[plopz]

Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.

[Teifion]

I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.

[redrobein]

I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.

[NortySpock]

Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.

You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)

The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...

https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...

[Teifion]

The current version isn't on steam due to a variety of (mostly infrastructure related) issues, the free version _will_ be on steam in the future though you will still be able to get the free version from the website for those who want to avoid steam.

[Panzer04]

Well, they can't sell out the game code. That's not how GPL works.

[gacgacgac]

Yes they absolutely can? Anyone can. I can.

The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.

[kcb]

That's not it. They will keep the assets closed and under license. There will be no free version of the full game.

Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.

[gacgacgac]

Which assets? The textures, models, and animations are Creative Commons (various flavors, mostly non commercial).

If the code is open source, one can always build a client that works with the Creative Commons assets or community contributed ones.

[Teifion]

The multiplayer game (the thing available now) will remain free including all the updates and improvements to it. What will be behind a one-off-payment will be the campaign. We've had a few bad actors spread word that the entire thing is going to be behind paywall, microtransactions, pay-to-win etc but none of that is true.

[kcb]

I think their plan is to make assets closed licensed. It's all pretty lame. Now any open source code contribution is packaged up and sold with someone else getting the check.

[falcor84]

Fighting fire with fire, what's to stop me from using GenAI "create new versions of all of these assets but with a Norse twist" and publish these under my GPL+CC BY-SA 4.0 fork?

[etdznots]

They’ll probably suck and the only person that will care is you.

[orthoxerox]

Nothing at all.

[netsharc]

I'm pretty sure you can. But if it's GPL, you need to provide source to the buyer, and the buyer can publish that source for free.

[inigyou]

Yes they can. Firstly, you can do anything and then someone may or may not sue you for it and they may or may not win. Secondly, if you're the copyright owner you can do whatever you like.

[fluoridation]

The owner of the copyright can do as they please with the licensing. What I've not seen is someone retroactively changing licensing terms, but even that might be possible.

[gertrunde]

The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.

(In theory!)

[insanitybit]

What do you mean?

[PtaQQ]

Hi, PtaQ here, Community manager for BAR. The idea behind the monetisation is to sell what has been built through the publishing funds. Everything available today and a lot more content will be released for free too and always available.

Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.

The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.

The post below explains it in detail.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...