[F3nd0]

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

[saghm]

In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/

It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.

[F3nd0]

Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.

https://openmw.org/

https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic

https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/

[dpoloncsak]

Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about.

PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material

[saghm]

Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.

[dpoloncsak]

I'm not entirely sure...I know the battle AI is custom, and a few moves are still not implemented. This makes me lean towards "they're scripting it themselves" but it could be a hybrid of the two for all I know

[saghm]

OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well!

This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...

(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)

[F3nd0]

Yes, there is <https://osgameclones.com/>. Note that not all of the listed games are free software, but many are.

[worble]

Luxtorpeda maintains a pretty comprehensive list of game reimplementations

https://luxtorpeda.org/packages

[t917910]

Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."

[zuzululu]

WTF!

That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2

I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT

[saghm]

Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).

[doctorpangloss]

what power, exactly? that nintendo doesn't care about these guys for some idiosyncratic reason?

[saghm]

The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.

I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.

[doctorpangloss]

IP law is peak law nerd, regular lawyers can't make any definitive statements about IP situations, what makes you think that you could?

[saghm]

Do you honestly think that most lawyers couldn't tell you that downloading the Linux source code for personal use is legal under IP law, or that dumping games from a Nintendo Switch and serving them on a website for public download is a violation?

If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.

It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.

[doctorpangloss]

> those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you

go ahead and ask. non-IP lawyers will tell you to talk to IP lawyers. another way to think of your two questions is, "in what scenarios would ... be permissible and not permissible, in your opinion?" if you were sincerely interested in learning something.

[joegibbs]

But why? Both the programmer and the artist have to eat, they both take pride in their work. What is the rationale for treating one side differently to the other?

[dangus]

This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.

And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.

It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.

Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.

This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.

[MYEUHD]

Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.

> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

This is not always the case. For example this game will be available on GOG on day 1. In fact you can pre-order it now: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gothic_1_remake

As another example, this game was released on GOG 5 months after the Steam release: https://www.gog.com/en/game/clair_obscur_expedition_33

Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.

All three of the examples I gave are $50 or more.

[Podrod]

You're wrong about Cyberpunk, it was released on both platforms on the same day. I mean it was CD Projekt's own store front.

[MYEUHD]

You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.

https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details

[dangus]

I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.

Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.

Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.

I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.

I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.

If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.

[MYEUHD]

> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.

It turns out I was wrong about Cyberpunk. It was released on GOG on day 1. https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details

The price chart on gogdb mislead me.

[dangus]

Ah I see. Yeah I actually thought that would be pretty strange since it was CD Projekt Red’s store.

[trinsic2]

I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.

THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.

The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.

[dangus]

I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.

A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.

I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.

[JacobKfromIRC]

There's also the free culture movement, which generally believes all creative works should be free, not just software.

There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml

That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).

[fasterik]

Why is there a distinction between software and art? Can't you make the same argument on both sides, either that artists should make their work freely available, or that programmers should retain the rights to their work?

[qq66]

I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)

[BlitzGeology91]

> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.

However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:

> Edge Cases

> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.

> […]

> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.

That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:

> Free programs

> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.

> […]

> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.

Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.

Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.

[1]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>

[2]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>

[ZeWaka]

Dwarf Fortress is a modern example of that paradigm.

[wtetzner]

As far as I know Dwarf Fortress is entirely closed source.

[ZeWaka]

I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.

However,

The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.

It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.

You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.

Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Raw_file

[TylerE]

In what way? I'm not seeing any.