiplayer games that all of the hip young people with their poggers Twitch streaming and their deadass rock music play? Yeah, can't build those given the state of everything these days.
On the other hand, games are so hard to build and require so much vision that despite decades of gaming history, volunteers/hackers are mostly limited to modifying existing games rather than building a game from scratch.
You use Super Mario 64 as some sort of low/achievable bar for what volunteers might be able to build, as if SM64 is an easy game to build, yet nobody is building games like that on a volunteer basis.
Even look at the engineering that went into OpenMW: once again hackers were only able to recreate a game engine that runs existing game files (Morrowind) which is the easy part of building a game.
Most successful games, AAA or indie, are the result of years of full time work, most of which is making the content. I just don't see that being possible in general, without being independently wealthy.
Games also benefit from a single vision in general, which is hard to square with volunteer style development.
There are certainly exceptions of games that are built as a community: nethack, space station 13, idk probably a third one. But I just can't see this being commonly done until we figure out how free software devs can eat.
With that said: I love free software and hope this problem is solvable, but unless society changes dramatically we may need to learn to do without not just AAA scope games, but even Stardew Valley scope games
> This will be a problem with everything until games are FLOSS.
I mean there is nothing stopping that right now. You can give up your time and learn game programming and asset design and make a game and give it away for free.
Sadly, I don't think games will ever be FLOSS until we figure out how to get people to pay for FLOSS software.