[Nel] Would a complete gpl'ed and copylefted online gaming world be financialy succes?

[Marc De Mesel]

What I was wondering, Would it be possible for a massive multiplayer game to 
be gpl'ed completely, meaning, the engine as well as the art and even make 
the title, the development website, the promotional website, as well as all 
documents (everything that is of use to the forker of your project) 
copyleft.

You would make money by charging access to your serverpark (or some other 
way you make money at your server park). Others would be able to fork your 
project and setup servers themselves.

On one hand this is bad for your business. There will probably pop up 
different variations, some closer to your project, look and feel, some more 
different. You will have to be more competetive. At the other hand it could 
be good for you as they will help create a bigger market as there will be 
more interesting products, online worlds in this case, as it will be more 
easy to make a world yourself, or with a little team since you can copy a 
lot of things from other projects.

Developing everything in gpl and copylet allows you also to attract more 
developers on the internet since you can develop your world in the wide 
open. All the documents, code and art can be viewed and played with. If 
someone shows interest and starts to contribute to the project you take him, 
after a while, on your team and give him or her a part of the profits to be 
made. (I though up a system that would allow for dynamic scaling of 
percentage of ownership ( and income) so that people who are of more value 
scale in popularity and also income and vice versa, people who stop 
cooperating or do stupid things will lose percentage (the other memebrs have 
some voting power).) (I'm thinking of an online world here that has monthly 
income).

You guys must already have had this idea so let me know what your thoughts 
were or are on this idea. Would it be possible to make money this way and 
hence be even be succesfull, financialy?

MarcDM


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