Comment by lenerdenator

Comment by lenerdenator 2 days ago

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.

hombre_fatal 2 days ago

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.

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spencerflem 2 days ago

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

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