this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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I look forward to opensource games on an opensource game store that allows devs to get paid. That would be amazing.
Anti Commercial-AI license
https://itch.io/ is pretty close just no exclusivly OS
That would be nice.
I can't believe indie devs like LocalThunk or Toby Fox don't get any money when someone buys their games. It's really bizarre.
Or do you mean, that there are open source game platforms out there that don't pay the devs?
If all the money should go to the devs, every game would need to be self-published, and the store would not take a cut, which isn't realistic, if you want the store or platform to have any features.
I mean that I don't know of an opensource game store, let alone one that allows devs to get paid. There are stores out there where devs publish their opensource games, but the stores themselves are proprietary.
I'm not sure how an opensource game store could be monetized. It would probably be donations. A part of those could go to the game store devs. Probably the closest we'll get to something like that is the Heroic Launcher. If they added an index of opensource games and had a distribution package (I assume it would be flatpak) and some method of payment or donation link, it could be possible.
Anti Commercial-AI license
The itch.io desktop app is open souce, but afaik the website isn't. It does actually allow devs to get paid though, through charges or encouraged donations. There are some games you can get from flathub or the standard linux package managers, but they don't have any built in features to pay devs.
https://flathub.org/apps/category/game
The expensive part of hosting game files, pages, and mods isn't really any different from what flathub or similar already does. I suppose cloud saves would require extra storage space, but I'd imagine an open source game store could charge for their cloud while also allowing p2p or a selfhosted cloud, which is a similar model to what a lot of open source projects with cloud features already do. That would be a fairly sustainable monetization scheme for the store I think, especially with donations on top of that.
Devs can be paid partially through donations, although I doubt that would be nearly enough without a system like Itch.io has where it always shows a payment screen that you have to click through before you can download the game. There are a couple more models, ArmorPaint is open source but you have to pay for binaries or compile it yourself, and Aesprite is source available (restrictive license) but takes a similar model. Overall though I don't think open source games will ever become the standard, even for indie devs, and even if open source platforms do.