I was wondering what things you can do to make money from an opensource MMORPG type game or any opensource project. I was thinking that selling in game items and advertising would be the main types. Also hold special events for charity like music concerts.

I have the same interest, so I'll keep track of this Thread =D

What do you mean by "selling in game items"? If I got it right, I think it is unfair. =/

Son Of Cain

There are lot's of way of making money from an opensource game. First of all, you have to remember that opensource != free of charge, there's nothing stopping you from charging for your software. What's usually expected is that an OS project supply the sourcecode when distributing the software, but there's nothing implied by opensource that you have to distribute it for free.

Further more, even if you supply your sourcecode publically and for free, you can still sell your game assets such as art, music, scripts etc. The meat of the game in other word. This is the direction that Nevrax has taken with their NeL engine (The Saga of Ryzom)

You can also take another route and sell a "service", i.e. charge people for using your servers to play. There's also money to be made on the side of the main game. You can charge for support, extra content, perks etc.

Finally, you can try to survive by supplying a great service and let people donate money to their favourite passtime.

I thought you had to give your game out for free with opensource. What i meant with the in-game items is that you could sell stuff like weapons, houses in game, you would still be able to raise money for free.

I guess the service approach is best: Maintaining a high quality server where people could play. This server might be the one you tune with updates for the game, attracting people to play in it. Selling in-game stuff seems not good to me, since non-paying players will have to work hard to get the same weapons others are buying; And if you're selling unique stuff, not found in the game, even worse =/

At least that's my opinion, I wouldn't like to play this kind of game.

Son Of Cain

Taxes.

Controll the in game money. (for eg. In order to get money, you have to get it off you. Which lets you keep controll of how much $$ is in the game, inflation, ect.)

Sell items.

Collect tax of users selling items

From,
Nice coder

The economists' guild? [grin]

Son Of Cain

I think they are right on. Charge for access to the servers.

If you do it right, you can extend the system, while keeping your extensions closed source. You have to look at the license, and find out ways to work around that. Usually, if you dynamically link to it, whatever is dynamically linked does not have to be the same license. But you will haev to release the changes that use those dynamic links in the code. But it's not really a big problem, becuase nobody will have access to whatever stuff you are doing in those dynamically linked systems.

This way, you could add unique stuff to your game and server that nobody else has, and gives an incentive to use your servers. Otherwise everybody can run the same thing, and the same sever and game, and you have no advantage.

Selling items is a really really bad idea. Who knows what the liability of such issues are going to bring in the future? I wouldn't want that responsibility on my head without a serious lawyer team behind me. I think it's not ethical as well as probably a potential legal issue.

Quote: Original post by qesbit
Selling items is a really really bad idea. Who knows what the liability of such issues are going to bring in the future? I wouldn't want that responsibility on my head without a serious lawyer team behind me. I think it's not ethical as well as probably a potential legal issue.

Look into Second Life. You have to buy land, housing, etc. in there with real cash. So far its working wonderfully for them with little to no legal problems. The Sims online also had it for a while where you could buy in game credits with cash (and also turn in credits for cash), that got exploited rather fast though (infact some people created whore houses and illegal gambling halls in the game to exploit it). And there have been other games (though not many have been successful like Second Life has been) that have made the player use real money to buy items in game. Its been done before. You would just need to be creative about it.

Look at gunbounds system (gunbound.net).

You buy in-game items with real money that are for vanity only, it seems to be doing great too.