| |||||||||||||
Valve: Steam'd PenguinsValve: Steam'd PenguinsPosted Jul 18, 2012 9:34 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)In reply to: Valve: Steam’d Penguins by josh Parent article: Valve: Steam’d Penguins I'm inclined to agree with the LWN comment page's great provoker on the questionable viability of high-production-value games as open source projects. Achieving the standards classified as "high production values" in respect of today's video game market requires an awful lot of specialist labour, not all of it interesting even to the people who love their specialist jobs. That specialist labour needs to be paid for one way or another, and thanks to my childhood coinciding with the height of the 8-bit microcomputer era I absolutely cannot bring myself to trust the average player of video games to pay for a game if they can 100% legally obtain it for free.
(Log in to post comments)
Valve: Steam'd Penguins Posted Jul 18, 2012 10:41 UTC (Wed) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
> Achieving the standards classified as "high production values" in respect
> of today's video game market requires an awful lot of specialist labour[.]
Isn't the same true for all software (at least)? There's a lot boring work
Are you saying those things are just easier to monetize as free software?
Valve: Steam'd Penguins Posted Jul 18, 2012 12:43 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Yes, because there are coherent model for monetization of those things by intermediaries - the obvious ones being to sell support contracts for the software or manufacture hardware that uses the software. A "high production values" video game comes with a whole bunch of audiovisual material that probably isn't usefully monetizable by intermediaries, but still needed an awful lot of polishing and attention-to-detail to reach the desired standard. (And even if it was monetizable by intermediaries, there's the question of whether the resulting supply of money would allow you to hire a voice actor people have actually heard of.)
Valve: Steam'd Penguins Posted Jul 18, 2012 15:23 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
I think the present popularity of Kickstarter projects with a CC or GPL output is suggestive that "free culture" is expanding.
Hollywood movie budgets remain beyond the scope of these projects, for now, but the right video game project could definitely raise a million dollars on Kickstarter. A million dollars can pay for a lot of that necessary but rarely voluntary talent needed for "high production values" while keeping the results Free-as-in-speech.
Valve: Steam'd Penguins Posted Jul 18, 2012 16:57 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Voluntary or not is really not what you should be looking at.
Game programming is like everything else. If you want to do a good professional job you have to have good professionals, or their equivalent.
That means people with ten years experience being artists/writers/programmers/ or whatever that are able to work for 5-8 hours every day for several months to get something done in a reasonable time frame.
This sort of thing is going to cost money no matter what. It's expensive and people need to make a living and be able to support themselves.
Raising money for software projects not anticipating using copyright law to create artificial scarcity has always been a challenge, but it should be possible. Kickstarter may be a start, but it's going to require more then that I think.
Valve: Steam'd Penguins Posted Jul 18, 2012 22:20 UTC (Wed) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"I'm inclined to agree with the LWN comment page's great provoker on the questionable viability of high-production-value games as open source projects."
Apparently you haven't been following Blender Foundation's recent projects.
|
|||||||||||||