[MUD-Dev] Fw: [Nel] Would a complete gpl'ed and copylefted online gaming world be financialy succes?

[Valerio Santinelli]

This post appeared on the NeL (http://www.nevrax.org) mailing
list. It seems that other people are evaluating making a
"commercial" GPL game. As far as I know Nevrax is doing something
similar by distributing their complete library under GPL and the
client, too. But they're not giving away the source code of the
server. I wonder how many problems they're going to have with people
hacking their client in order to cheat or to crash their
servers. And I suppose that we're going to see server emulators for
their game very soon.

Here's the extract:

--<cut>--
  From: "Marc De Mesel" <marcdemesel at hotmail.com>
  To: <nel-all at nevrax.org>
  Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 1:13 AM
  Subject: [Nel] Would a complete gpl'ed and copylefted online gaming
  world be financialy succes?
  
  What I was wondering, Would it be possible for a massive
  multiplayer game to be gpl'ed completely, meaning, the engine as
  well as the art and even make the title, the development website,
  the promotional website, as well as all documents (everything that
  is of use to the forker of your project) copyleft.
  
  You would make money by charging access to your serverpark (or
  some other way you make money at your server park). Others would
  be able to fork your project and setup servers themselves.
  
  On one hand this is bad for your business. There will probably pop
  up different variations, some closer to your project, look and
  feel, some more different. You will have to be more
  competetive. At the other hand it could be good for you as they
  will help create a bigger market as there will be more interesting
  products, online worlds in this case, as it will be more easy to
  make a world yourself, or with a little team since you can copy a
  lot of things from other projects.
  
  Developing everything in gpl and copylet allows you also to
  attract more developers on the internet since you can develop your
  world in the wide open. All the documents, code and art can be
  viewed and played with. If someone shows interest and starts to
  contribute to the project you take him, after a while, on your
  team and give him or her a part of the profits to be made. (I
  though up a system that would allow for dynamic scaling of
  percentage of ownership ( and income) so that people who are of
  more value scale in popularity and also income and vice versa,
  people who stop cooperating or do stupid things will lose
  percentage (the other memebrs have some voting power).) (I'm
  thinking of an online world here that has monthly income).
  
  You guys must already have had this idea so let me know what your
  thoughts were or are on this idea. Would it be possible to make
  money this way and hence be even be succesfull, financialy?
  
  MarcDM
--<cut>--
  
--
Valerio Santinelli
One Man Crew Gaming Community (http://www.onemancrew.org)
My Lab (http://tanis.hateseed.com)
HateSeed.com Founder (http://www.hateseed.com)
In Flames Italia Webmaster (http://www.inflames.it)



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