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Research the Case for Open Development
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not.
— Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)
Somewhere tonight, a developer is finishing a Steam page no one will read. They will refresh the wishlist count… twelve. They will close the laptop. In 2024 Steam shipped 18,900 games, 32% more than the year before, fifty-one a day [1]. That is one new game every twenty-eight minutes, around the clock, including the two or three released while you read this paragraph. A Kotaku analysis found 80% of those releases went unplayed [2]. By the time a new indie finishes their store page, fifty more pages have gone live behind them, and fifty more will go live tomorrow.
The funding situation behind those pages is no better. The GDC State of the Industry 2025 survey reported that 82% of indie developers had put their own money into the game they were making, and half of all developers were self-funding [3]. One in ten developers had been laid off in the past year, 28% in the past two, rising to one in three for US-based developers [3]. Studio closures stacked through 2023, 2024, and into 2025 have pushed experienced developers into the same crowded space as the first-timers [4]. The local picture is the same shape. Ukie's 2025 review counted 3,655 full-time UK games-industry job cuts across 491 companies between May 2024 and September 2025, against a 24% rise in incorporated UK games SMEs in the third quarter of 2024 alone, into a market where consumers spent £8.76 billion on games the following year [5][6].
Chris Zukowski, the marketing writer most indies read to understand how Steam works, puts the visibility question plainly. The Steam algorithm, he has written, withholds visibility from games that do not clear unstated sales and review thresholds, and progressively expands reach for the games that do; trading cards, Daily Deal invites, and discovery-queue placement are gated on milestones the platform deliberately keeps unspecified [7]. His preferred line is one he borrows from Jim Butcher: "You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you" [8].
A page on Steam with twelve views at midnight, refreshed. An inbox with no press replies. A wishlist count frozen since the page went up. The hardest thing for a new indie to do is be recognised.
The obvious answer is marketing. The answer is wrong. Ads, agency, wishlist campaign, Steam Next Fest beat, streamer outreach: each move has a per-unit cost and conversion rate, both working against a studio with no community and no budget. Wishlists from paid ads convert worse than wishlists from organic traffic, and the median Week-1 wishlist-to-sale conversion sits at 0.10 to 0.15, on Simon Carless's GameDiscoverCo numbers [9]. Chris Zukowski, the marketing writer who carries those numbers to most indies, treats them as a diagnosis of the pipeline rather than a prescription, and counts devlogs as one channel among several worth running. The marketing pipeline assumes a relationship between studio and player can be manufactured in the months before launch. For most studios the arithmetic does not allow it.
The relationship has a different name. Recognition is being known before introduction. It is the unasked-for message in the inbox. It is the friend of a friend who mentions, casually, that they have been following the work for a year. It is the conversation in someone else's stream where the maker's name comes up; nobody has to explain who that is. By the time a launch happens, recognition has either accumulated or it has not. The launch only resolves whether the community already there will buy.
Success is not the wishlist count on launch day. It is the distance between strangers and the people who already know who the maker is. Algorithms do not make recognition. People do, and people become a community by being given the chance to watch.
Recognition compounds because work seen by strangers can be remembered, recommended, and returned to. Hidden work cannot.
The practice that builds the relationship has a name: open development. The name covers a family of practices on a spectrum, not a single binary: a public devlog, an open-source repository, public design docs, a public roadmap, community feedback loops, co-design with the people the work affects. A studio can sit anywhere on that spectrum and still be doing the practice; the cases below prove different members of the family, not all of them at once. The cases run from a Kickstarter that raised AU$57,000 from 2,158 people who already knew the studio, to a platform that paid out a billion dollars to creators it never hired. They lead into the harder questions the practice has to answer in 2026: what happens when AI can produce the boilerplate, what stays human in the work, and what fears keep makers closed when the evidence asks them to open. The stake is simple. The mechanism that lets a new indie be seen is the same mechanism that lets creative work survive consolidation, displacement, and gatekeeping. The cases come first.
Team Cherry were three people in Adelaide. What they had to show was modest. Hungry Knight, a Ludum Dare jam game released on Newgrounds in August 2013 and scored one out of five on its first day, featuring a character design that would become the Knight [14]. Concept art from a later jam whose theme was "Beneath the Surface", sketches that would become Dirtmouth and the Forgotten Crossroads [12]. A one-star Newgrounds entry, some drawings, and, a year later, 2,158 people who showed up.
They ran a thirty-day Kickstarter in November and December 2014 with an ask of AU$35,000. The campaign closed at AU$57,138, 163% of goal, average pledge AU$26, ten per cent of the ask inside twenty-four hours [12][13]. The first people through the door were not strangers; they were people who had been watching.
The numbers that followed are easy to find. Hollow Knight shipped in February 2017 and passed 500,000 copies by November of that year. It crossed a million on PC by June 2018, hit 2.8 million by early 2019, and by August 2025 had sold almost fifteen million copies [12][15]. The 2,158 backers seeded a community that grew a thousandfold inside a decade.
After the announcement of Hollow Knight: Silksong in February 2019, Team Cherry went mostly quiet for six years; the game finally shipped on 4 September 2025 [129]. The community the original Kickstarter built did more than endure the silence. The r/Silksong subreddit turned the absence of news into its own cultural artefact: "silkposting", a meta-tradition of fake announcements, elaborate inside jokes, and ritual sacrifices of community members to "secure the release", which kept the game in conversation through every Game Awards and Nintendo Direct it failed to appear at [158]. The public-presence work was durable enough to carry a community through years of post-success quiet, and the community amplified it back.
Team Cherry have said as much. Ari Gibson, describing how much of the game's localisation and wider work came from outside the studio: "A lot of that has actually been through the help of fans and through the community coming to us" [13]. William Pellen on who those fan-translators were: "They're people who had already played the game and were really passionate about it" [13]. Gibson again, on what players reported back: "the journey they had was their own, had its own shape" [16].
The AU$57,000 was not the achievement. The 2,158 people were. They arrived at the Kickstarter already recognising what kind of game it would be, because the work had been shown. Team Cherry did not open their source or run a weekly devlog. Visibility alone was enough.
Eric Barone announced Stardew Valley on Steam Greenlight in September 2012 and shipped 1.0 on 26 February 2016 [17]. He did not open the source; he ran a public presence. The four years between were public. He kept a blog and posted progress wherever players were already talking [18]. Chucklefish signed on as publisher midway through development, after the public presence had built, not before. There is at least one concrete moment where the community changed the shape of the game: when forum users said the bachelorette portraits looked too similar, Barone redrew every villager portrait, posting before-and-after comparisons publicly during the redesign [19]. By the end of 2024 Stardew Valley had sold more than 41 million copies across platforms, with an estimated lifetime gross of US$518 million [20]. Barone's own description of how he handled the community is plain: "My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all. I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human" [21].
Barone is the four-year case; Tarn and Zach Adams are the twenty-year one. They began Dwarf Fortress in October 2002 [22]. The first public alpha shipped in August 2006. The game ran as a free download on bay12games.com from 2006 until December 2022, when a paid Steam release went live. Through every one of those years, Bay 12 has published a monthly devlog: each one a financial state-of-studio plus the next month's plan [23]. The Suggestions subforum on bay12forums.com has been feeding ideas into the game for two decades. The Adams brothers' Patreon, launched in early 2015, "doubled" their income at the time and became their sole funding source until the Steam release [24]. Tarn, in PC Gamer, on the players who funded the move from hobby to full-time work: they "are the reason I've been able to make the step from hobbyist to full-time developer" [25]. The Steam release sold 160,000 copies in its first 24 hours, 500,000 in its first month, reached 800,000 by April 2024, and has since passed a million [26][27]. The first-day community had been reading devlogs since Bay 12 was the ditch they named it after.
A shorter cadence holds the same shape. Andrew Spinks, working under the handle Redigit, shipped Terraria on Steam on 16 May 2011 and founded Re-Logic around the launch [131]. The game has sold more than 60 million copies by October 2024 [132]. Across fourteen years, every major content update has shipped free to existing owners, from 1.2 in 2013 through 1.4.4 Labor of Love in September 2022 and the 1.4.5 finale in 2024 [133]. The cadence runs in public on the Terraria Community Forums: state-of-the-game posts, developer "Spoiler" teasers, and a Suggestions board the team reads. tModLoader, the community modding framework, lives as an open-source project on GitHub and ships as a free DLC on Steam.
