Veridian Expanse by HowlingMoonSoftware
howlingmoonsoftware.itch.io
Explore the depths as you drill, craft, and fight to escape from a mysterious asteroid deep in the Veridian Expanse.

So I’ve been working on a crafting/exploration game for a while called Veridian Expanse. (I guess the details don’t really matter, so I won’t go into that, but check the links at the end if you’re interested) I have some unresolved feelings about making the game open source, and how/why to do it.

  1. The last game we released on Steam was up on pirate sites within hours, and showed up fairly high (second page maybe?) of a simple search result of the game’s name. It sold “well enough”, and since it was a pretty small game so we suspect that there probably wasn’t any “rampant piracy”. Certainly not enough to bother to reduce it anyway. We didn’t even bother to implement the (trivial to break) Steam DRM.

  2. From a sales point of view, I don’t think the source code is valuable. Nobody wants to pirate the source for some random game, they want the binary that’s already been made for them. Also, I’ve written some blog articles about how some of the game’s threading, hot-loading, rendering, and soft shadowing works. At some point when people started asking questions, I would just send them the code because “why not?” Eventually I just mirrored it on Github without the assets.

  3. The assets… While I have rights to all the data and graphical assets, the sounds and music are all royalty free items that I’ve purchased. Even if I wanted to release them, I can’t. I’m not sure I want to either.

  4. I use Linux to develop the game, but I know most of my sales will come from Windows or console versions. In a way I don’t care about the Linux market financially and have been considering just publishing it on Flathub because “why not?” It also runs pretty well on the Pi 4, and I even automated the build for it because “why not?” I certainly don’t hate the idea that people might like the game and tell their friends to buy it on other platforms. :p

My current thought is that I should just OSS the code, but leave the assets as proprietary. If someone really wants to pirate the game, there will be some easy way to do that a few search terms away. Even if I give away a Flathub or RPi version it’s not going to change the difficulty for someone that wants a Windows version for free. On ther other hand, maybe someone will find something useful in the code or get it running on *BSD or Haiku or something. (It already compiles/runs fine on them, but I don’t really want to spend time maintaining those builds)

There’s certainly plenty of games with open sourced engines (like the Id games), but closed data. Then there’s a few like Mindustry or 0AD that seem to be trying both, but are there other example of games that people can think of for comparison?

Some further Veridian Expanse links if you want to figure out what the heck I’m even talking about:

  • Felix Urbasik
    3•1 year ago

    @slembcke In my opinion, by releasing the source code, two things will be possible:

    1. People with enough programming experience will be able to build it an play it for free (although they might not be, since it’s missing some assets)

    2. Evil-minded people will be able to copy your work and market it as their own.

    …and this second point is where I see the danger. You don’t want your work to appear as some chinese clone.

    So… I’m not sure either. Maybe just try it as an experiment?

    • ffhein
      1•1 year ago

      Depending on what game it is, the assets could be anything from 1% to 99% of the finished product. Some rely heavily on procedurally generated content, which would make it easier to clone the game using only the source, but for your average title you’d have to create your own graphics, textures, meshes, animations, sound effects, music, levels, dialogues, etc. And if someone were going through all that trouble, my guess is that it would probably be easier to reimplement it in Unity than using the undocumented source code for an existing game. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I think it vastly depends on what game it is.

      Personally I think the biggest difference open sourcing the game makes is that it helps modders. Unless of course it has some new technology, that other programmers might be interested in seeing how it’s implemented. For example I think Teardown would be such a game, but instead of opening their source they’ve shared a lot of knowledge by explaining how their engine works so it’s not necessarily something to be afraid of.