I depends on the background. I'm 2 years into solo developing a game and all programming, artwork and animation is my own. I had to invest into quite some learning to make it possible, but I figured it's a worthwhile investment.
I do work with a composer, though.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."
I don't know about this particular developer but I don't think there is anything "obviously" out of scope. I've worked in the animation industry and creating hard surface models with this quality is not really that hard for a skilled artist. As such I still stand by the opinion that it could be a solo effort depending on the developers background/skill.
So you need the solo developer not to contract out or buy in existing music, graphics, 3D assets, animations, marketing, or you won't call them a solo developer.
Right, so do you also need them to create the 3D engine or are they allowed that off the shelf? Oh, they need to make it themselves. You're strict!
Ok, so they're allowed to write for a platform? Oh, no they're not, that's relying on other people's code.
And writing in an existing language? Tsk tsk tsk. Got to invent the programming language yourself, otherwise you need to list the entire GCC/LLVM team as your collaborators on the game.
They have to create their own silicon too, it's cheating to rely other people's chips, how can you call yourself "solo"?
Are they allowed to sell it on Steam or do they need to build their own store and payment networks? Heck, should they get themselves accredited as a payment network. Oh, and as a bank.
And presumably, if the game needs to be translated to any language other than the developer's own, they have to do that translation themselves, right? Not rely on experts in that language. Can't really be a "solo" dev that way, can you?
And so on.
Building a game involves effort, and millions of decisions. Is the gameplay right? Is the story right? Are the graphics right? Design the characters, the levels, the world. Make the game run. Make the game available?
I can accept that solo developers will sometimes make the graphics/music/"assets" themselves, sometimes buy off the shelf, sometimes pay others. But unless they hire that person full time to collaborate on the game... they're still the solo developer.
They will definitely lean on existing 3D engines, libraries, plugins, font engines... and that reminds me, I've almost never seen a game developer design their own fonts. These reusable components can be used in games, and some are even intended to (e.g. engine plugins). But do they define the game experience? Generally, no. That's on the game developer.
So if Bethesda fires all its developers and then gets its next game made by hiring those same developers as independent contractors, then Bethesda would be a solo developer?
"Raspberry Pi CM0 is a yet-to-be-officially-announced castellated Compute Module based on the Raspberry Pi RP3A0 SiP (System-in-Package) found in the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3E (CM3E)."
Absolutely agree. The blog post is claiming the opposite to what their ToS is granting - but one is fluff (that will be forgotten soon) while the other is legally binding. I cannot imagine applications like browsers that would require such an unrestricted license for user input just to do its service. That clearly indicates some "other" future motive that is underlined by the notion to remove the FAQ entry and other past actions towards an advertising future at Mozilla.
Am looking forward to explore some of the alternatives. And no, I don't want a just a correcting/updating/informing follow-up blog post of how we the users got it all wrong.
In fact, the current UPDATE makes it worse:
"UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."
vs. the ToS:
"You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
No - you don't need a license for my input. Just pass the butter, it's not your job to "use that information" in any way, form or shape. How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input? What did legally change that would require that license? No one asked you to: "We use data to make Firefox functional and sustainable, improve your experience, and keep you safe." (from the blog). What does that even mean? If you have specific use-cases in mind state them clearly, instead of this overreaching general license, that may or may not be misused now or in future. As of this ToS you may very sell my data to AI companies to "help me navigate the internet" which is not even part of the Privacy Notice protection.
Reinstatement your privacy guarantees in the ToS and be transparent about explicit use-cases.
The blog does come from company officials and so you can show it to a judge and state "this is how you should interpret their ToS". It will be harder than if the ToS was clear, but the judge on seeing the ToS and blog differ is likely to come down hard to Mozilla for creating this situation. But you also need a good (expensive) lawyer to pull this off.
Even with a lawyer it's still a gamble if you will win - and in either case, the damage will have been done by then and no monetary compensation will undo it.
> How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input?
Might be a case of covering their asses in the context of services they provide for search suggestions etc. Those are not mere programs users run on their own devices, and they rather make use of services run by Mozilla, which probably leads to their lawyers seeing the need for legally covering Mozilla ass.
A less charitable interpretation is that they actually want to introduce terms for using the software itself, in a way that conflicts with the no-nonsense "no restrictions on use" approach of open source, and thus ignoring open source principles in preference for covering their asses against hypothetical risks, while somehow still trying to look like open source.
In any case I agree the blog post or the update don't make anything better. I don't think the post says anything substantial about the terms of use or their introduction. It doesn't, in concrete terms, clarify anything about the seeming conflict between the introduction of terms of use and the commonly accepted definition of open source (which includes no restrictions on use). The post rather seems like a classic case of trying to make things better with nice-sounding words rather than owning up and actually clarifying any ambiguity.
Maybe, but SEGA seems to muddy their own case as their official support FAQ section [1] states:
"Will I still be able to play the SEGA Classics games?
Absolutely! All SEGA Classics games and bundles you own will remain in your library, ready to be downloaded and played at any time."
Note the "you own" here that is in dispute with the Steam user agreement.
This rubs me the wrong way. Resource renaming is a high level concept, which was one of the features of OpenGL that all the modern APIs have successfully dropped. A modern low level GPU API should not do that.
reply