Video games are expensive even “free to play” games. You need to buy an expensive game console or PC that can run the games made in the modern day. Then, some games can cost upfront now $70 or more dollars. Then you got to buy the dlc, and the micro-transactions to get anything meaningful done on the game.
Some free to play games have paywalls you’l eventually run into to either progress, or to get more of the game such as cosmetics.
Open source games on the other hand are typically free for anyone with an internet connection and a device that can run the game, can play for free with hidden fees, or dlc, Micro-transactions. and no ads. In fact the closest thing you get to cost when playing a more demanding open source game to you is the device (some cases, the Monitor) and the internet connection even if just temporarily to download the game.
In Super Tux Kart, you got a modern ish looking game, opensourced, and is free and legal for anyone to collectively download and share this opensource game. Being an opensource game.
What would you pick capitalist games, or open source games?
Some might believe there’s only a handful of open source games especially if you only play them from the Linux repositories. Some websites might have creator putting their open source games on them, some of these might even be might even be playable in your web browser with html5.
My favourite game is Dwarf Fortress, which is not open-source but still freely available
It’s basically free, while still under copyright protection? This might be a complicated one because while such a game might be free to access it’s not free to do entirely whatever you want to it, such as modding it. While freely available you couldn’t just get this game from anywhere in most countires. (legally)
But idk, is this good enough for communists to enjoy, just as long that you can freely access it in it’s pure form? But since it’s still copyrighted your places of getting it legally are limited.
In this day and age, I won’t be looking a gift horse in the mouth. I trust the devs to keep the game free as long as they are around. They’ve recently put it up on Steam for a modest fee (due to them needing money for American medical expenses), and they’ve kept the free version around and up-to-date as well. There’s also enough open access to mod the game extensively.
Yes, you can
There’s also Aurora 4X, if anybody’s into that kind of thing, which is not open-source at all (the dev is opposed to having the game mod). Also freely available anywhere and pretty great game.
It’s important to note that these 2 games basically built the open-source, freely-available, community of games, by proving that free games can be as great and successful as the most expensive budget-bloated AAA titles.
What I meant by anywhere, I meant that you couldn’t take the game without permission if it’s still protected by copyright. If they allow anyone to just take and share it on their own app stores without asking that is neat.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect anybody to share a game they’ve put years of their life into developing, without copyright or permissions. In the current capitalist climate, you can expect AAA studios, scammers, patent trolls, etc to take advantage and monetize or steal ownership of the game.
There was such a case on itch.io a few years ago, where some developer stole someone’s game, patented it as their own, put it on Steam, then were trying to force them to take down the game on itch.io.
You just can’t risk not having copyrights, no matter your intentions.
This is why you use a copyleft license such as the GPL. Licensing under the MIT license leaves you wide open to the capitalist exploitation you describe, but if an open source project uses the GPL, then anyone who modifies or distributes your code must maintain the same freedoms they were granted for anyone else.
But by having copyrights, it makes a game less communist because you don’t know if your favorite dev might not start taking things down, or enforce their copyright.
And actually there is a way to do this, while not having restrictive copyrighted control, if you explicitly have an opensource license that prevents this applied to your project form the get go, you can almost always refer to that and usually win in court if you can prove yours was developed first and that the license was in place since day way.
Such licenses might allow people to mod said game, but then require them not to change the license terms. This in theory would protect your game even from patents made in the future by other devs because applying a newer patent would either directly or indirectly change the original license terms.
But if the patent was already in place before hand, then the license wouldn’t be able to protect the project for long.
It depends on the context of property ownership. The original definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat before the Capitalist redefinition means government by the working class and Marx never said to abolish private properties without the progress to the relevant stage of the economy. Although the Capitalists had rigged the copyright law to serve the plagiarism that the law are supposed to oppose, copyright laws that properly provide the proper amount of reward to the creators could continue under Communist governance until the intellectual property ownership become irrelevant.