Is the games industry out of touch with open source?

2 points by jolexxa 2 years ago | 1 comment

Background: I've been a part of some Godot communities for a few years now, and we've seen a huge influx of people experimenting with Godot or switching to it altogether recently. It's as if game developers have only ever had eyes for proprietary engines.

Why is the games industry like this? Even enterprise software seems years ahead in terms of recognizing the potential and safety of open source software.

I'm mainly asking because I'm not in the games industry. My background happens to be cross-platform mobile for predominantly enterprise clients. So what's going on over there in the games industry? Are you folks alright?

Objectively speaking, there has been a huge surge of interest in Godot lately (Google trends, Discord sign-ups, etc). I imagine other engines are experiencing similar boosts, too. Since I host the grassroots community for C# and Godot developers (https://chickensoft.games if you like that kind of thing), I can personally tell from my site's analytics that it's got many thousands of hits over the last few days when it would usually only get around 10-50 per day, tops.

ThrowawayR2 2 years ago |

Seems to be the usual build vs buy dilemma: you can faff around with a less complete, less supported platform and hope it saves you money enough versus the money you spend to make it do what you want it to do to be worth it or you can license an off the shelf, batteries included platform with a lot of tooling and support that lets you focus on building your game instead.

The twist is that enterprise software is supported for many years where a game ships only once. You cannot count on shipping multiple sequels to amortize the engineering costs of going with a customized engine.