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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.

real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.

donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.

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BG3 is actually a perfect counterexample here. It doesn't have DRM, doesn't require an online account to play and uses direct connections for multiplayer. Nothing needs to be done to preserve it.

right, but if BG3 had to be free as in FSF free, it would not have been made.

This is almost certainly untrue. it would have cost the same amount and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.

>and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.

you have to be trolling, right?

if people can get the game for free, because freedom 2 demands the game be freely redistributable by anyone with no restrictions, people are not going to pay for it. they are going to get it for free.

This is not true in practise. In practise people can get the software for free no matter what the license is. And in practise people click the "buy on steam" or "buy on Google play" button and you still make money.

Everything you are talking about appears to me as AAA. There will be many game companies that dont think it's worth the time to do this for the reasons you describe, but IMHO they shouldn't exist in the first place. The way online only games are made right now is destroying the game industry so im glad to see them go. We will see better iterations of games once the bloat is removed.

Obviously not. No one is talking about donations

if the games are free, and we aren't talking about donations, how are the studios being paid?

Same way as now. Selling the game.

Free as in freedom not as in price

>Free as in freedom not as in price

free as in freedom = i give away the game to everyone i know for free, and the studio loses out on those sales.

edit: oops, just noticed you are the same person i suspect is trolling. so, probably best for us both to end the conversation here.

Definitely not trolling. On the contrary I run a profitable business where all the code is free software. As do many many other people.

It's fine to say you don't think it works in theory. But in practise many people have made their living this way for many years.

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