IMO OGA would only lose trust in the more straightforward case of copyright infringement - where it is someone else's work, or an edited version of it.
If someone sues because of a vague "similarity" or the copyright holder believes they own the rights to a "style", then I don't think people are going to say OGA should have known and removed the art, when it's impossible to make that judgement. If people are concerned there is a similarity, that can be discussed in the comments, and anyone deciding to use it can choose for themselves. I fear that a lot of art would end up being deleted if anything that might result in someone suing over a vague similarity was deleted.
Should all the art submitted as part of http://itch.io/jam/candyjam be deleted? I mean, this was a jam actively encouraging developers to create games which King believes would be infringing. That was trademark issues rather than copyright, though a similar principle applied, plus "the art looks a similar style" may often end up being a trademark issue rather than a copyright one - should the art be deleted, because someone might use a candy image from OGA, that King then decide to sue them for?
"I believe if you place your art on your site under OGA-compatible license, anyone else can submit them here, right?"
Legally this is correct, if someone releases something under a licence, one can't retroactively revoke that.
I don't know what OGA's deletion policy is, but in my opinion, I would hope the deletion requests are only acted upon if there is a good reason, say a licensing issue (such as it using copyrighted material from elsewhere without appropriate licences, or uploaded without permission).
Whilst it might seem nice to honour an author's request to delete, it causes problems if various games are using it, and link to a webpage here that then gets deleted. (Well, it's not a problem legally - but it helps as evidence that things are properly licenced, if the originating URLs are not dead.) As Demetrius points out, someone can just come along an re-add it, but it's less hassle to not have to do that, and to avoid changing the URL; it also seems stronger legally if the uploaded is the author.
Fair enough if OGA prefers to always honour deletion request, but just putting my thoughts out there for debate :)
http://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-takedown says that OGA honors requests to take down if it was uploaded without permission, but that seems to be more a case of erring on the side of caution when it comes to licencing - if someone claims it was uploaded without permission, you don't want to risk a court battle even if it seems that it was released elsewhere under a free licence. In this case though, someone can't claim it was uploaded without permission when they uploaded it!
I can play music from OGA in the browser no problem (including from search results).
It's possible to "favourite" music tracks to give feedback, as well as adding to collections in order for people to keep track of ones that they like. OGA also now keeps track of your downloads.
I don't think a "music player" is needed, because unlike Jamendo, the intention isn't to provide a music streaming service where people listen to music (e.g., in the background), it's to provide music for game developers to download and integrate into their games. So as long as I can easily listen to it when I find it, that's fine, I don't need things like playlists.
I don't see how a music player would make it easier to find music. Whilst the OGA search could do with improving, this is something that is being worked on. Is Jamendo easier find music? At a quick test, it seems similar in that you type terms, then get a list of hits, and can play from the list of results.
Whilst Jamendo is another good place for people to distribute or find music, I don't think OGA should encourage people to go there instead. OGA has the advantage that music uploaded is geared towards being used in games, meaning you don't have to wade through other kinds of music. Also Jamendo allows non-Free licences like non-commercial and no-derivatives. And the advanced search only allows limiting it to one licence - I can't select a list of licences to search for (which OGA does, incidentally).
Technical modifications are allowed in the GPL too (I can put it into a zip file). CC BY 4 is just more explicit about the difference between a technical modification and Effective Technological Measure.
It's good if they've changed the terms to allow Open Source, I believe Microsoft for the Windows Store (which also originally had similar problems IIRC) does a similar thing. So if DRM is no longer enforced, it may be that this issue is out of date anyway (and interesting to note that actually it is worth fighting these things). Are there any news articles on this?
These things do have the possible problem that although licences like CC BY are seen as "compatible" with, or the art equivalents of Free and Open Source software, I don't think any CC licences are OSI approved (http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ) - probably because they weren't written with source code in mind. So it may be that the mandatory licence for non-Open Source means that CC BY etc still can't be used in non-Open Source products, so those people should still stick with OGA BY or CC0. Also it's not uncommon for Open Source games to be multiple-licenced, i.e., source/binary under an Open Source licence, and different licence(s) for the art, so who knows what it means if another licence says "you can't do any of this, except for bits which are Open Source".
