Free Open Source Software (FOSS) as a whole is thriving, but Free Gaming still remains a child in comparison to other FOSS fields. That does not mean that Free Gaming is a failure. There have been success stories about Free Gaming (Nexuiz, Battle for Wesnoth, etc), but there have been few of these stories. The goal of this article is to explore how the founding of a Free Gaming Alliance could help the development and promotion of Free Gaming.

Introduction to the Alliance

Games are a complicated beast. A Free Gaming Alliance could help free games during those steps that are crucial to making a successful game: organization, development and publication. And during all steps the goal of the alliance would be the same: to provide professional help to free games. Taking over projects should not be a first thought. Consultants of the alliance would work as external members of the development team. It is not completely unimaginable, though, that the alliance would take over a promising project with the consent of the development team. That way the alliance could allocate more people and money to the project. But again, this should not be the case with every project. Besides there would be also be cases funding would be possible without a project takeover.

Organization

In terms of organization the Free Gaming Alliance could help projects with finding a team. When it comes to the programming department, free games have few problems. However, when it comes to content creation there are more problems. If you have ever visited an amateur game development website you might have noticed that there are few artists (designers, modellers, composers, etc) in comparison to programmers. The solution would be quite simple, though. The alliance could host a website where artists and anybody else involved in game development could upload free content (models, music, pieces of code, etc). At the first place projects in development projects could get the content they need. And secondly anybody involved into free game development would have a place to show of their skills.
Furthermore the alliance could also advice projects on topics such as deadlines and anything else related to organization.

Development

With regard to development the Free Gaming Alliance would have a simple job. The general FOSS community has already produced various tools which can be used for game development: GIMP and Blender to name two. Also with regard to SDKs there are already many usable products. These SDKs range from low-level (OpenGL, OpenAL, etc) to high-level (Irrlicht, Ogre, CrystalSpace, Horde3d). But tools are only one (important) part of game development. Another part is the development of the game itself. This is something the project team will be responsible for them self, but the alliance could advice and actually commit content. Furthermore it is not completely unimaginable that the alliance would create their own tools, libraries and maybe even platforms for game development.

Publication

And last but not least: publication. There are already various hosts for FOSS: SourceForge.net, Google Code, Ohloh. However, these hosts are not game specific. It is quite possible that this scares potential gamers. The Free Gaming Alliance could fill in this gap. By doing this the alliance could also offer services to monetize on publication. These services could include marketing, merchandise, package publishing, etc. Of course this would not only benefit the alliance, but also the project (shared revenue).

Conclusion

Yet, the Free Gaming Alliance is still a dream. I would love to see a real-life implementation, but I realize that it would be quite an undertaking. Still, it is an interesting and I would not mind working for such alliance.