“I wanted to contribute back to the project as a way to thank the devs for the time and effort they had invested in such a wonderful game, as well as to implement some of the things our community wanted that other devs didn’t have the time to work on,” says Ignacio R. Since then the game has grown into a polished, complex beast with 16 official single-player campaigns that have been translated into about 50 languages, charming artwork and an abundance of fan-made content. A few weeks later, a new release went online, packing improved artwork by Francisco Munoz, a Mathematics student from Spain, who became the first of many collaborators that spilled onto the scene shortly after. While making quality products according to this model might sound utopian, there is at least one game out there that has proved this is possible.īattle for Wesnoth got its first release in June of 2003, after David White spent two weekends making the turn-based, hex-grid strategy game set in a high-fantasy world with two playable factions: elves and orcs. Their relative obscurity hides a game-making model that is completely unique in how it blurs the line between playing a game and developing it, fosters long-lasting communities and does it all without a lick of profit in the crosshairs. This niche is rarely discussed in mainstream media as many of these games are rudimentary code-sketches, with art and gameplay light-years behind their commercial counterparts. The one part of gaming that can lay claim to true, untarnished ‘freeness’ is the open-source world, where other incentives besides profit drive creativity. Haunting stories of shady tracking and flat-out player manipulation by Freemium game companies and accounts of people obsessively spending inordinate amounts in virtual marketplaces designed to feed off the easily-hooked have done a good job of filling in the picture of how these games twist the meaning of ‘free’ to still fit their monetization strategies. It’s funny how the word ‘free’ has become almost pejorative when it comes to gaming.
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