* I agree with complete packs. Of course that's quite an undertaking, but it doesn't have to be "complete" - just having a set of art that's consistent (rather than just single one off pieces), and it's then easier to full in the gaps as required. Or maybe artists can look at existing art, and add something to complement it. I don't know if maybe people might think this would be seen as copying/plagiarising - I mean, obviously the art here explicitly allows copying, but people often have an artistic drive to be original, or a fear of being accused of just using someone else's work even if it's legal. But it's worth making the point that here, that really is a good thing for games! FLARE and LPC have shown that there are artists out there willing to create art for an existing set - more of that please :) Perhaps we need another LPC-style competition - or maybe it doesn't have to be a competition with prizes, I think the important thing about LPC was providing an initial set of graphics that artists then built on.
* More character art with animation - static images are fine for scenery, but it's not uncommon to see people release a game character which may look great, but being a single static image makes it unusable in many styles of game (well, they could still be used say as an NPC who just stands there, but not if you want them for a player character or movable enemy). The LPC set, and the FLARE graphics, are great not just for being a consistent set, but also having animation.
* High resolution graphics would also benefit Android, Windows etc. Though I'd say the gap is not just a lack of very high resolution, but a dominance of low resolution graphics. Much of the 2D art seems to have a retro early-90s feel (not that that's a bad thing, but this topic is what there seems to be a lack of), and is below the resolution capabilities of any device today. But having said that, I imagine there's the point that 2D game art becomes harder at higher resolutions (I saw someone making the point that doubling the resolution in each dimension is four times the pixels, and if you're doing pixel art, that matters). In practice my understanding is that most in-game graphics that are higher resolutions tend to be created in 3D, and then pre-rendered if 2D sprites are desired. There are a fair amount of 3D characters on OGA, though often not in a pre-rendered format. Still, in the case of very simple vector art like the balloons example, these restrictions don't apply, so I guess vector art (that can be scaled to any resolution) is something there's not much of.
On the note of 3D models used for rendering sprites, is there demand for taking some of these 3D models, and generating sprite sheets? I'm a programmer but did learn enough Blender to be able to render a static model in isometric (Clint's tutorial at http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_tiles/ was a great help), though animation is currently beyond me. Or has anyone had luck with Blender scripts that claim to automate this? (a quick Google reveals http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Render/Spritify ). I wonder if some programmers skip by the 3D models altogether, in which case generating spritesheets from 3D models (especially those with animations) might be an easy (albeit tedious) way to increase the amount of higher-resolution game-ready art.
@cdoty: To clarify the reason for the clause, it's to prevent additional restrictions (legal or technical) being applied to the licence which takes away those rights.
"DRM is not the only way to prevent someone from getting at the asset. Isn't a protected Unity package a form of DRM?"
I don't know about Unity; but CC define "technological measures" as "defined with reference to Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty". A key point is whether circumventing the protection would be illegal in countries that implement that treaty (e.g., the US, with the DMCA).
You say it's possible to get at the assets on IOS anyway. There are three possibilities:
1. The legal terms of service say that you can't do it. 2. Doing so would be illegal under laws like the DMCA. 3. It's not an issue - in which case this is all a red herring, and people can use CC licences after all :)
"The OGA licenses are a good example of this, but they are not universal and every artist isn't necessarily interested in using them. If a resource is uploaded to another site, there's a discrepancy in the licenses."
If a resource is uploaded to another site and it has to be under CC-BY instead of OGA-BY, how is that different to uploading it to Apple app store? In both cases, it's uploaded somewhere under a more restrictive licence. If it's okay for Apple because people can still download from OGA, then that applies to any other site. If you think it's important for the licence to be preserved - well, now you see why some people prefer CC-BY :)
(This is one of the paradoxes of licencing - yes, I can take anyone's OGA-BY and relicence it as CC-BY! Because that's the very freedom they grant, when they allow people to apply additional restrictions.)
"Nintendo also has a limitation against open sourced anything. I'm assuming Microsoft and Sony probably do too."
Do you mean consoles? Maybe, but that's bad too :)
claudeb asked why this issue only seemed to come up with IOS. Android is massively more popular, and I don't know if IOS being more profitable affects things, if anything, that should be a reason why developers should be able to pay for artists rather than taking Free art :) But yes, there are plenty of developers who want to write games for IOS anyway. But really, I don't think that matters, it's more that this is the first time it's been an issue, other platforms don't have the restriction that additional terms must be applied and you can only distribute through the company. One exception is consoles as cdoty points out, but those are sufficiently harder to develop for that you didn't have many indie/freeware developers in the first place - the companies developing for consoles would be paying for their own art anyway.
