Open or closed source?

Question

One of the major questions where I believe a final decision has not yet been made is:

Should the game be open or closed source?

This is also of course related to if we should try to monetize on the game or not. Although it is not necessarily directly automatic, one would expect that if we go by open source, then we try not to monetize, if we go for closed source then we will try to monetize.

Answer 1

I'm in favor of open source for now: it should be easier to make a fun game if we're not worried about business models or whether it's commercially viable.

Once we have a fun game, we can think about ways to monetize it and do a paid version.

There is also the kickstarter thing to think about... even with an open source game, we could put together a budget to pay ourselves for our time and see if anyone wants to donate.

So I vote open source alpha (possibly funded by donations) and at least considering going commercial / closed source in beta or later.

Answer 2

Open Source

Arguments for:

- If we would try to monetize the game, we would probably encounter a lot of problems of dividing the income among all the developers.

- Contributing to open source projects is something nice to add to your CV / Resumé.

- It will be a lot easier to setup git repositories as we can use GitHub

- We can have parts of our code posted for review on a lovely site known as Code Review

Answer 3

I'm inclined towards closed source, because if we decide to make our base game open source, then everything is open source and we will need a legal team to battle every clone that will rise, as our mod/game itself is obviously open, as it consists of Lua files that can simply be read or if stored as Lua bytecode/Java bytecode can simply be decompiled.

Nevertheless, I think we stil need to approach making the whole game from an open source perspective, simply because inevitably someone will at some point either decompile or remake the whole game, which is the starting point of open source either way.

First of all, we need a risk assessment of the chance that some company is going to clone our game and make a good looking one, before we have released our game, thus kind of hijacking our precious, I can think of two scenarios:

1. The other company is a professional company with lots of resources. Most likely they will either license or build their own engine, and will not interfere with us.
2. The other company does not have any resources and they will use an opensource variant, possibly ours, but without resources (assuming we will have them, they are not able to make a game of great quality with subquality images and gameplay.

Therefore I see no harm during the actual development, I do see that harm can be done once the game has been released. I imagine that people will create their own clients, and possibly try to sell them, now we have to counter act with the following decisions:

1. We need to have a legal team prepared to take down any obvious clones of our game that are being sold for money, which is simply not allowed and we are legally protected against that if we act upon it.
2. We should consider easy ways for potential players to download/buy the game, I think releasing on Steam is a must.

In the end it comes down to making it sufficiently hard for a non-legal releaser to keep up with the official releases. When doing with closed source, it is going to be easier than with open source, yet I believe both ways are possible, even though I have no current system in mind for open source.

If the non-legal releasers can release their non-legal version literally minutes after we have patched the legal version, then we are in trouble, as then they are the more convienent and less expensive solution to use for our potential costumers.

Lots of our resources, be the game closed or open source, should be focused on creating a sufficient delay between the time that our legal version gets released and the time that any non-legal version may be released in a working state. This holds for the initial game and for any subsequent update.

 

Going closed source does bring a few costs with it, but I think they are managable, so far I can see costs of Github and Travis CI, which are in my opinion an absolute must-have. I recommend to not take Bitbucket as it is only free up to five persons and in my opinion Github is overall way better.

The costs would boil down to:

• Github: We will be looking at an Organization of the level Bronze, this will mean we can have an unlimited number of members and can have a maximum of 10 private repositories. It will come at a cost of 25 dollars per month, I do not have an exact figure of the amount of serious contributors we have here, but I thinka t least 5, so comes down to 5 dollars per month per person, more information at: https://github.com/pricing
• Travis CI: Ouch, it will cost 129 euro per month to go closed source, which is above our budget I am afraid. This is either an argument to go open source, or to find an alternative solution that can build our code, run tests and execute arbitrary code - such as uploading releases - for us.

If we could get funding, we would have lots of possibilities, but I do not know whether that funding is a possibility.

Update: After having talked to Dad Gum, I understand the situation a bit more and there are actually more options.

Most important point we concluded was that there is a possibility to run the Lua code (for card effects, etc.) on server side only and thus we can protect the Lua source. Our way to protect our unique game, would then be to protect the Lua game code and be sure we never distribute that.

This is possible if we make our "basegame"-mod available to our own server only, this being closed source on that part. We can then make a server browser for all servers (and connect via IP), and players would see the official server running the "basegame"-mod, and a bunch of other servers running all kinds of mods.

By this discussion I have changed my mind and I think open source, specifically looking at the closed source costs, is the way to go, I envision these seperate repositories at the start:

• Client Repository, open-source, for client GUI code, which can interact with the server
• Server Repository, open-source, for server code, which can understand what Lua tells it to do and can interact with the client.
• Basegame Repository, closed-resource, for our Lua code, which runs as the "basegame"-mod on the server.

During development and alpha testing it is okay for the basegame repository to be open-source, once we move forward to a situation in which we plan to monetize the game, it needs to be closed-source though.

Exactly this will prevent non-legal releasers from releasing a client that can beat ours. They can still clone it, but there's where the legal points kick in.

Answer 4

I think it is best to start with an open source project at first.  We are just figuring out both how the program will work and how we will work together.  Since we are located in different parts of the world and are doing this project as a hobby, open source will make the most sense.  And until we have something that we know is worth money, there is no sense in spending a lot of money forming a company.

With that said, I think that monetization is still possible in varoius ways.  We should make the Java Client open source, and possibly the Server code, but for the modules we would only make a baseline Lua game that would not contain our custom scripts for our TCG.  This Lua "template" would explain to the potential modder where they should place their scripts and how to write their mod so that it is compatible with the Client and/or Server.  We would keep our own "mod" which is in essense our own TCG closed source, and then we could package the whole thing together and sell it at a later time if we want.