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.
This post isn’t about if a game is better, or higher quality through capitalism or open source it’s
It’s about which is more or less exploitative. When I briefly talked about Suptertux kart having modern ish feel, for an open source game that was impressive, while still retaining the benefits of being open source.
In my other post I actually did talk about open source games being decentralized (in this same community) and how it can actually make games better than capitalism games made under capitalism. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5761876
This is because, on that post I mentioned how if one party makes a web comic series or similar, under a creative commons licensed, then other unrelated parties could then freely make a fan game and go all in on making the game and not have to focus as much on making new characters and plot.
Basing a game off of a media, gives your game that extra feeling that man open source games are missing compared to games like Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm, or Dragonball Xenoverse.
open source development might be even more exploitative since it’s literally free labour and relies completely on the charity of other well off imperial core workers.
I do agree that everyone should have the freedom to create stuff from any IP, but lets be real here you won’t find a fan game made by a group of hobbyists on their free time better than a game made by a professional studio, its simply a matter of labour-power spent developing these games.
It’s not exploitative the way I view it if the people worky on the game are hobbiest and genuinely wanted to do this in their free time. Which happens to be most open source projects. Some are also made by small organization who are mostly hobbiest.
When you look at a corporate game it’s almost always strictly for money.
I don’t expect every game to be better in quality under an open source license by itself, But one you build up them projects based off of multiple open ips it eventually becomes easier to compare.
People look at how it is now, and don’t realize they can change that. not by themselves but when all these projects get collectively made by different parties and you get more and more content.