| ▲ | 999900000999 8 hours ago |
| This is beyond reasonable. You can still download it for free outside of Steam. If I make a Sonic fan game and Sega is like, you can keep it online, but just not on Steam, that’s nice. In this situation you still have the option of playing it on Steam for a modest price The alternative is the Nintendo route… |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| One alternative is the Nintendo route. Another is the Hololive route, wherein they started a publishing brand for indie fangames which they actively support and promote on an official Steam store page. Another example being Touhou, a one-man indie franchise with permissive commercial derivative works licensing, which has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan and to a lesser extent overseas thanks to an absolutely vibrant community that has made millions of fan illustrations, tens of thousands of albums, and thousands of fangames, hundreds of which are sold on Steam. If megacorps would stop being stuck up their own ass and completely irrational about how they exercise their IP rights, they would actually be able to benefit massively from allowing their fan communities to flourish. The status quo doesn't have to be this shitty, and we don't necessarily need to give credit to companies who meet the incredibly low bar of "not Nintendo". |
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| ▲ | 999900000999 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Steam is not the only way to play games. Atari is very kind to say you can keep distributing a fan game, just not on a commercial storefront. I don’t expect to see Sonic Fan games on Steam anytime soon. Even though Sega is one of the best publishers in this regard. Now if OpenTDD said no , we’re leaving it on Steam for free ,Atari could probably contact Valve to get it delisted. A compromise is not a loss. I’ve downloaded tons of applications and games without Steam holding my hand and somehow I’m ok. Although I do wish sandboxing solutions with better gpu support existed |
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| ▲ | eykanal 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fully agree, and glad you posted this. Atari has no responsibility to the open source community, and indeed has every reason to push back against this effort. That they're willing to discuss things at all, and that they agree to help support the effort, is frankly astonishing and extremely kind-hearted. |
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| ▲ | 20k 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At the same time, the open source community has absolutely no responsibility to make Atari profits here either. The outcome here is simply that open source is getting screwed over It isn't kind hearted. Them trying to shut down openttd would lead to a gigantic clusterfuck that would hurt their sales. This is them trying to remove a direct competitor to them releasing a new game as much as possible, without generating community backlash - to maximise profits These companies are not our friends | | |
| ▲ | freehorse 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > open source is getting screwed over It may have been "screwed over" if there was no access to the oss game. But you can still download the game from their website. They just do not want that these appear as competitors in steam/gog platforms, so they bundled the oss version. Both sides thought this was a reasonable resolution. Thus I don't see "screwing over" here. | | |
| ▲ | philistine 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Open source is a culture that includes its users. Open source is getting screwed over because at the first whiff of a capitalist losing a buck open source retreated and hid. |
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| ▲ | entropicdrifter 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And yet, they're also directly supporting the developers of OpenTTD via a donation and not giving them any legal harassment. This is, at worst, a morally-neutral compromise that's far better than any worst-case scenario |
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| ▲ | singpolyma3 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "no responsibility" but they could have chosen not to intentionally hurt them | | |
| ▲ | ndiddy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Imagine if you were Atari. You've bought the rights to Transport Tycoon Deluxe from Chris Sawyer and want to sell the game up on Steam. Then you see OpenTTD (the exact same game except better in every way) also on Steam for free. What do you do? | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In the first place, the game is 30 years old. If the world had a sane copyright regime, it would already be in the public domain. Nobody should be particularly entitled to buying abandoned 30-year-old IPs and squatting on them to collect rent. All the more so when there would be no rent to collect if not for the derivative work being literally the only thing keeping the IP alive. But let's suppose I am Atari and I have for some reason proceeded with buying said abandonware without doing my research. Upon discovering OpenTTD, I would hire the guy behind OpenTTD to work on a commercial version, keeping OpenTTD free to play but perhaps with some cool monetized expansion pack that would not have been possible without giving the developer the funding they need to work on it. That way I am making an investment in actually adding value to the game, and rewarding the person who kept it alive and in turn earning community goodwill, instead of investing in a shortsighted attempt to collect rent that backfires massively. | | |
| ▲ | freehorse 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > hire the guy behind OpenTTD > commercial version > monetized expansion It is not clear to me whether turning (future evolutions of) OpenTTD commercial and monetising it is a preferable scenario for its community. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it could be beneficial for players, if having a passionate developer able to spend more time working on it allows them to make future evolutions significantly better than they could be in a world where the developer only has time to work on it passively. That said, I am generally a proponent of indie game developers being paid for their work, as an indie game developer myself, so my personal bias may certainly leaking be leaking into my evaluation :) I'd note it also doesn't need to be done in a way that deprives players of any free future evolution. Paradox has a nice model for their games where they release expansion packs, where about half the content is part of a free update to the base game and half the content is paid. That would be perfectly suited for a case like this. |
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| ▲ | moggers123 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I go "oops I probably should have realised that existed before I decided to purchase the rights to and re-release a 999999 year old game which already has a GPL clone/spiritual successor/something". I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing). And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points. | |
| ▲ | singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You put it up for sale and hope nostalgia sells something for you aka the original plan. This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king. | |
| ▲ | rablackburn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems like a pretty clear case of caveat emptor | |
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ZeWaka 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The Dwarf Fortress route. |