I disagree with SketchyLogic that CC not being usable on Apple app store is deterimental "to the CC movement as a whole", when being against legal and technical restrictions seems to be a belief of Creative Commons organisation. It may be hugely important to an IOS developer, but that doesn't mean it's hugely important to other people with views against DRM or closed platforms (who aren't going to persuaded by the more profitable argument, when they're not making the money, and Apple is taking a 30% cut - it's like arguing that Windows makes more money than Linux, when in fact the lower costs is a possible benefit of Free Software - plus as an Android user, it's hard for me to contribute to a company's profits when they only release for the fewer Apple users in the first place - there are some games that I'd love to pay for, but can't). Within the Free/Open movements, there's long been a debate about "liberal" versus "copyleft" licences (e.g., BSD vs GPL). I think there's a place for both - so it is a good thing that OGA-BY now exists.
I'd certainly love for there to be better graphics (and more consistent), as I say earlier in this thread. Unfortunately this is something I don't have the skills for right now, but would welcome any contributions. (By pre-rendered, do you mean the buildings? This was the best way I found I could create something that didn't look awful, but they are one of the things that could do with replacing.)
Version 0.27 is now released - this adds speech samples (thanks to Rob Hunter, who recorded speech samples to go along with the game), along with in-game music and some other sound effects. Also some minor improvements to the graphics using more from Open Game Art (bombs, explosions, and some other minor improvements). I've switched to using SDL 2 for all platforms, and added support for Windows 8 tablets/touchscreens.
CC0 is the most permissive, but it's too permissive - BSD couldn't be relicenced as CC0, because being public domain there would be no requirement to include the required licence text. OGA-BY could be suitable, and is more permissive than CC-BY (CC-BY has "no additional restrictions" clauses that would add copyleft-like restrictions, that BSD doesn't have; OGA-BY removes these clauses).
"There were mit/bsd licensing options but they were not used.
"Feel free to state such additional licensing inside of the description and pick licenses that are compatible."
So it's still possible to let people know that they can licence under BSD in the description. But if the author is willing to dual licence under something like OGA-BY or CC-BY, then that option could be ticked (and is probably a good thing anyway - more licence choice helps reduce licence incompatibility problems).
BSD is less ideal for art, as it talks about "software", "source" and "binary", but then the same is true of the GPL and that still gets used for art (and is an available option).
"As I like to say, with software rendering all you need is a Turing-complete language and a surface to draw on. Whereas hardware acceleration is always very specialized. For example, modern GPUs can only do polygons, they can't help with voxels or raytracing. (Games like Minecraft pull lots of dirty tricks to optimize all those cube faces. In software.) And maybe you've heard about the way Amiga's incredibly clever 2D chips turned out to be completely useless once gaming moved on to 3D, while the weak CPU couldn't compensate. The simple, stolid, but upgradable PC won on generality."
Just to nitpick, GPUs have been turing complete since the early 2000s since the addition of shaders. So non-polygon based stuff is possible, though yes, less straightforward. It's true that CPUs are still easier to program. Roughly speaking, CPUs are optimised for running single complex threads very fast, whilst GPUs are optimised for running lots of simple things massively in parallel.
I don't think this is a reason for fewer Open Source 3D games, as developers can still do the traditional polygon-based graphics rather than voxels or raytracing. Though yes, it does mean GPUs are less interesting for people wanting to do some kinds of graphics.
The PC's 2D graphics chips of the early 90s were also useless for 3D gaming, though yes, the point is still true that dedicated 2D chips couldn't be used for 3D, and game developers instead turned to using the CPU. Unfortunately Commodore management had increasingly focused on the low end, perhaps relying on the 2D chips, though they were also having to deal with Intel x86 pulling increasingly ahead of Motorola 680x0. I don't think it was short-sighted to use 2D chips; newer models could have come with updated 3D chips, or simply faster CPUs - but Commodore had then of course gone bust.
