Open Source and Games

Motivations for Open Sourcing

Why do people Open Source code in general? Looking at a lot of Open Source code I came in contact with I can probably assign each piece of code into one of four categories:

Working with Others

If you want to work together with other people, Open Sourcing code is a great idea. If you want to connect different systems it makes a lot of sense to make the communication interface open source so that everybody can work on that. I think the buzzword for that is probably “interoperability”.

Community Maintenance

If a company went out of business or is no longer maintaining a particular piece of software, projects are often opened for everybody.

Marketing

Some people open source code for marketing reasons. These releases come often with ridiculous strings attached to the license or are missing essential bits. At the very least, these projects are not noticed as Open Source projects, even if they are technically Open Source.

Because it makes sense

Certain things only make sense to be distributed as open source. Either because people expect it to be open source (like libraries for Python or other dynamic programming languages) or because there is just no reason to keep it closed. My stuff falls under this category for instance. None of the Pocoo projects would work in any way if they would not be Open Source.

Users of Open Source Code

However, independently of that there are also motivations for using Open Source code. And that's actually the more tricky piece. There are people that use Open Source code for political reasons, for learning, because they are the best solution available or because they like the fact that they have access to the code and are more flexible that way.

Political Reasons

The Free Software Foundation, the majority of the people working on the GNU projects and more are probably doing their development for political reasons. They write the software for the sake of the software being free. Those are noble reasons but quite irrelevant for the rest of the world unless those tools become the best tools available.

Learning

Whenever I try to learn something new that relates to programming, I will try to either study similar Open Source code upfront of compare my own code with it. That works quite well independently of whatever license the code is under, because things I do for the sake of learning are usually not released to other people. And even if I would release that code, I have no troubles using a matching license.

Best Solution Available

Apple for instance chose the GCC compiler toolkit because it was the best one available for the price. Apple's motivation was that they can distribute the compiler to anyone as cheaply as possible. At the same time however Apple was always terribly afraid of the “must remain open” part of the license. They would much rather have a license without that clause attached. That might also explain a lot why they invest a lot of time and money into the development of the LLVM infrastructure and the clang compiler that is based on it.

Working with Others

This might actually be the only part where the reasons for open sourcing match perfectly up with the user's reasoning. If you want to work together the lines between user and developer blur. It's very likely that contributions will come from both sides with the intent to make the system better. Unless of course one side wants to harm the other one, but then one can hardly speak about “working together” any more.

In An Ideal World …

So as mentioned earlier the Humble Indie Bundle campaign managed to convince developers to send a “Thank You” to the community by releasing the code under open source licenses. The motivation there is both a marketing reason (might convince other people to spend more money) and because it made sense for them. They earned a lot of money with that and they can strengthen the trust with the community by giving back.

Now in an ideal world they could open source everything, but that won't work in practice. From what I have seen it is very hard to make a living just from independent game development. If you would give away all your assets you are basically removing any reason for people to still buy the game. Even with the income spike of the Humble Indie Bundle it's not very likely that the developer will have enough money to create another game. At least not with a reasonable buffer in case times become rough. Giving away everything under an open source license does not seem to be a wise step.

But who would be the users of such Open Source game? The average gamer does not have anything from available sourcecode. Except for maybe a few modifications more that wouldn't have been possible without access to the source. Maybe also a few bugfixes more for issues the original developers could not reproduce. People that want to earn money with a derived game can't use it obviously. These open source releases are all under the GPL license. No sane developer that wants to sell software would attempt to base his game on a GPL software when there are no commercial licensing terms available. And if there are, there are better engines available then the ones these developers wrote for themselves. Not because they wrote bad software — not at all — but because they wrote engines for their specific games. Those were never designed to be used for arbitrary games unlike real commercial engines. Even if you would accept the GPL licensing terms you could never ever bring your game to a mobile console, the XBOX 360 or something similar. These systems are fundamentally incompatible with the GPL's license terms.

So this pretty much leaves people that want to learn game development or people that would write open source games for political reasons. And on top of that: people that profit from the available code for better mods (the hardcore community of the game).

I personally would love to actually have the photoshop/gimp etc. source files for the assets to see how those were created. I don't care too much about the actual license of those. I wouldn't have any problems with a non open source license like a creative commons noncommercial/attribution one. However if people would want to create a real Open Source version of the game, they could do that step by step. And seeing how much work went into the assets of these games I doubt a true Open Source version would be ready before the developer creates it's next game. It's even questionable if these derived games would even have the same quality as the original one.

The most interesting part here however is piracy. What are piracy rates for indie games? Something way above 80% last time I looked. That's a damn lot. The fact that independent developers make any game seems to be that they have a trustworthy community that honors their achievements in game design and artstyle. Independent developers don't have the money (and don't want) to sue people downloading pirated copies from their favorite bittorrent tracker. From that point of view, it does not matter if a gamer downloads the game for free on a website that uploaded a compiled version of the open sourced game or from piratebay.

I am quite sure that with a carefully crafted license one could still sell the game and also have it under an Open Source-ish license.

The Issue is a Cultural One

The core issue here however is not that the assets are special: the assets are not more special than the code is. But one needs both to do something with it. And people chose to open source the code and not the assets for two simple reasons:

1. Assets are visible to the player. The player can't see the code, but the player can see the 3D models, textures. The player can listen to the music, hear the sounds and more.
2. Programmers love Open Source, Artists not so much.

I find that very interesting. It's not hard to spot an engine by its characteristics even if you don't have access to the code. A lot of quake engines don't even try to hide their origin and still provide the same console commands and movement behavior. The Unreal engine can be easily noticed from looking at the file system and depending on the version of the engine and the environment it's running in, you can tell it by the way it loads textures.

And programmers always modify the engine to do something new with it. Just using something unchanged is uninteresting. I don't think this is unique to programmers, that's how we work as humans. I think if one would release the assets instead of the source code under an open source license we wouldn't suddenly see the same unmodified textures, sprites and models appearing in every single open source game. But what we might see are more people opening those up in their 3D programs and playing around with them.

We as programmers often grew up in Open Source environments. Yet we do understand that Open Source code does not necessarily mean we make money from it. Only if we're lucky and use the downsides of open code to our advantage. We have so many Open Source projects that we can't even count them.

But what about artists? Yes there is Jamendo and a few other places where you can find Creative Commons licensed music, but the general consensus is that once you're known, you move away from it. The few people I know that make music never every consider giving away music. And from the well known musicians only Trent Reznor comes to mind when talking about Creative Commons licensed music.

The whole modding community for computer games to a large degree consists of people doing 3D models, textures, mapping and more. Very few of these mods are actually released with sources. They don't even have any kind of license attached most of the time. Yet they depend on the ability to remix an existing game.

Independent developers often claim to make up for their smaller budget with deeper game concepts and stories. And looking at games like “Braid” I can only agree with that. However what about stepping into a new direction the next time you open source something, and actually share the assets too? Maybe on a game where the financial hit wouldn't be too terrible. I don't think anyone actually attempted having an open source game that at the same time still sells.

And if that does not work out, why not open source assets and music instead of the code? Especially if the assets require attribution, there is no reason why it shouldn't drive traffic back to the original creators.

And with that: Happy Christmas everybody and a big “Thank You” to the independent game community and all people behind the Humble Indie Bundle. Indie games are what brought me back to graphic programming because they show that even with a limited budged and simpler artstyle you can create great games. And without realization that I wouldn't have learned a whole lot new things over the last few months.