shy_mia

Honestly... I'm not sure at this point. I was somewhat nihilistic before, but these past few years have brought that sentiment to a whole new level for me...

The main limiting factor towards a true communist utopia is one: we're human. As such, we are unfortunately individualistic by nature, and it's been proven time and time again that the accumulation of wealth and power only strengthens that sentiment in the vast majority of the population. Under these constraints, I don't see a path to fully public, decentralized governance and economic equality, someone will always attempt to centralize both.

What can be done is increase regulations, break up monopolies, put on safety guards and ensure better redistribution, and use, of wealth by increasing taxes to the ruling class. So basically yeah, some form of democratic socialism.

But then again, since decisions are made by the ruling class, that is unlikely to happen, it's not in their best interest.

And as we've seen this time around, you just can't beat stupidity. All the good intentions and overwhelming proof in the world won't do you any good if people are unwilling to listen. Oftentimes, even the highly educated are unwilling to listen, what chance do you have with the average person?

America's democratic party is much further right than any left leaning European party. Yet, even in the countries where those are or have been in power, the scary communist vision American propaganda promoted never materialized. People's lives got just a little better as a whole in most cases. American capitalism is a cancer just as much as communism is an unattainable utopia. The answer, as in most cases, lies in the middle, but that's something the American electorate really struggles to grasp.

Very mature

Yours is a flawed, extremist view.
How impressive something is has nothing to do with whether or not its source is available. What, if they release it to the public it suddenly becomes impressive?
You can disagree with the method of distribution, but it doesn't affect the quality of the game.

Piracy being a thing isn't a strong argument for open sourcing everything, since the barrier of entry is higher than you may expect for non technical people, a barrier that would definitely be lower if any game was freely available and compilable by anyone. Someone will make a free, one click installer, guaranteed.

Now, can you charge for open source software? Definitely.
Will it generate significant revenue in most circumstances? No.

Open source software relies on two methods for funding:

• People's good will, through donations
• Paid enterprise licenses and training

The former isn't something one can stably rely on, the latter just isn't applicable to games.
Again, that model can work for some high profile projects, but in the vast majority of cases, it won't. Especially not for games.

One can make works of passion and still want to be compensated, that's what artists do and games are a form of art. You clearly never had to put food on the table with the art you make.

Your vision of everything being open source is a utopia. A noble idea, for sure, but reality is much more bleak.

Just open sourcing the actual engine wouldn't do much. At best, you'd be able to make it work on newer hardware if problems arise, or port it to other OSs. Great stuff, but not enough when it comes to improving the game, preserving multiplayer, and so on.

There's a great amount of scaffolding on top of the base engine that any moderately sized game implements, be it through scripting or native code. That's what I meant by the line between the engine and the game being blurry. If you want to make meaningful changes to the game, you need access to that framework portion, but releasing it would allow for easy reverse engineering of everything else. It's a difficult balance to achieve.

I could see that being a thing, but the line between the engine and the game itself is a bit blurry in this context. Copyrighting just the assets and content would often not be enough. There will always be a good chunk of game code which isn't strictly part of the engine but under this model should remain closed source, otherwise people could just bring their own assets.

Frankly I'd be satisfied with companies open sourcing their games after they stop supporting and/or selling them, mostly for preservation and all that. I think that would be a great middle-ground.

Ah yes, closed source, such a dealbreaker, as if 99% of the other games weren't.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against open source games, it's just not a viable monetization strategy for most projects, and people gotta eat. There's reason why most open source games are either passion projects or old games that have been open sourced simply as an act of kindness towards the community since they generate pretty much no revenue.

At least it has something to complain about, unlike Karens.

I get the mistake. Wouldn't even call it one tbh, just an oversight. But when someone points it out normally one doesn't reply with "don't force your political views onto me" as if non male devs was some weird "woke" concept. A simple "whoops, missed that" would have been perfectly fine and everyone would've moved on. With that said, having followed the whole debacle I can say it could have been handled better by both sides.

The problem was more the fact that the devs viewed using anything other than 'he' as political, not the presence of gendered language itself. The devs themselves made a big deal about changing it. The way I see it, it's not even about trans people. How about just women? Is including women in software developent considered political? One would hope not, but here we are...

Gotta pad those CEO bonuses somehow!

He's like an elementary schooler, the difference is instead of bragging about having a PlayStation 7 at home he's trying to overthrow democracy... :/