FOSS Video Games

[Martin Owens]

> Well i see how FOSS games can be good, but i guess what i'm looking for is
> why a company like EA, Ubisoft, Valve, etc. would want to make FOSS games.
> How could they change their business model to profit from making FOSS games?
> Games have become really advanced despite requiring a heavy investment in
> coding and it seems the proprietary software model has worked very well for
> games. Assuming games stay the way they do (install it and play it off your
> computer) not any alternative that is online and played at conventions, how
> could FOSS games be a successful business? Free software can be sold, but
> most people will get the games for free, right?

No you don't get it, it's not about supporting the current crop of
game distributors. the likes of EA should die a horrible death in any
fair system. They do none of the work and reap huge amounts of reward;
the only thing they do is invest and if you have the population at
large investing directly you have no need for EA and what they do
becomes a total waste of resources and time.

As for games producers like S2, Id and so on, these existing companies
would have to radically change their business model and they couldn't
do that unless the people change the way they buy things.

Ultimately it's about people buying things. People should be buying
the rights and investing in content but instead people are stuck in
this Middle Age notion that nothing good can ever be publicly owned.
Instead they buy games off the shelf in boxes that give them almost no
rights.

And then you get a whole crop of people who are leaches and their
attitude is totally wrong, they take and give nothing back. Fine you
can deal with them as their friends with social pressure, that's the
way this has worked in the past; besides they're always going to be
some like that.

So to summarise, if you can cause a massive shift in the way people
buy games, you can cause a massive shift in games (and other media
(music/film/tv)) production.

Best Regards, Martin Owens