Why there isn’t any open source alternative to big commercial games out there? [closed]

Question

I’m thinking of all type of game categories. My experience is that there aren’t any open source games that really challenge the commercial ones, considered game value, graphics, sounds etc.

Answer 1

Apart from the obvious answer of law-suits (remember the Aliens mod that received cease-and-desist letters), the other answer is cost. It takes hundreds of people to create a game like Civ 5 (artists, managers, programmers) and the cost is immense. These people are working on it for 5 days a week, 7.4 hours per day (more towards milestones) and open source alternatives are done in spare time around real jobs (not that game coding isn't a real job).

For a good open source game take a look at FreeCiv.

Answer 2

Several reasons come to mind:

• It takes dozens if not hundreds of contributors over several years to create a major game title. An open source project of this magnitude would need lots of followers who are prepared to stick with it for a very long time. It would also require some people who are willing to coordinate the other developers (producers).

• The replay value of a game is limited. Most people just play it through once and then move on to the next title. This differs it from an open source application or library which is always useful as long as you depend on it. This probably makes it much more difficult to find long-term commited developers.

• I can't think of any business model related to open source games. Nobody would pay for support or much needed changes in the source code. Nor is there any agenda that bigger companies might be able to fulfill by funding an open source game project.

• Contrary to popular belief, making games is not per se more fun than making applications (At least not for me, I've tried both).

Answer 3

It takes about eighty people working more than full time for two years to make a major game. (Some take more -- Assassin's Creed 2 was about 130, I think -- some take less.) These people must be real experts at what they do, and you need a lot of diverse skills: programmers, artists, writers, actors, sound designers, level designers, producers, QA.

Let's say you want to make a world-class game that competes with the chart-toppers on graphics, art, sound, design, the whole deal. You need world-class people doing this work: for example, animators who would otherwise be working full-time at Pixar or Weta. To get someone to work for you full-time instead of going to Pixar, you're going to need to pay them, a lot.

A game isn't the sort of thing where you can take what would be 40 hours of work for one person and spread it across one hour of work for forty people. It takes a lot of arduous, unfun work. It's not just programming the graphics engine -- it's testing the same broken thing over and over and over again, fixing a bug that appears only on a Windows Vista machine running a particular ATI card, painting bumpmaps onto fifty slightly different kinds of crate. Volunteer hobbyists tend to "scratch their own itch", do the thing that's interesting to them and leave it to someone else to polish.

It takes a lot of capital to make a game. You need a high-end workstation for each dev, sometimes two. Big screens. Fancy tablets for the artists. Maya licenses (there's no open source tool even remotely comparable). Are you making a console game? The development kits are $10k apiece. Doing motion capture? $500 an hour to rent the studio. Hiring voice actors? SAG scale starts at $800 per day. Having Some Guy From The Forums perform the roles just won't get a professional result. Plus electricity for all this, a building to put it in.

It's expensive, and it takes a lot of very specialized expertise, working for a long time even when they're tired and stressed and don't really agree with the Creative Vision, but need to finish the job anyway. You're going to have a hard time convincing really talented people to do that for free.