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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Games like Battle for Wesnoth ( http://www.wesnoth.org ), Vega Strike ( http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net ), UFO : Alien Invasion ( http://www.ufoai.net ), Boson ( http://boson.eu.org ), Free Orion ( temporarily without a webhost ), and many more games that are emerging.
Thing is, the author of the article is right. It takes a large team a long time to create commercial grade games. That is why the open source model relies on a community effort and in some cases (such as Wesnoth and to a lesser degree Vega Strike) this has happened.
The more people that are aware of the open source model, then the more people that will attach themselves to communities and improve games that they like. It's all about market saturation, and the open source market just isn't saturated enough just yet. I've a feeling things are picking up though, from the momentum I've observed over the last few years, and that in 2-3 years time we may be talking differently about a core of excellent open source games that are solid and polished.