Showing the work in public also commits the maker to a posture they may have to defend. The clearest moment of what that cost Re-Logic was not a content update. In February 2021 Spinks lost access to his Google account without explanation, taking his Gmail, YouTube, and Drive with it. After three weeks without recourse, he cancelled the Stadia port of Terraria and posted: "I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge. Consider it burned. … I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little. Doing business with you is a liability" [134]. The studio walked away from the platform deal. Sixty million copies and fourteen years of free updates is what community-engaged cadence at scale looks like when the studio holds the line on who it will work with.
Where Bay 12 published the cadence in text, Double Fine published it on camera. The 2012 Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter was the moment the documentary became part of the deal: 2 Player Productions, fresh off a Kickstarter-funded film about Mojang, pitched Tim Schafer on filming the production and shipping the footage to backers [10][11]. The crew were inside the studio from the first concept meeting. They filmed everything.
The footage caught the failure of the plan. In July 2013 Schafer concluded the Kickstarter money would run out before the game was finished. Rather than cut scope to fit the budget, Schafer split Broken Age into two acts and used revenue from Act 1 to fund Act 2 [11]. The documentary captured the all-hands where Schafer told the team. Act 1 shipped on 28 January 2014, Act 2 on 28 April 2015. The 12.5 hours of footage went out to backers and onto YouTube in March 2015, with the budget crisis intact in the cut [11]. Double Fine shipped the failure of the plan as part of the record.
The discipline did not stop with the one project. Amnesia Fortnight, the in-house prototype week Double Fine had run privately since 2007, opened to the public in 2012: backers voted on which pitches entered prototyping, and 2 Player Productions filmed the two weeks that followed. Massive Chalice came out of the same posture, closing on 27 June 2013 with US$1,229,015 from 30,749 backers [28]. Psychonauts 2 followed on Fig in December 2015, raising US$3,829,024 from 24,109 backers [29]. Then the question changed.
On 9 June 2019, at Microsoft's E3 briefing, Matt Booty announced that Double Fine had joined Xbox Game Studios [30]. The worry was whether the documentary discipline would survive acquisition by a closed-shop megacorp. The answer was in the footage. 2 Player Productions kept the cameras running through the four years Psychonauts 2 still had to ship. The game released on 25 August 2021. Double Fine PsychOdyssey premiered on YouTube on 10 February 2023, ran for 32 episodes through October 2023, with a 33rd, feature-length epilogue on 26 July 2024 [31]. It is the most detailed public record of AA development in existence.
Layoffs happen on camera. The "is this fun yet" reckonings happen on camera, repeatedly, with prototypes nobody is sure about and producers asking the question the team has been avoiding. Producers push back against creative leads on schedule and resolve it on screen. Composer Peter McConnell scores in the room. The cameras stay on for the conversations a press release would round off.
A documentary at this depth is not a marketing artefact. A studio acquired by Microsoft, working on a sequel to a beloved game, kept the camera on for the layoffs and the disagreements and the prototypes that did not work. It is the work, shown, at studio scale.
If Bay 12 is the long case, Caves of Qud is the slow one. Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat at Freehold Games have been making it since 2007. The first public beta came in 2010. Steam Early Access opened in July 2015. The 1.0 release came on 5 December 2024, fourteen years after the first public beta [32][^gp-qud-1.0]. The Patreon launched on 3 May 2019, with tiers from US$1 to US$99 and perks including votes on the pets and tiles that ship in live patches [33]. The team's "Feature Friday" cadence has run weekly for years, each patch documented on itch.io and Steam. Asked why they stayed in Early Access for nine years, they answered that they "wanted a positive lifestyle and great game, rather than maximum profit" [34].
Across the three, feedback is design input, not promotional output. Barone redrew art after forum critique; Bay 12 runs a twenty-year Suggestions forum; Freehold ships patron-voted content. All three pre-funded full-time work through public channels before a commercial launch arrived. The cadence is long, boring, and unglamorous on any single Friday or month: a screenshot, a balance change, a financial note, a paragraph rewritten for the third time because a reader caught what the writer no longer could. Durability beats any single post.
The cost is not magical. A Friday post written every Friday is hours that did not go into the build, comments to read, expectations to hold. The overhead is not free. The alternative, silent work followed by a marketing push at launch, costs more in the long run for most under-resourced developers, because the marketing pipeline that closed-development assumes does not work for them. Chris Zukowski's wishlist-conversion figure is a diagnosis of that pipeline, not a prescription for any one fix; he treats devlogs as one channel among several, and the case for the cadence rests on what it builds over years, not on his number alone.
The devlog is not content alongside the work. It is the work, shown. I'm learning the same cadence on Volley!, one post at a time.
Lucas Pope started a thread on the TIGSource forums on 14 November 2012, opened it with a screenshot of a passport and a desk lamp, and noted that he had made a bunch of games but had never kept a devlog before [136]. The thread became Papers, Please. Thirty-two posts went up in November alone; eighty-one followed in December [137]. The posts were not announcements. They were the work, mid-build, with the screenshots and the dead ends in front of strangers.
When Papers, Please shipped in August 2013 and Pope began Return of the Obra Dinn, the cadence carried over. A second TIGSource thread opened in July 2014 and ran for the four years it took to finish the game, with monthly posts through June 2019 archived on his own site [138]. The Obra Dinn log is the one developers cite as a goldmine: detailed engineering notes on the 1-bit rendering, the third-person perspective lock, the audio system, the writing.
The reversal is in the November 2017 entries. Pope had spent months on the dithering: a 1-bit shader that converts an 8-bit grayscale image into the black-and-white look the game ships with. The first version of the technique tied the dither pattern to screen space. Turn the camera and the pattern slid across the surfaces. Pope posted the new pattern to the TIGSource thread and asked what people thought. The thread told him plainly: it was worse. He went back, took the criticism on board, and rebuilt the approach to keep the dither stable in world space. A forum reader, Brent Werness, contributed an algorithm that ran the error diffusion the other way round, and Pope folded it in [139]. The reversal shipped in the published TIGSource posts of November 2017, with the failed version still in the record above it. Months of work, walked back in public, with the better version arrived at because someone in the thread said the first version did not work.
The cadence ran the length of both games. The Papers, Please thread carried the build from November 2012 to release in August 2013. The Obra Dinn thread carried the build from July 2014 to release in October 2018, then continued for post-release notes through 2019. Five years of monthly posts on the second project alone, with the technical posts long enough that other developers wrote follow-up tutorials and shader rewrites against them.
Both games shipped, and both succeeded by any measure a solo developer would apply. Papers, Please sold 1.8 million copies in its first three years and reached 5 million by its tenth anniversary in August 2023 [140]. Return of the Obra Dinn won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Narrative at the 21st Independent Games Festival in 2019, took BAFTA Games Awards for Artistic Achievement and Game Design the same year, and has sold around a million copies across platforms [141][142]. The TIGSource readership for both threads was the community that bought the work first and told the rest of the world about it.
In April 2026 Pope said publicly that he no longer talks about the game he is currently making. The PC Gamer write-up of his appearance on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast carried his words: "You don't really talk about stuff when you're working on it. It's getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that." He added: "It's not a hard rule, but I've got a kinda feeling about that. I just don't feel as comfortable talking about what I'm working on again" [143]. The conditions had changed; his posture changed with them.
Open development is a posture, not a vow. A practitioner can enter it, hold to it across a decade and two finished games, and then exit honestly when the situation that made it sustainable has shifted. Pope spent six years building two of the most-cited indie games of the period in front of a community that watched every step. The community that arrived for Papers, Please and Obra Dinn did so in part because they had watched him work. The argument is for the visibility while it is happening, for the compounding it does for the maker over the years it lasts. The argument does not ask any maker to be visible forever, and it survives a maker stepping back when the ground moves.
Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, working as Extremely OK Games on Celeste, took the same posture across a different surface. They shipped Assist Mode in the base game on 25 January 2018, originally called "Cheat Mode" until Thorson renamed it because "Cheat" felt judgmental [35][36]. The mode lets the player slow the game down, give themselves invincibility, or lighten the difficulty of any specific obstacle. At launch the in-game description read: "Celeste was designed to be a challenging but accessible game. We believe that its difficulty is essential to the experience" [37]. Speedrunner Clint "Halfcoordinated" Lexa, who has limited use of one hand, posted in April 2019 that framing the default difficulty as "essential" othered players who needed the mode, and proposed alternative wording he had drafted with narrative designer Kathy Jones [38]. Thorson agreed, and the description was rewritten and shipped in the September 2019 update as: "Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode" [37]. The change shipped because a disabled speedrunner caught a wording the team had not. The exchange happened in public.
