Don’t let them take the overhand. Showcase your game for the fans. There will always be people copying or pirating your work. Keep doing the stuff you do and it will pay off (hopefully). Look at Zelda, its copied so often, yet it does not matter for the original. There are so many racing games, each of them is like a copy from another. Same for fighting games. Yet fans are fans of the originals and games are still good.
I don’t think its a good idea to not showcase your game, because someone can copy it.
This is just how capitalism work in general. Imagine how many amazing ideas don’t see the light of day because the creators know the markets will steal it, fuck them over, introduce a worse version to the world and then bin it when it has no more value. Capitalists are thieves, plain and simple and AI has newly empowered them in the software sector.
Or it’s a transition that forces people build upon other peoples ideas culminating into greatness. Everything just needs to be foss.
This would be nice if you could feed your family with free software.
But you can’t.
They foss, not free.
FOSS means free and open source software mate.
I mean, many open source projects offer paid subscriptions for hosting their service for you, in the world of hosted applications. So I mean, there are ways to monetize free software, indirectly.
Witcher IV is free but you want more than 30fps? For just $5/mo and you can play at a stunning 60fps! Want unlocked framerate? That’s $15/mo. 4k textures? $5/mo please. Want more than one saved game? Upgrade to three whole saved games for $10/mo!
This is essentially what you are asking for.
I feel like people would buy a game if the alternative was just that you have to compile it yourself and not have Steam achievements
They do. Mindustry, Residual, and Asperite come to mind.
What part of free did you miss from their comment? Those are only open source games, not FOSS like they specified.
- Free as in freedom, not beer
- You can also get them for free by compiling or (for Mindustry) via itch.io or Flathub.
Mindustry seems to be doing just fine.
An outlier is not the norm. Cave Story and La Mulana inevitably need to be sold to generate the dev’s incomeEdit: mistaken Mindustry for being FOSS
Mindustry has also been paid since launch, its open source, not FOSS.
- Free as in freedom, not beer
- You can get it for free on itch.io or Flathub
Has GNUv3 license
Mindustry is paid on Steam? Thats not FOSS that’s just open source.