Also note that this age of CPU-graphics was very short-lived, with hardware companies and developers switching to 3D hardware as soon as they could, because doing it in dedicated hardware is faster (who cares if it's less general or shorter term, people will need to upgrade to play new games anyway). Another example would be the Playstation, which again showed that dedicated hardware meant you could get decent games at a low cost. Since then, dedicated graphics chips has continued to be almost always the norm.
It did however mean a period where 3D games looked all a bit the same, because of the lack of freedom in 3D graphics hardware, but as I say, with shaders, graphics hardware is now fully programmable, so we get the best of both worlds :)
IMO OGA would only lose trust in the more straightforward case of copyright infringement - where it is someone else's work, or an edited version of it.
If someone sues because of a vague "similarity" or the copyright holder believes they own the rights to a "style", then I don't think people are going to say OGA should have known and removed the art, when it's impossible to make that judgement. If people are concerned there is a similarity, that can be discussed in the comments, and anyone deciding to use it can choose for themselves. I fear that a lot of art would end up being deleted if anything that might result in someone suing over a vague similarity was deleted.
Should all the art submitted as part of http://itch.io/jam/candyjam be deleted? I mean, this was a jam actively encouraging developers to create games which King believes would be infringing. That was trademark issues rather than copyright, though a similar principle applied, plus "the art looks a similar style" may often end up being a trademark issue rather than a copyright one - should the art be deleted, because someone might use a candy image from OGA, that King then decide to sue them for?
"I believe if you place your art on your site under OGA-compatible license, anyone else can submit them here, right?"
Legally this is correct, if someone releases something under a licence, one can't retroactively revoke that.
I don't know what OGA's deletion policy is, but in my opinion, I would hope the deletion requests are only acted upon if there is a good reason, say a licensing issue (such as it using copyrighted material from elsewhere without appropriate licences, or uploaded without permission).
Whilst it might seem nice to honour an author's request to delete, it causes problems if various games are using it, and link to a webpage here that then gets deleted. (Well, it's not a problem legally - but it helps as evidence that things are properly licenced, if the originating URLs are not dead.) As Demetrius points out, someone can just come along an re-add it, but it's less hassle to not have to do that, and to avoid changing the URL; it also seems stronger legally if the uploaded is the author.
Fair enough if OGA prefers to always honour deletion request, but just putting my thoughts out there for debate :)
http://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-takedown says that OGA honors requests to take down if it was uploaded without permission, but that seems to be more a case of erring on the side of caution when it comes to licencing - if someone claims it was uploaded without permission, you don't want to risk a court battle even if it seems that it was released elsewhere under a free licence. In this case though, someone can't claim it was uploaded without permission when they uploaded it!
Also of relevance perhaps: http://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-changelicense
I can play music from OGA in the browser no problem (including from search results).
It's possible to "favourite" music tracks to give feedback, as well as adding to collections in order for people to keep track of ones that they like. OGA also now keeps track of your downloads.
I don't think a "music player" is needed, because unlike Jamendo, the intention isn't to provide a music streaming service where people listen to music (e.g., in the background), it's to provide music for game developers to download and integrate into their games. So as long as I can easily listen to it when I find it, that's fine, I don't need things like playlists.
I don't see how a music player would make it easier to find music. Whilst the OGA search could do with improving, this is something that is being worked on. Is Jamendo easier find music? At a quick test, it seems similar in that you type terms, then get a list of hits, and can play from the list of results.
Whilst Jamendo is another good place for people to distribute or find music, I don't think OGA should encourage people to go there instead. OGA has the advantage that music uploaded is geared towards being used in games, meaning you don't have to wade through other kinds of music. Also Jamendo allows non-Free licences like non-commercial and no-derivatives. And the advanced search only allows limiting it to one licence - I can't select a list of licences to search for (which OGA does, incidentally).
Technical modifications are allowed in the GPL too (I can put it into a zip file). CC BY 4 is just more explicit about the difference between a technical modification and Effective Technological Measure.
It's good if they've changed the terms to allow Open Source, I believe Microsoft for the Windows Store (which also originally had similar problems IIRC) does a similar thing. So if DRM is no longer enforced, it may be that this issue is out of date anyway (and interesting to note that actually it is worth fighting these things). Are there any news articles on this?
