A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.
Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren’t going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.
I have mentioned examples of games that saw commercial success while being open source. And of course, delayed open source is also an option as some other users have said here.
Shoutout to Frictional Games (known for Penumbra, Amnesia, Soma) who publish many of their older (commercially successfully) games on their GitHub: https://github.com/FrictionalGames
Great that they’re using the GPLv3 license too.
Sidebar: that’s why the Penumbra games have excellent VR support now, for those interested in shitting their pants.
Well, one of the alternatives is what ID Software used to do, where they would sell the game for a period of time and then open source the code Once sales dropped off.
Yee, you’re mot going to be hurt by open sourcing your game 5 or 10 years later. By that time practically nobody will buy your game anymore. And of the ones who still will,.they likely aren’t the ones that would even bother with looking for alternatives other than a big sale on a store page
But then, open sourcing adds to human culture, it lets others modify the game, or use it as a foundation for something new. And those things will credit you, and you will still get some extra benefit/good pr.
It’s just a good thing to do, imo.