[FSFLA] LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!

[Ismael Luceno]

On 05/Jan/2022 14:37, Jacob Hrbek wrote:
> > Most of these events are competitions without prizes, so the purpose
> is up to the developer... generally people who participate intend to
> make money out of the games afterwards irrespective of the type of
> event, so I think having users only counts if it makes money for the
> author. -- Ismael Lucano
> 
> One of the highlighted issues was that it's very difficult to maintain
> freedom and fund the development of more complicated games e.g.
> Wolfenstein series where the developer releases all the source code
> under GPLv2 or GPLv3, but keeps the levels proprietary to sustain the
> development.
> 
> So i was arguing about providing >2000 USD price pool that can be crowd
> sourced to help sustain the development as usually the game can sustain
> itself after it's playable and well known.

Making it attractive would mean the prizes and frequency of the contests
need to yield an average much higher than what would be possible by selling
the game, which sounds unrealistic to me.

A single top game can easily gross tens of millions, I don't think you can
compete with the privative models this way; and even the average good-ish
games makes 20k-25k USD on their first year.

Making it work would require a different approach.