utzucto · HackerTrans

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I totally agree. It can have a lot of upsides that people ignore because they're afraid of someone eating their lunch with a 5min clone job. If it sounded like I was implying that no one actually thinks going FOSS is a bad idea, I wasn't. I totally believe you, I'm just not in the games industry so I wouldn't know first hand what people think about it. I just brought this up since it's something I've been thinking about as I work on my own projects which may or may not involve any monetization. My first instinct was to default to closed source and open up if I had a compelling reason to, but I've come around to starting open. Even without the benefits of easy modding and that stuff, I think there's also a bit of good will that you gain from being open source, although I'm sure most players don't care whether its FOSS or just has a modding API.

utzucto

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

I like the article, it's got a lot of the same threads that I've been thinking about recently while developing an iOS app and a browser game (unrelated to each other). It's also interesting to learn about how the flash sites I used to play when I was younger actually made and distributed money. Back then I just assumed the devs made some cut of the banner ad money or something.

As I was reading it, I somewhat agreed with the sentiment I see in some of the comments around that the article had a bit of the "old person discovers new trend and concludes its the future of everything" (which you see a fair amount with VR, on Stadia/cloud gaming, the "metaverse," and other things you mentioned FNF doesn't do) but this comment tempers that feeling. At the very least, I think that this is an interesting showcase of a project that is successful outside of the big platforms and I agree that it's a direction that things could be going in to some extent.

Speaking about the fact it's free & open source, I think that people --in this case the games industry people to whom this doesn't make sense-- sometimes put too much weight on the decision to publish source code. I think it's about focusing on what differentiates your product from others, and in this case it seems like the game differentiates itself with music and personality rather than complex code, thus bandcamp & kickstarter. There's probably a lot of software products that don't gain anything from being closed source, and I'm no Stallman.

As a bit of an aside, I appreciate you mentioning the fact that there's a whole several continents of people who aren't American, or NA, or English-speaking, etc. and aren't necessarily talked about when it comes to diversity. Diversity is often based around US/CAN sensibilities around identity and other things. Obv very difficult to fully consider the entire Earth's population in everything you do, but just considering the fact that not everyone is in the same place or can have the same powerful hardware/internet connection is worthwhile. I'm absolutely not perfect in this regard either.

I wonder if the increasing use of chromebooks in school (revealing my US bias) is/will push this trend forward as well. I don't use chrome, so maybe there already is an ecosystem of games in the chrome app store.

utzucto

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

I think the increasing difficulty of being discovered on ever-growing platforms like the App Store is/will push more games to other places (though I don't know how instant-game platforms will build userbases like native app stores).

Also, I don't think people moved away from instant games because the instantness wasn't enough. I think it's more about what devices kids (and people in general) are using for everything else; people who are playing mobile games now probably would have been playing flash games a few years ago. I'm kindof spitballing here, but I wonder if all the chromebooks that are used in schools now are or will be pushing kids back to online games platforms like the old flash sites