The studio also published the player-movement code from Celeste on GitHub under an MIT licence for the code, with assets reserved, and the repo doubles as a public issue tracker [39]. Celeste won Best Independent Game and Games for Impact at The Game Awards 2018, was nominated for Game of the Year, and had sold 1.7 million copies by January 2025 [35].
Neither Pope nor Extremely OK Games pitched transparency as marketing. The marketing arrived anyway, because readers had watched them working in public for years.
Anuke released Mindustry under GPL-3.0 on GitHub and sold it on Steam at US$9.99 from late 2019. The price of a sandwich; the buyer also gets the entire source code. The paid Steam build has grossed US$9.7 million across an estimated one to two million owners [40][41]. The free builds run on itch.io, F-Droid, and GitHub Releases. Buyers pay for convenience, Workshop support, and achievements; the repo runs alongside the storefront.
tobspr Games published Shapez's source under an MIT licence. The original sold over 500,000 units on Steam while remaining open, and the free web demo has been played ten million times [42]. Shapez 2, the closed-source sequel, sold 150,000 copies in its first Early Access weekend in August 2024 [43], passed 500,000 by the Dimension Update [44], and crossed 650,000 at full launch in April 2025 [42]. The pattern is not that open source sells the product. The pattern is that an open, free, heavily-played original was the funnel the commercial sequel monetised.
Step back one level, to the tools. Godot, named after Beckett's play as a wink at the feature that is always one release away, is MIT-licensed, developed by more than 2,500 lifetime contributors, and funded through the Godot Development Fund at €36,000 a month from 1,521 members and 18 sponsors as of August 2025 [45]. When Unity announced its runtime-fee policy in September 2023, Godot's GitHub stars and new-user signups doubled within a month [46]. Re-Logic, the Terraria studio, donated US$100,000 to Godot and US$100,000 to FNA in response, calling Unity's move "predatory" [47]. The donations came with a standing pledge of US$1,000 a month to each engine, so the support compounds rather than landing once and ending [135]. It fits a wider posture: the same studio walked away from a Stadia port in 2021 after Google locked its founder out of his own accounts, refusing the platform deal on principle. A studio whose flagship has sold more than sixty million copies treats the open commons as something to invest into, and treats closed-shop power as something to push back on by name. Antti, the solo developer of Road to Vostok, publicly ported his game from Unity to Godot after spending 615 hours on the move, and said in a subsequent interview: "There's a good possibility that Godot becomes the Blender of game engines" [48]. Commercial Godot releases through the engine's showcase and independent coverage include Brotato, Dome Keeper, Cassette Beasts, Halls of Torment, The Case of the Golden Idol, and Road to Vostok [49].
Blender sits underneath a different layer of the pipeline but makes the same argument. The Blender Foundation received €3.1 million in 2024 through its Development Fund [50], with named corporate backers including Epic (a US$1.2 million grant in 2019), AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Netflix (€240,000 a year), Ubisoft, and Arrowhead Game Studios (€30,000 a year) [51][52]. Ubisoft has adopted Blender as the primary content-creation tool at its Paris Animation Studio. The Open Movies programme, from Big Buck Bunny in 2008 through Charge and beyond, has proved that a non-profit can drive a professional-grade tool and ship released art alongside it, bankrolled by community and corporate donations rather than licence fees.
Joel Spolsky named the underlying mechanism in "Strategy Letter V", published 12 June 2002: smart companies commoditise their complements, because cheaper complements raise demand for the product they sell [53]. Most of the cases above fit the pattern. Lucas Pope sells the games and gives away the TIGSource devlogs. Bay 12 gives away the binary and earns through Patreon. Tobspr's Shapez is the open complement that funnels into the closed sequel. Anuke charges for the Steam build of an open repository. Naming the mechanism does not weaken the case; it sharpens it. The argument is not that everything should be open. The argument is that openness belongs at the layers where it acts as the engine of trust, distribution, and on-ramp. The layers that pay for the work can stay closed without contradicting the practice. I have put my game Volley! under MIT for the same reason: not as a sales engine, but because the trust and on-ramp it builds are worth more than the code.
GNU founder Richard Stallman would say MIT is the licence that lets capital take the work back into closed hands, and he is not wrong [54]. The choice for Volley! is MIT anyway. GPL's reciprocal requirement raises the barrier for the casual contribution this whole argument celebrates, and the dynamic Spolsky names is mostly absent for indie games at the scale a single person can ship. The licence is the trade. The practice is what matters.
The argument has a parallel that predates the open-source vocabulary used here. Anna Anthropy's Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (Seven Stories, 2012) named the lineage of work made by "freaks, normals, amateurs, queers, housewives", distributed through Twine, neocities, and Glorious Trainwrecks rather than through Steam or Patreon [55]. The zinester practice is the games version of open development at the lowest possible barrier: tools that anyone can pick up, work shared without a storefront in the loop. The cases gathered here mostly pass through commercial channels; Anthropy's lineage refuses them, and the principle holds either way.
Open tooling is now the substrate under a generation of commercial indie work, and openness, where it works, functions as a distribution and trust multiplier rather than a monetisation strategy. A commit from a stranger lands on the repository. The project gets better. The stranger tells their friends. The commons grows, and the makers inside it are found.
On 25 August 1991, at 20:57 GMT, a Finnish computer-science student named Linus Torvalds posted to the comp.os.minix Usenet group. The subject line read: "What would you like to see most in minix?". The body opened:
"Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix..." [56]
He signed off noting he had ported bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 to it. He had wanted to call it Freax; a sysadmin at the University of Helsinki renamed the FTP folder to "linux" without asking him. The hobby, in the end, did become big and professional. It is now the dominant kernel on internet servers, all five hundred of the world's fastest supercomputers, seventy percent of smartphones through Android, and virtually every networked embedded device. It is an argument for public development that runs against every intuition a private-industry veteran brings to software.
The lineage Torvalds joined was already long. Mar Hicks's Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017) traces how postwar Britain's computing labour was performed largely by women and then systematically reclassified out of the profession as the field rose in status [128]. Even the lineage Torvalds is named for was collective from the start. The infrastructure Linux ran on top of had been built across decades by women operators, hobbyist mainframe users, and overseas contributors whose work fed into the systems that became standard. The histories that named one person were doing the closing, not the work.
Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, first presented at Linux Kongress in May 1997 and published as a book in 1999, is the clearest written case for the argument Torvalds had lived [57]. Raymond's formulation, often called Linus's Law and frequently misattributed to Torvalds himself, is that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The argument is not primarily about code quality. It is about the speed and openness that come from letting the work be seen.
Outside of software specifically, the same pattern has carried. On 19 December 2013, Buffer's CEO Joel Gascoigne posted "Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries" [58]. Every employee's name, role, and salary, along with the full formula and its location tiers, went public. In the thirty days that followed, Buffer's monthly job-application rate rose from 1,263 to 2,886 [59]. The open-salary system has run continuously for more than a decade; as of January 2025 Buffer publishes salaries for 75 employees across 30 roles, and refined the approach with a 2024 update reframed as the "Open Salary System" [130].
Pieter Levels started his "12 Startups in 12 Months" project in 2014 and has run an open revenue dashboard at levels.io/open ever since [60]. The public record of Nomad List's revenue, cross-referenced with independent tracking, runs from US$120,000 in 2017 to US$5.3 million in 2024 [61]. Remote OK, a sibling project, sits at US$2 million in annual recurring revenue. Both are run by a solo operator, in public.
The theory caught up late. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks (2006) defines commons-based peer production as work that is "radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands" [62]. Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus (2010) notes that "the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource" [63]. Cory Doctorow's "The Memex Method" (2021) argues that the act of publishing notes in public is what makes them retrievable and generative years later; writing in public compounds what writing in private merely records [64].
A kernel, a payroll, a revenue dashboard. Each ran on the same wager: that work seen by strangers compounds in ways work hidden from them cannot. Games arrived late; they are arriving now.
Junior engineers used to learn the craft in three places. In a company, by being hired into the work and given small things to do under supervision. In a university, in CS programmes that placed students into real projects. In open-source communities, by sending pull requests to maintainers willing to teach.
Two of those three are shrinking fast. In the US labour market, where the data is sharpest, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab's August 2025 paper "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen used ADP payroll records to show a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22 to 25) in the most AI-exposed jobs since the widespread adoption of generative AI, and a 20% drop from the late-2022 peak for software developers in that age band by September 2025 [65]. Workers thirty and older in the same AI-exposed categories grew between 6 and 12% over the same window. The New York Fed's Labor Market for Recent College Graduates tracker put computer-science recent-grad unemployment at 6.1% in 2025, and computer engineering at 7.5%, both, awkwardly, higher than art history or English [66]. A computer-science graduate in 2025 is more likely to be unemployed than an English major. Indeed Hiring Lab data shows software-developer postings down 71% from February 2022 to August 2025 [67]. The fifteen largest tech companies cut new-graduate hires by 25% from 2023 to 2024, and new graduates are now 7% of new hires at Big Tech, down more than half compared with 2019 [68].
