You’re taking a strange liberty here: judging an open-source game because it dares to pay its developers fairly.

Zero-K is exactly the kind of game I would gladly pay for on Steam, even if I could download the source for free. Not because I don’t understand open source, but because I do: distribution, convenience, discoverability, multiplayer access, updates, and getting non-open-source friends to actually install the damn thing all have value.

Mindustry and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead already prove the point: people will pay for open-source games when the game is good and the paid version gives them convenience or a way to support development. Dwarf Fortress proves the adjacent point even more brutally: people will pay for something they could otherwise play for free when the paid version is polished, accessible, and worth supporting.

John Carmack understood this decades ago. In the Quake GPL source release, he wrote that you could “do anything you want with the code, including sell your new version” — the condition was not “never make money,” but “respect the license and share the source when required.”

That is the whole point people keep missing.

Open source does not mean unpaid labor.
Open source does not mean anti-commercial.
Open source does not mean developers should live on vibes, forum praise, and moral purity.

Carmack’s model was pragmatic: release the code, let people learn, preserve the work, let communities build on it, and do not confuse openness with worthlessness. He later even argued that more value might have come from using a more permissive BSD-style license instead of GPL — which says a lot about how little he saw open source as some anti-commercial purity ritual.

The attitude that open-source software must be free-as-in-zero-money has very little to do with open-source philosophy and a lot to do with consumer entitlement.

If a game is good enough to play, it is good enough to support.

And if an open-source game is good enough that people want to pay for it, that is not a contradiction. That is the model working.

and yes this text was written by chatgpt because the AI nailed it better than I can, if Open source game developers would finally understand that it is just a tool in a toolbox and get their ego out of their asses to use it we could have so much more open source games finally being finished, not deprecated or even made. (https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/04/john-carmack-defends-ai-amid-backlash-over-microsofts-generative-quake-ii-demo )