Open source gaming… pointless or the savior of the industry?
I was browsing through my feeds from the past week trying to come up with a column topic, you know, so the good folks at Gaming Clarity don’t fire me on week two, when I ran across a very interesting Ars Technica review on an import only, open source handheld game system.
Emulation Station GP2X F-200 gaming handheld reviewed
The device has some impressive power for the $169 price tag, and in their opinion is worth the money just for the ability to emulate every game system from the Commodore 64 through the PS1. Assuming you have the legal ROMs, of course.
But the article got me thinking about open source in general and how it applies to video games. Outside of gaming, we all know about the great FOSS (free open source software) that is available, and slowly becoming acceptable, even in the business world. But in the realm of video games we don’t see much impact from open source.
Oh sure, most Linux distributions come with a few open source puzzle games, I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve lost to 8-bit skiing games on my Ubuntu machines. I know for a fact there are a few really good shooters, and adventure games that are open source too, but unless you really start looking under the stones and peering into the dark corners of the internet you are unlikely to run across them.
Why is that? Why have the open source developers made such good inroads everywhere but games?
I suspect the issue might be in the open source development system itself. Fundamentally, open source developers are volunteers. There are a few of them that develop full time backed by major corporations who have an interest in the software, but for the most part, these are people who finish their day job, come home and start working on heir open source projects. The nature of this type of development is slow. Perhaps too slow to put out an in depth successful game in a world where the hardware changes every few months.
But are we moving too fast? The gaming world is plagued by the same game being released and re-released, and re-re-released as a special edition with little really new or innovative stuff ever seeing the light of day.
Think about it. Halo 3, SoulCalibur 4, Ace Combat 6, and don’t even get me started on the Command & Conquer series, there are at least 15 titles in that series. Even Rainbow Six, a game I love, wasn’t content with continuing the series in different cities all over the world, the poor R6 crew is stuck in Vegas for the second release in a row.
The industry is stagnating. I think we need some sort of infusion of open source talent. What would be great is if some major company would just release a current game or graphics engine to the open source world. Let the open source world play with it, develop it, have some real fun with it. Sure, whomever did that wouldn’t make any money on the game per say (they might be able to lock in an exclusive publishing deal for x years or something) but the introduction of fresh thought and ideas into the industry could be priceless.
Am I just dreaming again? What do you think? Are there any FOSS games you play now? Hit up the comments below and let us know what you think.
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