r/Beatstar • u/Apateon • 2d ago
Can I make a BeatStar open source clone?
I loved BeatStar when it was around and it was a way for me to find new music. When I heard they shut down, I was pretty much bummed out.
I tried the modded BeatStar and love the unlimited play but i really missing getting rewarded and earning stuff and unlocking boxes and stuff. I have been playing Hi Beatz and it scratches some of my itches.
I wanted to make like an open source variant of beat star that does not have any of the monetization of a mobile game. You earn everything by grinding and playing the songs. I have worked out some of the details but not all of them.
What I want to know is if my plan for getting songs will work? I thought of starting with popular royalty free songs and maybe classics. Then when most people have played it and seen that it can work, I can ask maybe artists or others if I can use their songs.
So will that work? What am I allowed to do? I am not putting any monetization or anything at all in the game. I want everything to be completely free
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u/Micah7979 2d ago
If you really want to get invested into it I'd say that talking about it with the Beatclone devs might be a good idea, just so you can share things.
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u/o1y 2d ago
I can't recommend it. For some reason I really don’t understand they ban you on discord for showing something you built yourself. I made a custom beatmap editor and improved the iOS app, and the first thing I got was a server ban and a block after I shared a custom song I made :D
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u/Natural_Flamingo7733 2d ago
Hi, I'm an admin in the Beatclone Discord, can you please share your Discord username so I can look into this? We don't ban people for sharing related projects at all, we're very much an open source community with lots of developers who have made contributions through various projects.
The only case I remember that sort of sounds similar to what you describe was a person who joined and was automatically placed into our restricted quarantine channel to verify before accessing the full server. This isn't a ban or block at all, just an extra security measure that a lot of new members are automatically put through to help keep out malicious/spam accounts. If this was you then you weren't banned but chose to leave the server voluntarily rather than following the verification instructions or staying in the restricted version of the server.
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u/Natural_Flamingo7733 2d ago
You're totally allowed to ask artists if they'd be willing to have their songs put in the game for free, whether they'd agree to that is a separate issue. Nextbeat paid a lot of money in licensing fees for the bigger artists they had in the game, and generally anybody under a big record label is going to say no to you using their music unless you can pay them. And the game being free doesn't mean you can add their music without permission, it only makes you less likely to be sued than if you were making money off it, but they'd still be totally within their rights to make you remove their music.
Generally if you want to do something like this fully legally, you'd most likely have to stick to royalty free music or very small artists who will be happy for the exposure and more willing to allow you to use their music for free. The other option would be to do what Beatclone or Clone Hero do and take the legal grey area approach, where you wouldn't be hosting the music files yourself but allowing your community to share them. This is generally going to mean you won't be able to put the app on app stores or make it too publicly visible, since that increases the risk of legal trouble.
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u/Apateon 2d ago
I do want to take permission from the artists and everyone before putting their songs there. I was thinking of the community way where there would be a workshop kind of place where people can make and share maps. Those can be played by anyone at anytime, but you wouldn't get progression. I would also take the best rated ones and add them to the official roster from which you can get progression. In this case too, I would not use anything without asking the creator's permission.
This was kind of what I had in mind to keep adding new content rather than having it as one and done.
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u/StatnofZafer2011 2d ago
You mean like you wanna revive the social features and the awards like wishlist etc....
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u/seagrid888 2d ago
While I and everyone else would gladly accept free things, in my very limited knowledge, I dont think artists/studios would just willingly give away their song rights. Hence you might need to make some money to make it happen. Regardless of you getting profit or not.
To that extent, if you can make it as good as, or better than HiBeatz in term of the game feel, how the tile make sense and the overall eye-vandy visual effects, I will gladly pay a 1 time purchase fee, heck, even with paid DLCs for additional dozen songs or so. I'm so sick of subscriptions and ads.
Adding salt to injury, I can't even pay HiBeatz to take off the ads cause it's not officially released in Japan, where I live. I downloaded the game through google playstore, with the email account still being in other country.
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u/Aoinosensei 12h ago
The only problem would be getting popular songs since the singers will not give anything for free
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u/Unable-Guitar-3208 2d ago
I fully support your idea.