This topic is about opensource community developed game projects. Can this be a way for a community of people to earn some money from a big game such as a massive multiplayer online? I seen some of those project on linux.
If its truly open source anyone can host servers and compete with your paying ones right? But sure, I mean there have been companies around for decades that have made money on distributing Linux builds
No, and it’s completely unrealistic to expect otherwise. Hosting and maintaining the servers alone is a very expensive process that typically requires powerful dedicated servers.
I remember investigating private servers once upon a time (RageZone forums have an extensive amount of information to read through) to get an idea for the costs associated with just the hosting process and some of the server software that was stolen directly from companies had absolutely insane requirements.
At the time your average home computer had a couple gigabytes of memory, but the software took three to four times as much just to start up. Getting enough players to support the cost of server required even more memory. That’s not including the fact that you needed multiple cores and high performance storage drives. We’re talking thousands of dollars.
PlaneShift is one of the oldest open source MMOs and to my knowledge it has never made any money at all. It’s completely maintained by volunteers too.
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You can run a Unity docker container and use AWS and scale dynamic with the current concurrent player number
It’s definitely become easier to host an MMO, but you have far more competition now. Competition that is often very high quality and already free to play. Open source is many things but it’s rarely the same quality level as commercial.
Its not true for Open source software, maybe for Open source games, never played an open source game. The key to a successful open source project is a dedicated code review team
We’re talking about open source massively multiplayer games. At least I believe we’re talking about the game itself being open source. It’s entirely possible the thread starter is referring to open source software used with commercial games. If that’s the case though it opens an entirely different can of worms.
Opensource means you are not going to earn any money, ever, from your project.
Nature of licenses like GPL allow anyone who got a copy of your game to redistribute the game for free in unlimited number of copies.
I’ve seen some people run community projects (not opensource) and custom servers, but typically they set donation box and use it strictly to pay for server fees.
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Not true, like I said earlier, there are companies that sell Llinux dists (Mostly for business) for example with Support etc
If people dont want to host their own servers I see a business opportunity here, offcourse the game must be good enough for people to want to pay it.
In the case with Linux the open source community get no money from the revenue made by distrubting that package, it seems they are happy with that, but I doubt contributors to a MMO open source project will feel that way
It sounded like you thought open source in general equals low quality that is not true. Games I have no idea, are there any cases of open source games that was released under that license? I know games like Doom etc that became open source many years after their initial release
I actually got first hand knowledge of making money on open source, I made this library
https://github.com/AndersMalmgren/SignalR.EventAggregatorProxy
I was contacted many years ago from a large company that wanted support for the library because it had grew so large within their corporation. They still pay me 2k USD per year and by the hour fee if they need actual support. Pretty ok passive income, i wish I had more support contracts 
Once again this is a thread about games. I’m not referring to non-game applications. I would have thought that would be obvious by now but apparently you like telling people they’re wrong about subjects they’re not discussing. 
Got any concrete evidence this business model wouldn’t work for a game? Keeping servers up and let people pay for that maps basicly 1:1 to the classic support deal I talk about.
edit: I think the big challenge will be in getting people to want to contribute to such a open source repo
Only in the sense that there are no games following that business model. If it were a feasible business model then someone somewhere would have at least tried it yet to my knowledge it has never been done. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible though.
So all unexplored ventures are bad? hmm, there are a couple of billionaires around the world that beg to differs
Weren’t you the one who repeatedly suggested that the numbers coming in from Patreon weren’t acceptable? If we’re being realistic here the income you would see from the venture would likely be on par with the income some people are seeing from Patreon.
If anything I would argue that the people who would consider this venture are already successful with other methods.
Why would it, if its a success it will make the same money as every other MMO. Again the problem is not the payment model but rather to get people to contribute to the open source project.
There are so many failed MMOs…
I can imagine
Yep. Most open source projects start out with just one or two contributors, and stay that way for quite a while. To get a lot of traction it needs to have wide appeal. Ideally a more specific developer tool, or if it’s a product one with a very large market. There are open source projects with commercial counterparts that do well. But the ones I’m aware of have a massive potential user base.
A few years back when I entered the game industry I created a rather substantial project that was basically an mmo engine. It was fairly leading edge, first public implementation of an architecture that is now becoming a defacto standard. And I had no other contributors. There were a couple of other similar projects that followed mine, one by a fairly well known studio, and the only contributors they really have are their own employees.
Making it even more niche by making a complete game, I see zero chance it would work.
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