Open Source=Alive Game?

As I continue my meander through retro-FPS land, I've reached Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. One of the best "dueling games" scenarios of all time. They're both awesome, and they're different enough that (at the time) they could coexist.

But only one of them is still decently active today, and I have a theory on that. Quake 3 was open sourced about 5 years after release. Unreal finally got sort-of released for free (still not OS) in 2024.

And today, I can go find a server with real people (not just bots) playing real Quake 3 pretty much any time of day. Unreal Tournament, I've made it into exactly one "normal" match in a weekish of looking. There are plenty of weird servers. People still play instagib for some reason (HAAAATE), made even worse by these assinine "bowling alley" looking maps where you can't really dodge or aim. There was a cool one where the nuke launcher was modded into a jet you could fly. But, basically, it's dead. It's a shame, because it's a great game, but it's dead.

Is the reason Quake 3 survived because of IoQuake and Open Arena? I can't prove that. Maybe it was just a better game and it survived. Maybe there were a few really dedicated people who kept the scene alive. But, in my mind, the fact that you can just download and go, and know it'll run on a modern computer, for free without pirating or whatever (hell, Open Arena is in most distro's repos) seems like a pretty big advantage.

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