The university pipeline collapses through the same door. Handshake internship postings fell more than 15% from January 2023 to January 2025 while applications-per-posting rose to 109 across all sectors and 273 in tech [144]. NACE puts the 2024 intern-to-full-time conversion rate at 62%, the lowest in five years [145]. The University of Waterloo, whose co-op programme is the global benchmark, watched its spring co-op employment rate fall from 93% in 2024 to 77.3% in 2025, the worst since records began [146]. Northeastern capped CS students at 100 co-op applications per cycle because there were no longer enough postings to absorb them [147]. The University of Sydney's CS capstone ran 28 industry-partner projects in 2017 and 9 in 2025 [148]. UC Berkeley's Hany Farid, in September 2025: "Our students typically had five internship offers throughout their first four years. They're happy to get one job offer" [149].
The proximate cause is widely named. GitHub Copilot reached 20 million all-time users by July 2025, with adoption at 90% of Fortune 100 companies [69]. Cursor passed US$2 billion in annual recurring revenue and over a million paying customers by early 2026, deployed at more than half of the Fortune 500 [70]. Marc Benioff said in early 2025 that Salesforce was "not going to hire any new engineers this year because we have had such productivity gains from Agentforce" [71]. Mark Zuckerberg, on Joe Rogan's podcast that January: "Probably in 2025 we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer at your company that can write code" [72]. The headlines read this as juniors losing jobs. The harder fact is that the task-level work juniors used to be hired to do has been absorbed, and with it the rung of the ladder the next generation was meant to climb.
Open-source communities are the third training ground, and they remain the only one growing. GitHub's Octoverse 2024 reported 1.4 million new developers joining open source that year, with no rise in the rate of rejected pull requests, meaning new contributors were absorbed rather than turned away [73]. The skills juniors used to pick up on the job (code review etiquette, commit-message discipline, scope negotiation, release management, the ability to disagree in writing without taking it personally) are still taught in public repositories with engaged maintainers. Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software, free online and continuously maintained, remains the canonical handbook [74]. GitHub published "Rethinking open source mentorship in the AI era" in 2025, arguing that OSS maintainership has become one of the few places where these craft skills are practised on the record, in front of strangers [75].
The caveat is Nadia Asparouhova's, in Working in Public (2020): modern open source is closer to a creator-and-maintainer economy than to a guild, and many maintainers' problem is too many low-quality drive-by contributions, not too few contributors [76]. Apprenticeship happens in the sustained-contributor tail, not in the first pull request. The opportunity is real, but it is taken by the people who keep showing up.
Open development in games extends the on-ramp. A studio that builds in public, credits contributors, and accepts thoughtful pull requests offers the same training the industry has stopped offering. The person whose first line of shipped dialogue lands because a studio merged their pull request learns the craft from inside something that ships. Open development finds the indie a community; it also rebuilds, where it can, an apprenticeship the industry has lost.
Clint Lexa, a speedrunner who has limited use of one hand, posted on Twitter in April 2019 that the word "intended" in Celeste's Assist Mode description othered players who needed it. He proposed alternative wording he had drafted with narrative designer Kathy Jones. Maddy Thorson at Extremely OK Games agreed; the line was rewritten and shipped in the September 2019 update. The exchange happened in public. The credit landed in the patch notes. No internal review at any staffing level was going to surface that word on its own.
A playtest specialist can run a checklist. A marketing consultant can survey a panel. Neither, as a rule, has spent a life with a one-handed controller layout, reading text through dyslexia, or watching a cutscene without sound. The information that improves the design is held by the player who lives it, and closed development pays for proxies where open development reaches the source.
Broader teams have access to data narrower teams do not, and cannot get it by trying harder. Closed pipelines run on whoever the company hired, whoever the QA budget paid, whoever inside the building thought to raise the question, whoever the marketing department targeted. At every step the funnel filters against the same defaults: location, credentials, money, ability, language, gender, race. Open development reverses the filter. The contributors are anyone who can read the repository. The playtesters are anyone following the devlog. The community is whoever the public posts reached. The mechanism is not philanthropy; it is friction. Closed pipelines have high friction for participation. Open ones have low friction, and the people excluded by the high-friction filter find the low-friction surface first.
In each of the cases below, the insight came from someone who had lived the constraint.
Naughty Dog's accessibility breakdown for The Last of Us Part II (June 2020) credited disabled consultants by name and shipped a game that became, on press reports, the first AAA title playable from start to finish by a fully blind player [77][78]. The game has more than sixty accessibility settings. Ian Hamilton's aggregation of player response from the disability community is the fullest contemporaneous record [79]. The features were not specced from inside the studio. They were specced from outside, and the studio published the credit.
The Xbox Adaptive Controller, released in 2018, is the cleanest case, with one qualification. The hardware is Microsoft's, the firmware is not public, and the manufacturing was done in-house. What was open was the design process: Microsoft worked with AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Warfighter Engaged, and individual disabled gamers across hardware, packaging, and accessory design, and built the device on standard 3.5mm switch ports so it slots into the existing accessibility-hardware ecosystem. The shipped device "looks absolutely nothing like the first prototype", per Microsoft's own account [80]. The packaging itself, with loops to open with one hand, a hinged lid, and unobstructed slide-out, was iterated against direct disabled-user feedback. This is co-design rather than open development in the source-public sense, and it belongs in the same argument for the same reason: the information that shaped the product came from outside the firm. A closed-development equivalent would have shipped a worse product, and never known.
Forza Horizon 5 added picture-in-picture sign language interpretation for cutscenes in March 2022. Playground Games hired a deaf-led casting company and used native signers rather than a single hearing interpreter [81]. The decision came from the deaf community. The alternative default would have been worse, and obvious in retrospect.
The insight that improved the product was not available to the internal team at any staffing level, no matter how thoughtful or how well funded. It was available only because someone outside the team had lived it.
The same structural mechanism shows up in open source at large. GitHub's Octoverse 2024 reports India is on track to overtake the United States in contributor numbers by 2028, with year-on-year contributor growth above 25% in Nigeria, Brazil, and the Philippines [82]. Outreachy has placed more than a thousand FOSS interns from underrepresented backgrounds since 2006, expanding from a women-only intake to anyone facing underrepresentation in tech [83]. The pool widens, the participation widens, and the participation that widens contributes the next round of insights.
Names sit behind the flags. Toge Productions, working out of Tangerang, shipped Coffee Talk in January 2020 to roughly 385,000 Steam units and around US$3 million gross, and ran a public devlog series on itch.io and Medium documenting design decisions, music, and mechanics across the build [84][85]. Polychroma Games, a small Manila team founded during the pandemic, released Until Then on 25 June 2024 to 99% positive on more than a thousand Steam reviews within weeks; the rating draws substantially from Filipino players seeing themselves in the work [86]. Rasheed Abueideh, a solo developer in Nablus, released Liyla and the Shadows of War free in 2016 on iOS, Android, and Windows; Apple initially refused to list it as a "game" before reversing position, and it took the Excellence in Storytelling award at the 2016 IMGA MENA [87][88].
The romantic version of this story is wrong, and the correction matters. Nadia Asparouhova's Working in Public (2020) is the cleanest statement of the discount: the "community" label on most open-source projects is overstated, the typical project is run by one or two people, harassment of maintainers is real and underreported, and OSS demographics still skew toward English-fluent men in stable connectivity environments [76]. Open development has the mechanism for broader participation. It does not always realise it.
Where it does, the loop has numbers. Ian Hamilton's running tally of accessibility business cases puts them on the page. The Last Door reported 14% of its first 150,000 players used the dyslexia-friendly font, shipped after two days of work. MUDRammer had a 12% blind player base. Solara's highest-value in-app purchase spenders were blind [89]. Accessibility is audience expansion with measurable conversion. Each accessibility win adds players. The added players surface more insights. The insights enable more accessibility.
Robert McRuer, in Crip Theory (NYU Press, 2006), names what is at stake when disabled experience appears in an argument as a productivity input or a revenue input [90]. The Hamilton numbers are real and worth naming, and the cases stand on their own terms first: as players whose objections were correct, whose design instincts improved the work, whose money paid for it. The structural point is that lived experience is information closed development cannot reach; the openness-as-multiplier reading is a secondary one, and it does not exhaust the cases.
