Why aren’t there open source sports games?

Note: The post originally appeared on jonknowles.win

Every few years I buy a copy of the current EA Sports NHL or FIFA game for Xbox, and this year, I got both games for Christmas (thanks mom). Although I haven’t had much time to play FIFA 17 yet, I know what to expect: it’s usually incrementally deeper and nicer in subtle but noticeable ways. Not so with EA Sports’ NHL game. Perhaps the experience is different for players who play on Xbox Live a lot, but as far as I can tell, very little has been introduced to the basic functionality of the game in five years or so. It would be unfair to say that each new release is just a glorified roster update, but the series is unquestionably stale. Unfortunately, EA has a captive market: Their main competitor, the NHL 2k series, was discontinued after the 2011 edition, and there’s millions of people just like me, who’ll buy the game consistently so they can play with current rosters against their friends, accompanied by new music and fresh commentary. But it becomes a little more depressing each year.

I guess what I find lacking most in the NHL series is the lack of options for interesting and weird gameplay. In this regard, the contrast is greatest with what the FIFA series has done couldn’t be clearer. FIFA has dozens of fun skill games to play: trick shots around weird objects, keep away, two-on-two, and so forth. NHL lacks anything of that sort. Shootout mode and practice mode have been essentially static for a decade or so. Why isn’t there a half-ice free-for-all like there was way back in NHL 2006? Why not add the NHL All Star Game skills competitions? How about mini-sticks? Pond hockey? Floor hockey? Big goals? But it doesn’t even have to be that outlandish. Three-on-three overtime is the coolest thing that’s happened to hockey in a long time. It’s basically a constant exchange of breakaways until someone wins. But NHL 2017 doesn’t even have a setting to change the number of players on the ice. Why can’t I play a whole game of three-on-three if I want to?

The deficiencies of EA’s NHL series have led to my favorite open source pipedream: an open-source hockey sim game. How cool would it to have annually-updated hockey game that produced a generic hockey experience and let users share custom rosters? Now, there are several very good explanations as to why this might be difficult, if not impossible. Open source games in general have been far less successful than, say, open-source office productivity software or web development tools. A lot of that development is done in foundations funded by industries that use those tools, and no such benefactors exist for open source games. And a project that aimed to provide an alternative to such a complicated game as NHL 2017 would be a major endeavor. On the other hand, a sport simulation game is the kind of project that would be easier to sustain and refine over a long time. Compared to most games, which are built, sold, and consumed for a fairly brief period before players tire of them and move on to the next thing, a sport sim can be around and grow forever, much the way that EA’s NHL series already changes slowly over time.

The other major objection to this idea would be use of logos, rosters, and player likenesses that EA or the NHL would claim as trademarks or intellectual property. This problem seems intractable. After all, no one wants to play as Joe McHockey on the Calgary Red Team or the Anaheim Aquatic Birds or whatever. We want to play as Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers or Florian Busch of the Berlin Eisbaeren. To be honest, I don’t know much about copyright law. However, there are plenty of other examples of third parties using these logos and information in contexts that are considered fair use. Publications and websites reporting on the NHL use them every day, of course. Perhaps the prospect of the NHL or EA sending legal threats would scare developers away before they got started. But it would be easy to produce the game without any rosters at all and let users produce logos and rosters for whatever leagues they wanted to play in – and share them freely online of course.

Like any open source project, it seems like some brave souls just have to try this and see where it goes. I don’t have the time or expertise for that, but I would be eternally grateful to anyone who could break us away from EA’s mediocrity.