Technically they are not exactly on the same field which could allow using similar trademarks. But on the other hand in this case X’s use of X could be reasonably argued to be very confusing for customers and therefore violating X’s trademark.

Could it be said many game companies attempts end in alpha but communities’ failures are just more transparent?

Maybe but it’s rare for a company to put out products at alpha level unless they go bust before the game is finished. Sometimes games are launched at beta level and fixed later but that’s not the same than the eternal development limbos of open source projects, where something almost playable is released to keep people engaged but it never really gets much better than that.

It has been fun to think about designing gameplay in the past but I’ve never studied the basics.

I’d say the most important thing about making games is gameplay design. While good game engine design is a big thing, what actually makes a good game is the user experience, not the technical details of how they implement things. It’s also what is the problem in a lot of open source projects. I had a friend who implemented a very nice javascript browser based game engine. There were very cool features like particle physics and complex light effects in it. But in the end nobody wrote an interesting game with it. What matters is the content of the game, not so much which engine implements the content.

Good game design is also something that PhD theses are being written about. Not simple at all. I found the nintendo talk about designing zelda botw world very interesting. How much thought goes into things like the psychology of the player and how he reacts to what he sees and how to steer the player where the story wants him to go while giving him the impression he makes the choices himself is mind blowing.

Yeah… “community developed game” very rarely turns out well. Especially if they attempt something resembling AAA content. Perpentual alpha state is the most common outcome. And when they work they typically just recreate some existing game with little creativity in terms of IP. Maybe Veloren will be the exception but nothing they show is in any way special. It seems they have already rewritten the engine entirely once. Edit: and of course it looks a lot like cubeworld and minecraft.

It’s not really difficult to create some graphics content and moving characters on some engine engine, but that’s like 5% of what it takes to make a good game. Communities are very good at the former but not so good at the remaining 95%.

I want to make games that repect users’ software freedom and for now I bet on users learning to value their software freedom too.

Users generally want games that are fun to play and that actually work. Software freedom is very very much secondary even among those who even know what it means.

It was a private company back then so I don’t think there is financial info available. But at least it seems that the reports they filed for IPO indicated they had made loss for a few years prior.

Battery life has nothing to do with the price of the phone because battery size is limited by physical size not price. The cheapest phones actually tend to do well in comparisons.

The problem with patron model is that most people don’t want to pay for something they might get some time in the future. We have tried things like gofundme and it generally has been a disappointment. Patron models works for some things, like I might pay for an entertaining content creator to keep making content, at least if the stuff isn’t also available for free, but games are not like that. It’s generally considered stupid to pay in advance for games and seeing how expensive making big games is it would require millions of people being stupid per game.

In the end the patron model in game development would mean mostly big well established companies could make money. Who would pay for an unknown new company with no well established track record? Investors wouldn’t because there would be no return later. Only idiot users would.

Unity technologies has never made a profit since it was founded. It’s still a company aiming at growth by burning money. Their losses have only increased since they went public.

Where did you get the idea that Android phones have longer battery life? iPhones usually do very good in battery life comparisons. Usually you have to go ~20% larger battery on an android device to get the same battery life as an iphone. Of course if you look at just the top charts you get a number of large Android phones with like 7000mAh batteries, which are by far not the norm.

For example by my quick sample of three reviews your one plus nord seems to roughly match iPhone13 battery life but lose to iPhone 14.

I’d say this is actually one reason people buy iPhones. With Apple they can trust that power usage has been implemented well. With Android phones some of them have good battery life and some don’t. Even within one brand.

Better local AI capability. It’s definitely something they are working with, introducing new accelerator features with new processors. Currently most of the actually great AI tools still require you to offload the workload to a server somewhere. And some stuff is not worth doing in a mobile device before it can be done at a fraction of the power.

For the basic hardware features, mainly the camera and image processing tools are actually relevant. Almost all non professional photography in the world is now done with phones and there is still a lot to do to improve the miniature cameras.

Some of the greatest new features from the past few years are things people don’t even realize weren’t always there. Like for example my phone opens up when I pick it up and look at it. And locks when I put it down. This makes usage so much more fluid and is something that did not happen just ten years ago. This kind of UI optimizations are way more important than some numbers in spec sheet. And the local AI processing I mentioned is a key in enabling more situations where the phone understands what you want without you explicitly pressing buttons.

I have soon a PhD in computer tech related subject, program for living, and am a lot younger than the judge, and if you ask me if Mozilla makes a search engine I would say I have no idea, they’ve made a lot of stuff. And if you asked me how Google’s SEM tools work I would ask wtf is SEM.

The problem is, free software model is actually difficult to make profit with. Red hat has long been touted as the prime example of how to do it, by selling service and support instead of software, and even they try to limit the customers’ freedom as much as possible now. Turns out a lot of people don’t need support. And the better the software the less support is needed.

I struggle to see a way to make a game engine available so that it’s free software and the customers can just take it if they don’t like your pricing policy, but still make money from developing it. Or even break even. What would the engine developers sell? What would the game developers sell if the code could just be redistributed for free?