[scrollaway]

Funny how often, musicians and directors feel the same about their work and encourage people to "illegally" download their products.

I don't think developers are the problem.

I've played World of Warcraft a lot. It's a game that has affected tens of millions of people directly, and hundreds of millions indirectly (through WoW's influence on other games, game models and so on). It has built careers, businesses, companies, and so on.

Yet one day, it'll close down and nobody will ever be able to play it. All that'll be left will be the game files - 3d models - and a lot of screenshots.

Sad.

[zanny]

There are hundreds of private servers out there. I know of at least six that are near-perfect recreations of vanilla, BC, wrath, and even cata. If the main game died, these private servers would continue to exist. Most of them are actually self-funded and self-sufficient as is. I played expensively on a Cataclysm private server, because I had quit in the first patch due to brokeness and never had a chance to actually see Deathwing (in its intended form at level 85) because Pandas had come out by then.

In reality, the game has gone away. Every time a new expansion has come out and reset everything millions of people had their old game taken and were given a new game. And sometimes, they didn't like the new one, and sought the old one. And even if it is illegal, the market is providing their demands. There are even a few open source projects for server cores to run WoW on.

[cookiecaper]

I'm sure WoW's community would find a way to keep the game alive with relatively few alterations. There's no reason someone can't write a third-party world viewer and/or server that would still allow people to enjoy a more or less authentic WoW experience.

I actually think it'd be really exciting for someone to write a compatible client for a 3D game like that and release it. What would FreeTF2 look like? The idea of multiple clients implementing a proprietary game netcode and all simultaneously playing together is really interesting to me, at least.

This has happened with Second Life but only because Linden Lab explicitly facilitated it. They actively encourage third-party developers and release the code of their official reference client. Second Life The Network is also basically just a bunch of scripts and textures coming down the pipe so it's easier to implement than say an unofficial client for an FPS or RTS, which is very likely much more opaque.

[clarry]

I agree about WoW. I've never played it, but I could imagine loving it. Chances are I never will though.

> I don't think developers are the problem.

It depends on the project. So I guess big commercial titles have other problems. Smaller groups though -- whether indie game studios or just individuals making freeware games (Dwarf Fortress, anyone?) -- they're usually what the developers make of it. And it very often is the case that the developers do not care about others' freedoms or portability and all that. It's too much work, nobody uses that platform, we don't care about minority users, whatever. The same old excuses, which are mostly BS.

[pjmlp]

Because you know, the baker, the supermarket, the landlord all accept the said BS as payment.

It is very easy to wave BS to software developers. Now try to earn a steady income from FOSS desktop software.

[clarry]

Way to miss the point. Now try to read again and understand.

Giving users the source so they can help themselves has nothing to do with landlords and supermarkets. It can get you more money though, by increasing the user base and making more happy users. It can make your game sell for much longer. Doom still sells, and people play it on the weirdest of platforms. And if the developers cared enough, they'd learn that it doesn't necessarily take much effort at all to make code easier to port. But you do have to care. If you don't, and you write code under the assumption that you won't and nobody else should port it, then the result won't be very nice.

So maybe you could still play Doom on dosbox or in a VM, but I don't think it'd sell much if they hadn't given the source that allowed people to create legal ports for modern systems, with features that make the game more enjoyable. People still enjoy Doom.

[throwawaykf05]

> It can get you more money though, by increasing the user base and making more happy users. It can make your game sell for much longer.

Does not follow. There is no evidence that you can make more money by simply open sourcing your project. In fact, judging from the number of popular, widely used open source projects reduced to begging for donations, it's precisely the opposite. You may simply be assuming as true the same excuses that pirates use to justify their piracy, saying "Hey, I'm giving you free advertising!", completely overlooking the fact that 1) advertising in itself does not feed the creators, and 2) they're primarily advertising it to people just like them, who'll also simply pirate the product.

Look at the companies making the most money in software. Then look at the companies making money from open source software. Note: not companies that use open source or open up some of their non-core code, but those whose primary product is open source, such as Red Hat. There's a few orders of magnitude of difference in revenues. This despite Linux running the vast majority of servers on the Internet and in data centers. Why is this?

While open source proponents like to live in an ideal world where everybody shares their code and collaborates, the harsh truth is that the vast, vast majority of the world will take what it can and give nothing back. That is not conducive to building a viable business when by open sourcing your code, you're essentially make your product even easier to be taken for free.

[clarry]

Way to miss the fucking point. Now try to read again and understand. Pay attention to the words I make. Note the example I made.

Freeing the code is a first, inevitable step.

This is what id has done with the Doom and Quake series. These games still sell! And we can play these games on whatever platform, with whatever custom features, because the source was released and people picked it up and made it work and improved it.

You're completely overlooking the fact that freeing a game's source code is completely different from making the entire game free. Business continues as usual: they sell the actual game, which people need to actually play it.

Companies whose source code is their entire core product are completely different. You cannot make a relevant point by talking about their problems.