The compounding is what closed development cannot do. A studio with a narrow team and a private playtest pool converges on a local optimum: the version of the game that worked for the people inside it. A studio that builds in public, takes feedback from the people who show up, and credits them when their insight ships, accumulates community and accuracy together.
On 2 October 2003 the Source engine source code left Valve's network. Five days later an unfinished build of Half-Life 2 followed. The German hacker Axel Gembe had breached the company through a build account whose password, after careful consideration, was blank [91]. Gabe Newell posted publicly on Halflife2.net asking the community for help tracking the intruders [92]. The unreleased flagship of the most-anticipated PC release of the year was on the open internet, against the studio's will, more than a year before launch.
Half-Life 2 shipped in November 2004 to commercial and critical success. Valve then released the Source SDK openly. A long-tail modding scene formed around it, which is how Garry's Mod and a generation of mappers happened. The worst case for source disclosure happened to Valve, and the company emerged stronger for it.
The leak landed softly partly because Valve's catalogue was already one the company had found rather than built. Counter-Strike began in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod by Minh Le, an architecture student in Vancouver, and Jess Cliffe, a level designer he met online. The first beta went out as a free download. Within months it was the most-played mod on the engine. In April 2000 Valve acquired the intellectual property and hired both creators; the retail release followed on 9 November 2000 [93]. The pattern repeated. Team Fortress started in 1996 as a Quake mod by Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley; Walker still works at Valve. Portal grew out of Narbacular Drop, the 2005 DigiPen senior project by Nuclear Monkey Software; Newell saw it at the DigiPen career fair and hired the entire seven-person team [94]. Garry's Mod was Garry Newman's 2004 Half-Life 2 mod; Valve approached Newman to ship it commercially on 29 November 2006, reportedly handing him the full Source engine code in exchange for a 50% revenue share, and the game has sold over 20 million copies [95]. Dota 2 descends from Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft III mod lineage carried forward by Eul, Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, and the pseudonymous IceFrog, whom Valve hired in October 2009 to lead the sequel [96]. Almost every Valve franchise except Half-Life itself originated outside Valve.
After the leak, Valve doubled down. The Steam Workshop launched on 13 October 2011 as part of the Team Fortress 2 "Manniversary Update", initially for community-submitted cosmetic items, and extended to all Steam games in early 2012 with Skyrim as the flagship third-party title [97]. By January 2015, Valve had paid Workshop creators over US$57 million across Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [98]. Valve has not published a comprehensive update since, which is its own caveat: the figure is a floor from a decade ago, and the cosmetic economy has expanded since. The current Counter-Strike 2 Workshop pages state a 25% revenue share for item creators on direct sales, with allocation per contributor at Valve's discretion [99]. Third-party analysis estimated Valve grossed over US$1 billion from Counter-Strike 2 case keys in 2025, with a separate analysis putting the figure near US$980 million the prior year [100]. The cosmetic economy is core revenue, and the people drawing the items live outside the building.
The same posture extended to the operating system the company sells through. Proton released on 21 August 2018 as an open-source compatibility tool built on Wine and DXVK, with an initial 27 whitelisted titles [101]; the source lives on GitHub under the ValveSoftware organisation [102]. The Steam Deck shipped on 25 February 2022 running SteamOS, an Arch-based Linux distribution. Valve has not published official sales numbers, though IDC estimated 3.7 to 4 million units shipped by February 2025 [103]. The Steam Hardware Survey tells a sharper story: Linux sat at 1.0% of the platform before the Deck, climbed to 1.38% by December 2022, 1.9% through 2023, and reached 5.33% in March 2026, the highest figure ever recorded [104]. The infrastructure that made the Deck possible is open, and the part of the PC market that uses it has more than quintupled.
Free to Play, released on 19 March 2014, is the version of all this aimed at non-players. Valve made and gave away a feature documentary following three Dota 2 professionals at the first International tournament. It premiered at the Castro Theatre on 18 March, released free on Steam and YouTube the next day, and passed 5.5 million views inside a week [105][106]. A studio at this scale publishing a free, externally distributable documentary about its own game and players is itself a build-in-public artefact. Free to Play sits at the lighter end of a spectrum whose heavier end is Double Fine PsychOdyssey [31]. Both put their work on the public record. One chose the launch event. The other chose the process.
The strategy is named, not accidental. The 2012 Handbook for New Employees, leaked in April 2012, described a "flatland" with no managers, desks on wheels, and the line "nobody reports to anybody else"; it became required reading in management circles for years [107]. The reality was messier. People Make Games' investigation, alongside PC Gamer's reporting on ex-employee accounts, documented a hidden hierarchy, stack-ranking that drove risk-aversion near review time, and diversity collapsing under peer review [108][109]. The Handbook was an aspiration, not a description. The cultural value, such as it is, came from publishing the principles at all and then enduring the public audit.
Newell himself has been on the record for years. At LinuxCon North America in September 2013 he opened with: "It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming, sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope." He went on: "What we became convinced of is that Linux really is the future of gaming" [110][111]. On piracy, in 2011, he said: "In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" [112]. Both quotes are public, on the record, and stake out Valve's worldview in the writer's own words.
Steam itself is proprietary. Valve takes a 30% cut. The Source 1 SDK was open; Source 2 is not. Valve is famously silent on internal projects, Half-Life 3 the canonical example. The argument is not that Valve is fully open. It is narrower and harder to dismiss: at every customer-facing layer, the SDKs, the mod-to-product pipeline, the cosmetic economy, the operating system, the runtime, even the documentary filmmaking, Valve operates closer to open development than its peers, and these are the principles that built the dominant PC games marketplace on the planet [150].
Open at every layer that touches its players, closed at the layers that touch its money.
This essay was written with AI. The argument is for human craft and human credit; the tool I used to assemble citations and tighten prose is a large language model. The objection writes itself: using AI to argue for human craft concedes the case. Dodging it would forfeit the point.
The accounting: I drafted this essay with Claude as a research and editing assistant. I chose the cases. I made the argument. The fact-checking, the structure, the worldview, and what to leave out are mine. The model surfaced sources I then verified: the key ones read in the original, the rest checked against the claim. It suggested cuts I accepted or rejected line by line, and produced revisions of paragraphs that were already correct. It accelerated the boilerplate. It did not do the thinking.
The line I draw runs through the project, and I draw it openly. In code, the model helps with boilerplate and refactor; the architecture, the design, the gameplay are human. In writing, the model helps with research surfacing and editing; the argument is human. So is the voice. In art, no AI generation. Sprites, animation, music, sound, UI: every pixel, every frame, every sample is made by a person, credited by name.
In May 2023, the Center for AI Safety published a single sentence: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." [120] The signatories include Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Stuart Russell. That month Hinton resigned from Google so he could speak without conflict, telling the New York Times: "These things could get more intelligent than us and could decide to take over, and we need to worry now about how we prevent that happening." [121] Bengio went on to chair the first International AI Safety Report, mandated at Bletchley and published 29 January 2025, with ninety-six authors and an Expert Advisory Panel nominated by thirty nations, the UN, the OECD and the EU. [122]
Stuart Russell's Human Compatible (Viking, 2019) makes the case that the danger is not a robot deciding to harm us; it is a sufficiently capable system optimising for an objective slightly different from the one we meant. [123] Anthropic's "Core Views on AI Safety", published 8 March 2023, sits with the same uncertainty: the company is acting on "a greater than 10% likelihood that we will develop broadly human-level AI systems within the next decade". [124] Ten percent is not a prediction; it is a number large enough that ignoring it would be reckless.
