[jamalaramala]

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

[koonsolo]

Blender is great, I also use it. It's a nice example on how a non-developer tool is successful with open source.

There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they never gained any real traction.

I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have some big things planned :).

[mkesper]

I think Blender was (and still is) exceptionally good at community building. Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

[johnnyanmac]

Blender itself is also over 20 years old. And it struggled a lot even when opt source until several things came together at once. A mix of a UX overhaul, autodesk pissing off the community, and outreach yielding fruit as corporations experimented with adoption.

I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.

[Suppafly]

>Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see that advice all the time here and reddit and other places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if making it free would somehow increase sales for him.

[popcorncowboy]

Clearly you are unfamiliar with the process. Step 1, open source project. Step 2. Step 3, profit.

[jamalaramala]

* Step 1: Ask for $100,000 to fund the start-up

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)