Freed Software and Gaming

[orbulon]

While freed software has made a lot of progress in most aspects of computing, I think there ought to be more of a push to encourage it within computer gaming, which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of what people use their computers for.

Almost every computer game on the market, both free and paid, is closed source and has a proprietary license or EULA. Furthermore, many have incredibly intrusive telemetry, such as with RedShell. Then there’s Steam, which is a game library/launcher software full of DRM attached to almost every game you download (though thankfully cracking it is rather trivial).

There are a few small games which have released some or all of their source code after ceasing development, which is respectable, but this is about the most I have seen of open source/freed software in the gaming industry.

A little while ago I had an idea to create a freed software game library, similar to Steam in functionality and without DRM, to begin to encourage free software in gaming. There is already GOG, which I think is still proprietary but lets you download games with no DRM.

What do you guys think about all this? What else could be done to promote free software in gaming?