I decided to write down a list of complete (no alpha/beta), playable (no proprietary dependencies), FOSS videogames.
I added all the games I could find online + all of the games that came to my memory.
Feel free to have a look to see if there’s something you didn’t know. And please suggest anything I missed, but please do not suggest pre-release or unfinished games.
Thank you!
EDIT: thank you very much everyone for the comments and for sharing additional awesome lists of FOSS material. Hopefully one day I will have the time to sift through all these games and pick all the non-pre-release ones which don’t have any proprietary dependencies.
In the meantime, here’s a copy of the links:
- LibreGameWiki - A wiki of free games and related topics started by Han Dao.
- Open Source Game Clones - Open-source or source-available remakes of great old games in one place.
- Open source games (bobeff) - A list of different open-source video games and commercial video games open-source remakes.
- Open Source Games (trillarion) - A list of open source games, game frameworks and game creation tools.
CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.
Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.
Ah, that’s a shame, I never really thought about it, but it does make very much sense. I’ll demote but keep the CC BY-NC games in a separate section in this list for now, but I will probably remove them in the future once the list grows enough. Thanks for the pointer!
Maybe it is better to avoid duplication of effort and contribute to OSGL.
You just need to add a “mature” tag to it and a option to filter by it. contributing to it is easy as far as i can tell.
They seem to be a bit more lenient than me. Their list also includes games which depend on non-free assets, as long as the source code is free. Still, I will add this list to the list of lists in the post. Thanks!
Space Station 14. Outrageously fun, deep, rewarding, hilarious, insane game. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The learning curve for basic controls can be a lot, but it’s so worth it.
The third link has it, but not the first.
Here’s my Mastodon thread on one of my favorite SS14 rounds, which I got quite a few videos of: https://packmates.org/@noxypaws/115755081201489367
SS14 is still in early-access, but fair enough, it’s so popular that it deserves at least to be in the honorable mentions. Thanks for your suggestion!
Early access isn’t a good way to describe the state of the game to be honest. “Playtest” is even misleading, but slightly less so. It’s such a unique formula, being open source with tons of contributors and tons of forks, and being unlikely to ever reach a point of being “stable” or “released”. There will never stop being frequent releases. And the current state of the upstream game is very polished, performant, full of content, and that’s not even including the dozens of forks which all have their own unique features or changes, some of which may make it upstream and some which will remain unique to certain forks/servers
I believe the devs of the upstream game/engine/launcher/toolkit are targeting features for administration, moderation, and quality of life for the large influx of players for when they DO eventually hit the “no longer playtest” switch:
https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/23246
Another RTS suggestion, OpenRA: https://www.openra.net/
Hi! Although OpenRA’s source code is free, it depends on proprietary assets, so unfortunately it doesn’t qualify for this list. Still, thanks for the suggestion, CnC and RA were both amazing games!
I checked the website and you’re right, the game engine is free but the mods require files from the original games.
How about open arena? http://www.openarena.ws/
Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. I can’t quite understand if this project is mature and if it depends on non-free assets. My first question emerges from the fact that they use a 0.x.x version identifier, and the second one from what is says on this page.
Content repository for OA3 is not yet available.
It’s definitely done, apparently new development is still happening, but there hadn’t been a new release for a long time.
Assets are licenced under the same licence as the engine, GPL2.
Licence for game assets: https://github.com/OpenArena/gamecode/blob/main/LICENSE
Sorry for being pedantic. I might be dumb, but I don’t see any assets (sprites/models/sounds) in this repository. I think the license you linked might just be referring to the code.
The lack of recent releases isn’t a discriminator for this list. And active development is certainly a plus.
RTS: 0.A.D.
FPS: D-Day:Normandy
Hi, thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately 0 A.D. is still in beta, so it wouldn’t qualify for this list yet. It’s definitely popular enough to deserve to be in the honorable mentions though, so I will add it.
As for D-Day:Normandy I assume you mean this? I can’t seem to find a license (nor source code actually, but maybe there is no source code as all scripts might have been written manually). I could add it if it’s actually FOSS, but I’d need help about the license and where to find sources.
In your link, the source is in the src folder
The license is GPLv2. I believe the file is called GNU.TXT in the repository, at least that’s what I have in mine https://github.com/InFerYes/dday
Additionally there’s LICENSE.TXT with some information by Id Software, who open sourced the engine on which this game is based.
My repository’s code is what runs on the active servers. Powabanga’s has installers for the clients.
A FOSS lemmings clone.
Added, thanks for the suggestion! They tricked me with the 0.x.x version identifier, but it seems to be a mature/completed project.
