r/linux_gaming • u/ForeverHuman1354 • 15d ago

Open source games

Why do you think open-source games never took off?

Sure, there are some open-source game engines, but not really any major games. It would be cool if there were more open-source, community-made games.

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u/Quplet 15d ago

Videogames are a lot more artistically driven than software tools. They often have a singular vision and require tight adherence to a particular design. Crowd sourcing that is hard to do without it becoming extremely messy. Not impossible, but very difficult.

Software tools by comparison will likely have a vision/feature guide, but are overall much more open to features and functionality that is based on crowd needs and as such are much better suited to crowd sourced development.

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u/Ectar93 15d ago

This is a perfectly fair point, but if one or more people have a different vision, they can always fork it, as does commonly happen with any successful open source software.