Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaedPsyker | Hacker News Reader

Is this in terms of contributors?

To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done", with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new game.

I think that's just the nature of software never being done + the only reason games have been declared "done" in the past is when you had to master a single boxed release.

I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.

You allude to the reasons why though, with the box release requirement--though that's a part of the greater economic reasons.

> I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.

I wish that was the case because then you as the player could be done with paying for the game once. Instead, the current trend is to make games into live services that have continuous development funded with continuous revenue streams. Moch more predictable for the companies to see their revenue slowly go up or down than invest in a completely new game that might be a hit or might flop completely.

And there are a fair number of open source recreations that keep games alive like OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and OpenRCT (Roller Coaster Tycoon)

Does that really mean anything? For an open source project the "apparatus" is whatever community forms to maintain that project and yes, the community won't just decide that as a whole they are now going to create a different game. But individual contributors absolutely can and do decide that they are done with the game and move on to something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com