These things do have the possible problem that although licences like CC BY are seen as "compatible" with, or the art equivalents of Free and Open Source software, I don't think any CC licences are OSI approved (http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ) - probably because they weren't written with source code in mind. So it may be that the mandatory licence for non-Open Source means that CC BY etc still can't be used in non-Open Source products, so those people should still stick with OGA BY or CC0. Also it's not uncommon for Open Source games to be multiple-licenced, i.e., source/binary under an Open Source licence, and different licence(s) for the art, so who knows what it means if another licence says "you can't do any of this, except for bits which are Open Source".
* I agree with complete packs. Of course that's quite an undertaking, but it doesn't have to be "complete" - just having a set of art that's consistent (rather than just single one off pieces), and it's then easier to full in the gaps as required. Or maybe artists can look at existing art, and add something to complement it. I don't know if maybe people might think this would be seen as copying/plagiarising - I mean, obviously the art here explicitly allows copying, but people often have an artistic drive to be original, or a fear of being accused of just using someone else's work even if it's legal. But it's worth making the point that here, that really is a good thing for games! FLARE and LPC have shown that there are artists out there willing to create art for an existing set - more of that please :) Perhaps we need another LPC-style competition - or maybe it doesn't have to be a competition with prizes, I think the important thing about LPC was providing an initial set of graphics that artists then built on.
* More character art with animation - static images are fine for scenery, but it's not uncommon to see people release a game character which may look great, but being a single static image makes it unusable in many styles of game (well, they could still be used say as an NPC who just stands there, but not if you want them for a player character or movable enemy). The LPC set, and the FLARE graphics, are great not just for being a consistent set, but also having animation.
* High resolution graphics would also benefit Android, Windows etc. Though I'd say the gap is not just a lack of very high resolution, but a dominance of low resolution graphics. Much of the 2D art seems to have a retro early-90s feel (not that that's a bad thing, but this topic is what there seems to be a lack of), and is below the resolution capabilities of any device today. But having said that, I imagine there's the point that 2D game art becomes harder at higher resolutions (I saw someone making the point that doubling the resolution in each dimension is four times the pixels, and if you're doing pixel art, that matters). In practice my understanding is that most in-game graphics that are higher resolutions tend to be created in 3D, and then pre-rendered if 2D sprites are desired. There are a fair amount of 3D characters on OGA, though often not in a pre-rendered format. Still, in the case of very simple vector art like the balloons example, these restrictions don't apply, so I guess vector art (that can be scaled to any resolution) is something there's not much of.
On the note of 3D models used for rendering sprites, is there demand for taking some of these 3D models, and generating sprite sheets? I'm a programmer but did learn enough Blender to be able to render a static model in isometric (Clint's tutorial at http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_tiles/ was a great help), though animation is currently beyond me. Or has anyone had luck with Blender scripts that claim to automate this? (a quick Google reveals http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Render/Spritify ). I wonder if some programmers skip by the 3D models altogether, in which case generating spritesheets from 3D models (especially those with animations) might be an easy (albeit tedious) way to increase the amount of higher-resolution game-ready art.
@cdoty: To clarify the reason for the clause, it's to prevent additional restrictions (legal or technical) being applied to the licence which takes away those rights.
"DRM is not the only way to prevent someone from getting at the asset. Isn't a protected Unity package a form of DRM?"
I don't know about Unity; but CC define "technological measures" as "defined with reference to Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty". A key point is whether circumventing the protection would be illegal in countries that implement that treaty (e.g., the US, with the DMCA).
You say it's possible to get at the assets on IOS anyway. There are three possibilities:
1. The legal terms of service say that you can't do it.
2. Doing so would be illegal under laws like the DMCA.
3. It's not an issue - in which case this is all a red herring, and people can use CC licences after all :)
"The OGA licenses are a good example of this, but they are not universal and every artist isn't necessarily interested in using them. If a resource is uploaded to another site, there's a discrepancy in the licenses."
If a resource is uploaded to another site and it has to be under CC-BY instead of OGA-BY, how is that different to uploading it to Apple app store? In both cases, it's uploaded somewhere under a more restrictive licence. If it's okay for Apple because people can still download from OGA, then that applies to any other site. If you think it's important for the licence to be preserved - well, now you see why some people prefer CC-BY :)
(This is one of the paradoxes of licencing - yes, I can take anyone's OGA-BY and relicence it as CC-BY! Because that's the very freedom they grant, when they allow people to apply additional restrictions.)
