this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
93 points (94.3% liked)
Games
32386 readers
2235 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you actually want to make games for a living, then don't do open source. Have people pay for enjoying your work. If it is a hobby, open source may be beneficial, because you can then team up with other hobbyists.
You can charge people for open source software. Most people on Steam won't bother building your game from source even if it's not difficult and you distribute the assets freely.
Fair point. But then, would anyone actually care that it is open source? I am not sure if there is a larger target group that would be more inclined to buy a game because of that. Maybe you can use it for marketing though?
Marketing would be one and open source, democracy and freedom (fediverse anyone?) are kind of getting popular I think. Probably good to jump in now.
Besides that, open source means your game will probably outlive you. For example, the assets are mostly what the game looks like and they often are excluded so you cant just build it from source but you can help make it better.
And if your game is good, people will just clone it. See gta and minecraft.