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Author Topic: "Free Games" Article - Quite a slap in the face!  (Read 3624 times)

Offline Destructavator

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"Free Games" Article - Quite a slap in the face!
« on: February 02, 2010, 02:20:48 am »
While on my way to my Yahoo! web mail, I stopped at a "news" article on the front page, in-between videos and other news stories about Barack Obama and the latest celebrity gossip-s***-news, and saw a story on free video games you can get on the net or play online for free.

Without exception, every single listing was for either an old commercial game re-released for free, or some bloated, unclean freeware crap game.

There were absolutely NO open-source programs listed.  That, and I know for a fact that some open-source games are better than some of the ones they listed.

I have a feeling they did this on purpose, with a motive, something related to the fact that many people, even many gamers, are unfamiliar with what "open-source" means and have never heard of sourceforge and similar sites.   ::)

In my disgust, I'm not going to bother giving a link to this garbage story...

Ugh!

Offline SoulRipper

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Re: "Free Games" Article - Quite a slap in the face!
« Reply #1 on: February 02, 2010, 02:43:29 am »
What can i say, im hoping that the somebody putting together that article just doesnt know what Open Source is! (Which would be quite preposterous in it's own right). I can admit that a lot of open source games lack any special appeal, being just the Open Source equivalent to commercial games or clones of them (usually inferior ones). But it should also be mentioned that there are games around, Open Source non the less, that should be more than just worth mentioning. (UFO: Alien Invasion for instance  ;D).

But seriously, that was probably an example of bad, ugh, "newsmanship".

Offline Destructavator

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Re: "Free Games" Article - Quite a slap in the face!
« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2010, 03:35:35 am »
Actually, in a certain way it makes sense for a large, commercial company like Yahoo! to ignore and brush off open-source, because advertising or even mentioning open-source applications won't make them any money.  Think about it - freeware can be loaded with advertisements and such that link to for-profit stuff that partners with such an Internet company.  I've heard that many commercial and free games even sell space inside the games for advertising.

By comparison, it is difficult to do that with open-source, because anyone could grab the source, re-compile it without the crap, and pass around a clean copy of it.  That and making open-source works for profit is usually a bit self-contradictory - not always, but with GPL it certainly is, putting two opposing ideologies that don't really mix against each other.

Bottom line, any way you slice it there isn't any real profit to be made for a commercial company to give open-source much attention, at least with games.