I support AI safety research and the slowdown of frontier capability work to let safety catch up. The Future of Life Institute's open letter of 22 March 2023 called for a six-month pause on training systems more powerful than GPT-4; it gathered tens of thousands of signatures and did not get its pause. [125] The international report, the Bletchley Declaration signed by twenty-eight countries and the EU in November 2023, the Seoul Frontier AI Safety Commitments signed by twenty companies in May 2024, and the Paris statement of February 2025 are partial answers and worth defending as such. [126] [127]
Some of this has produced real-looking commitments. Anthropic published a Responsible Scaling Policy in 2023 [113], METR runs independent evaluations [114], and the UK stood up an AI Safety Institute [115]. The follow-through is thinner than the headlines. Anthropic's RSP has been quietly weakened twice: the v2 update in October 2024 swapped quantitative ASL-3 thresholds ("50% aggregate success rate" on autonomous-replication tasks) for qualitative ones ("the ability to fully automate an entry-level researcher"), and v3 dropped the explicit pause commitment [151]. When Claude Opus 4 shipped in May 2025, Anthropic deployed it under "ASL-3 protections" while admitting it had not actually determined the model crossed the threshold [152], and shipped it without ever publishing the ASL-4 definition the original 2023 RSP had promised to deliver before reaching ASL-3 [153]. METR is donor-funded and access-dependent; its published evaluations of OpenAI's o3 flagged that the model "appears to have a higher propensity to cheat or hack tasks in sophisticated ways," and o3 shipped anyway [154]. The UK AI Safety Institute was renamed the AI Security Institute in February 2025, dropping bias, ethics, and societal-harm work to focus on cyber and CBRN; the same week, the US and UK refused to sign the Paris AI Action Summit declaration that sixty-one other countries signed [155]. None of the Bletchley, Seoul, or Paris commitments are binding; xAI has already missed two self-imposed deadlines to publish a Seoul-compliant safety policy with no consequence [156]. Meanwhile, frontier training compute has continued to grow at four-to-five times per year since the FLI moratorium letter [127], and over thirty models have now been trained at GPT-4 scale or above. The pattern is consistent: commitments are voluntary, thresholds are revised downward when they bind, and the people inside the labs who pushed hardest for safety left. OpenAI's Superalignment leads Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike departed in May 2024, Leike writing that "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products" [157].
The reason is plain. Sam Altman at OpenAI, Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei at Anthropic signed the extinction-risk statement and kept training larger systems at the labs they ran. The reason they give is that someone will, and the safest version is built by the people paying attention. This is unacceptable. If it were unacceptable to them, they would have stopped. A signatory who calls the work an extinction risk and continues it has either overclaimed the risk or accepted it on everyone else's behalf. Both positions need to be challenged, not deferred to. The contradiction is not that the labs do nothing; it is that the partial mechanisms above exist because the labs themselves named the risk extinction-level, and yet the same labs weaken those mechanisms when the thresholds bind. The open question is whether internal commitments by competing companies are sufficient when those same companies say the worst case is human extinction. The race dynamic is harder to dismiss: a cautious lab that slows, hands the frontier to one that won't. In public, the labs point to the unsafe Chinese frontier model. The choice of villain is strategic; "a competitor builds it unsafely if we don't" generalises across every jurisdiction the lab might prefer not to name. The abstract version is the more accurate formulation, because the actor least disposed to caution may sit in Beijing, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, or a private compute cluster nobody has heard of yet. That is the argument for binding coordination outside any one lab, which is what the safety summits and the international report begin to construct, rather than an argument for the cautious labs racing alongside the rest. And there is a deeper counter still. If frontier capability is itself the danger, who reaches it first does not change what is built. A careful lab that races to assemble an extinction risk before a careless one still assembles the extinction risk. The race-dynamic argument only holds if the artefact is safe in trained hands; the labs' own statements deny it.
No company statement resolves this. Only pressure from outside the labs can.
Closed frontier labs make safety hard to verify from the outside. Independent evaluation, responsibly released weights, and alignment research are the levers a public can actually pull. Visible work is how external scrutiny becomes possible at all. The bet is not against the tool; it is on the people making the choices about it.
The smaller failure mode is not that the tool exists. It is a culture in which the underlying craft is no longer practised, because the boilerplate became the whole job and the only people who knew how to do the rest aged out without replacement. The remedy is not to ban the tool. The remedy is to keep practising the craft and to keep teaching it. Open development is one of those practices. A devlog written in public is a craft kept in public. A repository read by strangers is a discipline strangers can learn from. A credit list with real names on it is a record that the work was made by people, by these people, who can be hired and learned from again.
Open development matters more with capable models, not less. Refusing the tool is a luxury most solo devs cannot afford. The competition across the market is shipping with Copilot, Cursor, and Claude in the loop, and next year's tools will be more powerful again. Working unaided is not a principled stand; it is a slower release schedule against competitors who have one. The question is no longer whether to use the tool but under what discipline. A lone developer with an assistant can do more than they could alone. A lone developer with an assistant and a community that watches them work can do more than that, and is held to a standard the assistant does not enforce. The community asks the questions the model does not.
Why this trade-off. Why this credit. Why this cut. A devlog readership that has followed the work for a year is the closest thing a solo developer has to a senior colleague across the desk. Their questions are the audit the model cannot run on itself.
The model agrees. The community does not.
Upstream, the model was trained on writing that was not consented to, by people who were not paid. I do not have a clean answer to that, and I will not pretend to. The choice I have made is to use the tool in the narrowest way that still does useful work, to keep human-made artefacts at the centre of the project where they can be paid for, and to be open about both. That is a partial answer. It is the one available to me today.
The argument is not against the tool. The argument is for the posture that keeps the tool in service to the people using it, and for the practices, open development among them, that make that posture stick. Read it and ask whether the cases are real, whether the argument coheres, whether the position is recognisably one person's. The test is not whether the model touched the page. The test is whether a person is behind the page.
There is a kind of work only a person can do. "Write what you know" puts it cleanest. A story by someone who has lived it carries weight that a story assembled from research never reaches. The rule operates everywhere creative work meets the world.
Return for a moment to the Celeste Assist Mode line. "Intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience": one word in that sentence does the damage, and the damage only registers if the language has been pointed at you. The fix shipped because Clint Lexa was carrying what nobody inside Extremely OK Games was carrying. The corrected version is shorter, kinder, and structurally identical in what it offers the player. The information gap it closed was not a gap any internal review could have closed at any staffing level. A playtest specialist can run a checklist. A marketing consultant can survey a panel. Neither has lived inside the body of the player on the other side of the screen.
The same shape recurs in the other inclusivity cases: disabled consultants credited by name in The Last of Us Part II, AbleGamers and SpecialEffect in the room for the Xbox Adaptive Controller down to the packaging. Each time, the load-bearing insight came from outside, and only the people who had lived it carried it in.
Only people produce continuity. Agents can swarm a problem. A dozen instances will return a dozen credible answers in the time it takes a person to read the brief. That is a genuine capability. What it cannot produce is the trust people accumulate between each other across years. The Linux kernel is not only code. It is thirty years of disagreement, repair, and trust between thousands of maintainers; the kernel as it exists today is shaped by every one of those years. Dwarf Fortress is two brothers and the readership that grew up around them. Lucas Pope's TIGSource threads are six years of readers who watched him work, mistakes and all. The trust in those threads is built out of those years, accumulated one post and one reply at a time. Continuity cannot be assembled at speed.
Swarms produce answers. Communities produce a relationship to the work. The two are not substitutes; they are different tools for different jobs.
Almost every input to a creative work can in principle be supplied by a system. Reference material, plausible prose, plausible art, plausible code: the tools are credible at all of them, and getting better. The one input that cannot be supplied externally is the experience of having been a person on this pale blue dot we call Earth.
Grief, joy, embarrassment, recognition: the shape of a memory of a particular afternoon. These are the materials creative work is made of. The only source of them is people, and the only way they reach the work is through someone who has carried them, sitting down to make something. A culture that forgets this will keep producing, and the work will keep selling for a while. Over time the feedstock thins: each generation of tools is trained on the previous generation's output, and the average converges on the average. The way out is the way in: more people sitting down to make work only they could have made.
Open development is the practice that takes this seriously and builds for it. The work is made of the people who showed up. They are credited by name. The next person can find a way in. The community becomes a source of the experience the team cannot have alone. A closed studio with the most skilled team imaginable still draws only on the people inside the building. An open project, in principle, draws on everyone in the community too.
None of this is automatic. Open projects fail. Communities turn toxic. The contributions that should land can be crowded out by more aggressive ones. Asparouhova's caveat from earlier still applies: the mechanism for breadth is not the same as breadth achieved. The claim is structural, not guaranteed. Closed development excludes most of the world outside the building; open development has the mechanism to include it. Over time, the difference compounds.
Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), names the conditions craft requires: time, protection from market urgency, a community of judgement [116]. The practice this essay argues for assumes those conditions, and not every developer has them. The maker with eighteen months of runway and a partner subsidising rent can take up the cadence; the maker with three months and a child cannot. Naming this is not defeat. It names who, today, can carry the practice the work asks for. Visibility is not free either; it is paid in inbox time, comments to triage, expectations to manage, attention that cannot be turned off. The argument is that it is worth the cost.
Eleanor Roosevelt named the price. "Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect" [117]. Open development asks more of everyone in it. The maker works in public and answers for the work. The contributor signs their work. The community does more than consume. The compound interest is paid in what the work becomes when each of those holds for long enough.
