cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17747926
Back in June the developers of Fishards put out a bit of an ultimatum: fight them in-game and win to make the game open source, or they will nuke the game from orbit.
Thankfully, the community came together, and won. So now Fishards has been made open source, and it’s still free to play on Steam too.
While I definitely appreciate seeing a game go open source instead of being lost to time, I am furious that they gated that outcome behind challenge, and especially that they were explicitly threatening to delete the game. It absolutely screams “we don’t actually care about game preservation, but we know our fans do, and we’ll exploit that to make them dance for our amusement”. That has very much put them on my “never support” list.
Actually, I think there is some value there. It makes it so the fans have to step up and say “we want this game to be preserved and open sourced.” Which sorta serves as a bellwether for whether others would be willing to step up and keep it going once it is. If the fans hadn’t stepped up like that, it would have been a bit telling that there may not have been much support for it once it was OSS.
I don’t think in-game skill is a fair way to judge that. You can absolutely have a capable developer who is passionate about the game, but who isn’t very skilled at the game itself. And unless the game has an extremely technical target audience, I can expect that most of the players who brought the challenge-winning skills to the table are not also coincidentally people who would be developing or otherwise technically supporting a continuation.
Also, if they release the source and it doesn’t get traction, no-one is harmed. Any procedural and legal clearances should’ve been done before announcing the challenge. To me, open sourcing an EOL game or other product is about giving an opportunity for others to continue or learn. It might be sad if no-one bothers, but it’s still the right thing to do regardless of when or whether someone takes on the challenge.
The idea that they would have actually deleted game is a little naive.
If you threaten to do wrong by someone, that’s wrong regardless of whether you are actually willing to follow through and regardless of whether people accurately guess whether you’re willing to follow through.
Perhaps you are incapable of understanding tongue in cheek humor.
Stop being a reactionary single cell for a change and think rationally for a moment.