Linked by Adam Geitgey on Tue 31st Aug 2004 20:12 UTC
Despite the impressive list of achievements of open source software, it can be argued that there have not been any world-class games created under the open source banner. Sure, several old games like Doom and Quake have been gifted to the open source community, but there are no comparable original creations in this area. One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.
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Rab,
you are talking fanatically and without objectivity.
Nethack is great for what it is --my husband loves it too-- but it is like trying to learn VIM or Emacs. People who play games, don't want to study a whole encyclopedia before they start playing a game. It is not for everyone, in fact it is for VERY FEW people, even if Nethack is on the same par of GOOD open source development projects like Apache, PostgreSQL or Subversion.
And I don't think that "Open Source games focus on being addictive and fun to play". Most open source games are just games, designed by amateurs, who just learning some C and some SDL programming, or who just want to re-implement a game they loved once in their Amiga or their Windows PC.
But the reality is, as the article explained, that the times CHANGE. Market-quality games DO become harder and harder to develop every day because of the complexity in the AI and graphics. OSS can never --ever-- beat a good commercial game that took 2-3 years to make for a closed team working full time together, every day and researching on the same time for better algorithms.
You can disagree all you want, and give us poor examples like nethack (which I agree is great, but not for most people), but reality is, where is the Black&White in the OSS world? Where is DungeonKeeper or SimCity etc? Nowhere. These games are so complex and involve so many different skills, that the OSS model just doesn't work as well as a company-model would do.