None of this is a counsel of despair about the tools. The opposite. The same age that produced the models is the one in which the people who want to make work get to decide what the tools are for. That agency sits in the hands of anyone willing to keep the making theirs.
The contribution that automation cannot reach is the contribution that survives automation. Open development is a practice for protecting it and letting it accumulate. That is why the argument runs past software, and past games.
Someone will steal the idea. They might. Ideas are not scarce. Execution, taste, and the community around the work are scarce, and none of those travel with a stolen design doc. The person publishing the design doc for eighteen months has the readership that grew up with it. A thief can copy the doc and start at zero. The maker has eighteen months and a thousand readers between them and zero.
Players do not care how a game was made. Most do not. Some do, and those some are exactly the community a new indie needs: the first hundred readers who become the first thousand buyers who become the first hundred thousand. A launch on an empty store page has to find everyone. A launch on a page with three years of posts behind it only has to find the people who were already there.
Showing the work shows the failure. Yes. That is why it works. Lucas Pope's Obra Dinn devlog walked back months of dithering work in front of the readers who told him the new pattern was worse. Dwarf Fortress's monthly notes include two decades of bug-fix confessions. Polish is cheap; credibility is not.
Open source does not pay. It pays for Anuke. It pays for tobspr. It funded Godot's foundation and Blender's studio model. It funds Bay 12 and Freehold through Patreon. Open source is not in itself the sales engine. Openness is the trust-and-distribution multiplier underneath sales that arrive through other paths. The instinct that open means unpaid is a holdover from a model the industry has already moved past.
The risk is too high for a solo developer. The risk of silence is higher. A closed project that fails leaves the maker with a private repository and nothing to show. An open project that fails leaves a readership, a record, a reputation, and the first community for whatever comes next. Openness looks like the risky path. It is the one with something to show for itself either way.
Davey Wreden's burnout came partly from the public reception of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, not in spite of it. He named that burnout publicly in a launch video for Wanderstop [118], folding the cost into the record itself. Cuphead was made over seven years of frame-by-frame animation under a re-mortgaged-house regime; it is the strongest case in indie history of open development carried at near-ruinous personal cost. Silence preserves options the open practice gives up: the pivot, the rename, the quiet shelving, the protection from parasocial pressure when a project is going badly. The cost is real, and the makers above paid it. The claim is not that the practice is costless. It is that the alternative costs more in expectation for under-resourced makers.
Closed development still produces hits. It does. Derek Yu spent the better part of a decade on Spelunky and its remake while keeping the work largely private, on the principled stance that he puts out games when they are ready; Balatro shipped from an anonymous Canadian working alone in private and reached five million copies; Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made traditionally by a French studio of ex-Ubisoft developers and broke three million in a month. The argument here is not that open development is the only path. It is that it is the most reliable one for makers without Yu's authorial standing, LocalThunk's talent ceiling, or Sandfall's bench. The named cases are the top of the distribution, not the median; the practice expands the right tail of outcomes, not the centre.
Open development is not a guarantee either. Daniel West spent close to four years on Airscape: The Fall of Gravity, exhibited it at GDC, PAX East, PAX Prime, PAX Aus and the Indie MEGABOOTH three times, posted to Reddit and the forums throughout, and shipped on Steam in 2015. The game sold just shy of 150 copies across all platforms in its first three weeks on Steam. West wrote the post-mortem himself, plainly: "I've actually never heard of a game released on Steam (with some level of marketing) that has sold less copies than Airscape" [119]. The shape of his visibility matters. Showcases, festival booths, press write-ups and Reddit posts are events. They put the work in front of indie peers and games journalists for a few days, then end. A weekly devlog with readers who come back is a relationship. It puts the work in front of the same people, repeatedly, for years. Airscape had the first kind in abundance and not much of the second; its visibility was real, and aimed at the wrong audience to convert. It is not the act of being seen by anyone. It is cumulative visibility to the audience that would buy the work, sustained over enough time to compound. The cases above are not a promise that visible work converts; they are an argument that the visible version is the one with a chance, and a record either way. Openness is a practice, not a guarantee. The practice still beats the alternative.
Somewhere right now, a developer is sitting alone with an empty repository. They have not made the first commit. The voice in their head says no one will be watching. The voice in their head is right… for now. They open the laptop. They make the commit anyway.
A week later, an issue. Someone has read the code. A month later, a contributor with a fix and a kind comment. A year later, a small community that has been reading the devlog and asking when there will be something to play. Good code alone does not bring the community. Visible work does.
This is the quiet shape of recognition. It is not the trailer that goes viral or the storefront that lights up at launch. It is the contributor whose name lands in the credits because the repository was open enough to accept their pull request. It is the Kickstarter backer who watched the bestiary updates for two years and showed up the day the next game was announced. It is the TIGSource reader who has not played the game and may never play it, but checks the thread because the developer has earned a few minutes of their attention. It is the player who finishes a game they love, sits through the credits, and recognises a name from a forum thread three years old. None of these moments scale. Each of them is the whole point.
Volley! is the game I'm making, and open development is the practice I trust to make it under. The game is made in the open: design docs public, code MIT-licensed. It is also a training ground: the person who learns to ship by sending a pull request that lands in a commercial release has learnt to ship something that ships, in an industry that has otherwise stopped teaching this. The cases gathered here are existence proofs, not a controlled study; the practice can work, against a default that is failing most of the people who try it. The alternative is silent work, a hoped-for breakthrough, and a marketing push at launch into a store that ships fifty-one new games a day.
The wider point sits one step out from games. Open development matters, but not above everything; it protects what does: the human craft that takes a life to learn, the human community that takes years to grow, the chance that the next person walking in gets to make work of their own. Every industry that touches creative work is being asked the same question right now, by automation and by consolidation and by the slow narrowing of who gets to be heard. Games are one window on that question. Visible work, credited contribution, broad participation: the answer reaches further than games. The principle is older than the medium and will outlast it.
The hardest thing for a new indie to do is be recognised. Open development is how a person's work gets found. Closed development is how it gets lost.
Shuck is currently one person, Josh Hartley. The game, Volley!, is being built openly at shuck.dev. Thanks to the writers cited for arguments earned over decades, and to the developers named in the cases for showing what the practice looks like at work.
