Submitted by Duion on
I still remember all those people telling me things like "Dude you need to use social media for marketing etc it is so great and will do so much" and similar things, so I looked into it and used some methods of course and this will be a little breakdown of the results.
So these are the things I tried:
Youtube:
Submitted by Duion on
Some time ago I watched a presentation about indie games and how much money they earn and the result was that 82% of all indie games make less than minimum wage, 7% make enough to at least survive and only 11% make profit. To make it simpler, you got a 90% change of failure, if you go into indie game development. Imagine applying for a job and the boss tells you "Well if you work here, there will be an 82% chance you will be paid worse than in any other job or not paid at all, 7% chance you get the worst payment and 11% chance you get more than the minimum".
Submitted by Duion on
Of course I'm still observing the open source game development scene (which is mostly nonexistent, but this is not the topic now) and noticed a clear trend towards mobile game development, so much that almost everything looks to be just geared towards the mobile market. It seems to have been an easy transition, since the open source game development scene was mostly 2D or retro game development anyway, but now the rise of the mobile market has given it so much justification that basically everything is just mobile game development now and nobody tries to do something real anymore.
Submitted by Duion on
Well this is mostly from my experience in the past, but now I think I got enough confirmation that I can formulate this as a theory, at least regarding game development:
Proprietary developers benefit the open source development more, than the idealistic people dedicated to open source development.
Submitted by Duion on
After my article on why most open source game art is useless I wanted to also take a closer look on the usefulness of game asset stores. Since they are quite common now and an essential part of most game engines, people might think they are very useful and a great invention, so let us break down if that is true.
Submitted by Duion on
Well first let me tell you the events that lead me to this conclusion. My initial idea was to create an open source 3D shooter, because there was no actively developed 3D shooter for years now, so I thought I just make one on my own. I thought it cannot be that hard, since open source gives you so much benefits, like using other people's work and combining it to something new, so you end up with much less work. There were certain things on my checklist of what I need like:
1. Open Source game engine
2. Open source game code
Submitted by Duion on
This is kind of a follow up to my previous blog: "Why I don't use the GPL-license" since I realized the problem is much bigger than just the question what license to use, the problem expands to the whole open source movement.
Submitted by Duion on
First when I got into game design I did not bother that much about licenses, I thought open source is open source. Torque3D was MIT-license, which is a liberal license, so I thought, well good for me that the license is so liberal and I just kept it as it is.
Submitted by Duion on
Hello Internet, over all those years of being into open-source game development I just have to tell someone my experiences with that.
Let's just start with the biggest problem right ahead and the biggest problem with the nonexistent open-source game development community is its nonexistentness and the biggest problem with nonexistent things is, that they don't exist.
Submitted by Duion on
In the past I always thought people really mean it seriously, if they complain about bad products or shady business practices from companies and therefore want improvement of the situation. I don't want to go into detail about those shady practices, since there are a lot of them, but in its core it is all about milking as much money from the customer while at the same time spending as little as possible into the development, this results in never fixing issues with the game or just abandoning it straight after it was released and those games that do not get abandoned get filled with microtransactions which results in the game experience being destroyed, since it is no longer a fair game which makes it meaningless to play on a competitive level. Most peopel probably know the problems very well, since they complain about them and even make documentaries explaining all in detail whats wrong.
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