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[108] People Make Games, "What's It Really like Working at Valve? We Found Out." (YouTube, January 2023), presented by Chris Bratt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
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[112] The Escapist, "Valve's Gabe Newell says piracy is a service problem" (2011). https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-piracy-is-a-service-problem/
[113] Anthropic, "Announcing our updated Responsible Scaling Policy", 15 October 2024; Responsible Scaling Policy version 3.0. https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcing-our-updated-responsible-scaling-policy ; https://www.anthropic.com/rsp-updates
[114] METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), autonomy evaluations and methodology. https://metr.org/ ; https://evaluations.metr.org/
[115] UK AI Security Institute (formerly AI Safety Institute, renamed February 2025); Frontier AI Trends Report. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/ ; https://www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-trends-report
[116] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008). https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151190/the-craftsman/
[117] Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (Harper & Brothers, 1960). The quoted passage on freedom and responsibility is widely attributed to this book (p. 152 per quotescosmos.com). https://archive.org/details/youlearnbyliving0000roos_r7p8
[118] Davey Wreden, "Wanderstop and Cozy Games with Creator Davey Wreden", PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted 2024 (YouTube, December 2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVetaNhp2a8 ; coverage in Mollie Taylor, "'Healing is messy, and it is bitter': The Stanley Parable's creator has used his newest game as an outlet to explore his own burnout", PC Gamer, 5 December 2024. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/life-sim/healing-is-messy-and-it-is-bitter-the-stanley-parables-creator-has-used-his-newest-game-as-an-outlet-to-explore-his-own-burnout/
[119] Daniel West, "'Good' isn't good enough: releasing an indie game in 2015", Gamasutra / Game Developer, 2015; coverage in PC Gamer, "Airscape: The Fall of Gravity developer looks at why it flopped". https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-good-isn-t-good-enough---releasing-an-indie-game-in-2015 ; https://www.pcgamer.com/airscape-the-fall-of-gravity-developer-looks-at-why-it-flopped/
[120] Center for AI Safety, "Statement on AI Risk" (May 2023). https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
[121] Cade Metz, "'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead", New York Times, 1 May 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html
[122] Yoshua Bengio et al., International AI Safety Report 2025, mandated at Bletchley and published 29 January 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-ai-safety-report-2025
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[124] Anthropic, "Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How", 8 March 2023. https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety
[125] Future of Life Institute, "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter", 22 March 2023. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
[126] The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-2023-the-bletchley-declaration
[127] Frontier AI Safety Commitments, AI Seoul Summit, May 2024; AI Action Summit, Paris, February 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/frontier-ai-safety-commitments-ai-seoul-summit-2024 ; https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2025/02/11/statement-on-inclusive-and-sustainable-artificial-intelligence-for-people-and-the-planet
[128] Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535182/programmed-inequality/
[129] Team Cherry release announcement on X, 21 August 2025: Hollow Knight: Silksong shipping 4 September 2025 on all platforms. https://x.com/TeamCherryGames/status/1958539409789423741
[130] Buffer, "Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer" and current Transparent Salaries page (75 employees, 30 roles, January 2025). https://buffer.com/resources/salary-system/ ; https://buffer.com/salaries
[131] Cheerful Ghost, "Interview with Andrew Spinks, creator of Terraria", with Spinks discussing the May 2011 launch and the founding of Re-Logic around it. https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/posts/1425/interview-with-andrew-spinks-creator-of-terraria ; Terraria on Steam, listing the 16 May 2011 release. https://store.steampowered.com/app/105600/Terraria/
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[133] Terraria 1.4.4 Labor of Love released 28 September 2022; 1.4.5 finale released 2024. Coverage at Nintendo Life and the Terraria Community Forums. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/09/terrarias-huge-new-labor-of-love-update-is-now-live-heres-whats-included ; https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/terraria-labor-of-love-is-out-now.114357/
[134] PC Gamer, "Terraria creator cancels Stadia port after being locked out of Google account" (February 2021); Kotaku, "Terraria Dev Cancels Stadia Port Over Being Shut Out Of Google Accounts". https://www.pcgamer.com/terraria-creator-cancels-stadia-port-after-being-locked-out-of-google-account/ ; https://kotaku.com/terraria-dev-cancels-stadia-port-over-being-shut-out-of-1846219960
[135] GamingOnLinux, "Terraria dev Re-Logic donates $100K to Godot Engine and FNA, plus ongoing funding" (September 2023), confirming the US$1,000/month standing sponsorship to each engine. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/09/terraria-developer-re-logic-donates-100k-to-godot-engine-and-fna/ ; https://www.engadget.com/terraria-developer-re-logic-is-giving-100000-to-two-open-source-game-engines-amid-unity-debacle-054307544.html
[136] Lucas Pope, Papers, Please TIGSource development log, opening post 14 November 2012 (archived index). https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/tig-00/ ; original thread https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.0
[137] Lucas Pope, Development Logs index (Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn TIGSource archives, with monthly post counts). https://dukope.com/devlogs/
[138] Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn TIGSource development log, July 2014 to June 2019 (archived index). https://dukope.com/devlogs/obra-dinn/ ; original thread https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0
[139] Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn TIGSource development log, November 2017 entries on stabilising the dithering and adopting Brent Werness's reverse error-diffusion algorithm. https://dukope.com/devlogs/obra-dinn/tig-32/ ; Brent Werness algorithm reference https://github.com/akavel/WernessDithering
[140] Engadget, "Indie favorite Papers, Please has sold 5 million copies" (August 2023); Game Developer, "Papers, Please has sold 5 million copies in a decade"; Lucas Pope on X, 1.8 million units sold by August 2016. https://www.engadget.com/indie-favorite-papers-please-has-sold-5-million-copies-171537016.html ; https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/papers-please-has-sold-5-million-copies-in-a-decade ; https://x.com/dukope/status/762851441719390208
[141] Game Developers Conference, "Return of the Obra Dinn takes Grand Prize at the 21st IGF Awards!" (March 2019). https://gdconf.com/article/return-of-the-obra-dinn-takes-grand-prize-at-the-21st-igf-awards/
[142] BAFTA, "Winners Announced: British Academy Games Awards in 2019" (April 2019), with Return of the Obra Dinn taking Artistic Achievement and Game Design. https://www.bafta.org/media-centre/press-releases/winners-announced-british-academy-games-awards-in-2019/ ; Levvvel, Return of the Obra Dinn statistics, reporting approximately one million copies sold across platforms. https://levvvel.com/return-of-the-obra-dinn-statistics/
[143] PC Gamer, "Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope no longer feels comfortable talking about work-in-progress games: 'the situation just feels different'", 6 April 2026, citing Episode 10 of Mike & Rami Are Still Here with Mike Rose and Rami Ismail. https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/papers-please-creator-lucas-pope-no-longer-feels-comfortable-talking-about-work-in-progress-games-the-situation-just-feels-different/ ; coverage at Checkpoint Gaming https://checkpointgaming.net/news/2026/04/papers-please-dev-lucas-pope-isnt-talking-about-new-game-due-to-ai-concerns/
[144] Handshake, Internships Index 2025 (sample: 6,000+ students and recent graduates; data through January 2025). https://joinhandshake.com/network-trends/handshake-internships-index-2025/
[145] National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2025 Internship & Co-op Report, March 2025; summarised in "Intern Conversion Rate Fell, Fueled by Lower Offer Rate." https://www.naceweb.org/talent-acquisition/trends-and-predictions/intern-conversion-rate-fell-fueled-by-lower-offer-rate
[146] Tiffany Wen, "UW's co-op program sees a significant unemployment rate for spring 2025," The Imprint (University of Waterloo), 21 May 2025. https://uwimprint.ca/uws-co-op-program-sees-a-significant-unemployment-rate-for-spring-2025/
[147] Mara Macri, "Northeastern implements a 100 co-op application limit on NUWorks," The Huntington News (Northeastern University), fall 2024. https://huntnewsnu.com/80415/campus/northeastern-implements-a-100-co-op-application-limit-on-nuworks/
[148] David Braue, "Syd Uni capstone shake-up raises red flags," Information Age (Australian Computer Society), 23 February 2026. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/-syd-uni-capstone-shake-up-raises-red-flags-.html
[149] Brent D. Griffiths, "A leading computer-science professor says 'something is brewing' as graduates struggle to find work," Business Insider, 28 September 2025; quoted on the UC Berkeley School of Information news page, 28 September 2025. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2025/computer-science-students-are-struggling-get-jobs-prof-hany-farid-tells-business-insider
[150] Video Game Insights, Global PC Games Market Report 2024 — Steam at approximately 75% of PC games distribution by revenue, with Epic Games Store at 8-10%, Microsoft Store/Game Pass at 6-8%, and GOG at 2-3%. https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/VGI_Global_PC_Games_Market_Report_2024.pdf
[151] SaferAI, "Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy Update Makes a Step Backwards," 23 October 2024. https://www.safer-ai.org/anthropics-responsible-scaling-policy-update-makes-a-step-backwards
[152] Anthropic, "Activating AI Safety Level 3 Protections," 22 May 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/activating-asl3-protections
[153] Garrison Lovely, "Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments," LessWrong / Obsolete, 23 May 2025. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HE2WXbftEebdBLR9u/anthropic-is-quietly-backpedalling-on-its-safety-commitments
[154] METR, "Details about METR's preliminary evaluation of OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini," 16 April 2025. https://evaluations.metr.org/openai-o3-report/
[155] Fortune, "U.K. drops AI safety focus as it signs up Anthropic to help transform public services," 13 February 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/uk-ai-security-institute-safety-anthropic-trump-vance/ ; TechCrunch, "As US and UK refuse to sign AI Action Summit statement, countries fail to agree on the basics," 11 February 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/11/as-us-and-uk-refuse-to-sign-ai-action-summit-statement-countries-fail-to-agree-on-the-basics/
[156] The Midas Project, "xAI misses a second, self-imposed deadline to implement a Frontier Safety Policy." https://www.themidasproject.com/article-list/xai-misses-a-second-self-imposed-deadline-to-implement-a-frontier-safety-policy
[157] Jan Leike on X (Twitter), 17 May 2024 (https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494); CNBC, "OpenAI dissolves Superalignment AI safety team," 17 May 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/openai-superalignment-sutskever-leike.html
[158] Joshua Wolens, "Silksong's finest meme merchants enjoy one last bout of Silkposting before the curtain call," PC Gamer, September 2025; supplemented by GamesRadar coverage of the r/Silksong meme culture across the six-year wait. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/usd350-collectors-editions-an-8-billion-all-time-peak-and-fake-thank-you-letters-silksongs-finest-meme-merchants-enjoy-one-last-bout-of-silkposting-before-the-curtain-call/
Contributing
The game
The Cast
Process
Reference