"Nintendo also has a limitation against open sourced anything. I'm assuming Microsoft and Sony probably do too."
Do you mean consoles? Maybe, but that's bad too :)
claudeb asked why this issue only seemed to come up with IOS. Android is massively more popular, and I don't know if IOS being more profitable affects things, if anything, that should be a reason why developers should be able to pay for artists rather than taking Free art :) But yes, there are plenty of developers who want to write games for IOS anyway. But really, I don't think that matters, it's more that this is the first time it's been an issue, other platforms don't have the restriction that additional terms must be applied and you can only distribute through the company. One exception is consoles as cdoty points out, but those are sufficiently harder to develop for that you didn't have many indie/freeware developers in the first place - the companies developing for consoles would be paying for their own art anyway.
I disagree with SketchyLogic that CC not being usable on Apple app store is deterimental "to the CC movement as a whole", when being against legal and technical restrictions seems to be a belief of Creative Commons organisation. It may be hugely important to an IOS developer, but that doesn't mean it's hugely important to other people with views against DRM or closed platforms (who aren't going to persuaded by the more profitable argument, when they're not making the money, and Apple is taking a 30% cut - it's like arguing that Windows makes more money than Linux, when in fact the lower costs is a possible benefit of Free Software - plus as an Android user, it's hard for me to contribute to a company's profits when they only release for the fewer Apple users in the first place - there are some games that I'd love to pay for, but can't). Within the Free/Open movements, there's long been a debate about "liberal" versus "copyleft" licences (e.g., BSD vs GPL). I think there's a place for both - so it is a good thing that OGA-BY now exists.
(Getting off-topic, but interesting report at http://gearnuke.com/pc-dominates-market-51-console-30-mobile-13-accordin... on 2013 revenue share, showing PC at 51%, consoles 30%, mobile 13%; it doesn't break down by platform though, and unclear whether it includes ad revenue.)
I'd certainly love for there to be better graphics (and more consistent), as I say earlier in this thread. Unfortunately this is something I don't have the skills for right now, but would welcome any contributions. (By pre-rendered, do you mean the buildings? This was the best way I found I could create something that didn't look awful, but they are one of the things that could do with replacing.)
Version 0.27 is now released - this adds speech samples (thanks to Rob Hunter, who recorded speech samples to go along with the game), along with in-game music and some other sound effects. Also some minor improvements to the graphics using more from Open Game Art (bombs, explosions, and some other minor improvements). I've switched to using SDL 2 for all platforms, and added support for Windows 8 tablets/touchscreens.
CC0 is the most permissive, but it's too permissive - BSD couldn't be relicenced as CC0, because being public domain there would be no requirement to include the required licence text. OGA-BY could be suitable, and is more permissive than CC-BY (CC-BY has "no additional restrictions" clauses that would add copyleft-like restrictions, that BSD doesn't have; OGA-BY removes these clauses).
Some previous discussion at: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/other-licenses . In particular, see qubodup's reply:
"There were mit/bsd licensing options but they were not used.
"Feel free to state such additional licensing inside of the description and pick licenses that are compatible."
So it's still possible to let people know that they can licence under BSD in the description. But if the author is willing to dual licence under something like OGA-BY or CC-BY, then that option could be ticked (and is probably a good thing anyway - more licence choice helps reduce licence incompatibility problems).
BSD is less ideal for art, as it talks about "software", "source" and "binary", but then the same is true of the GPL and that still gets used for art (and is an available option).
"As I like to say, with software rendering all you need is a Turing-complete language and a surface to draw on. Whereas hardware acceleration is always very specialized. For example, modern GPUs can only do polygons, they can't help with voxels or raytracing. (Games like Minecraft pull lots of dirty tricks to optimize all those cube faces. In software.) And maybe you've heard about the way Amiga's incredibly clever 2D chips turned out to be completely useless once gaming moved on to 3D, while the weak CPU couldn't compensate. The simple, stolid, but upgradable PC won on generality."
Just to nitpick, GPUs have been turing complete since the early 2000s since the addition of shaders. So non-polygon based stuff is possible, though yes, less straightforward. It's true that CPUs are still easier to program. Roughly speaking, CPUs are optimised for running single complex threads very fast, whilst GPUs are optimised for running lots of simple things massively in parallel.
I don't think this is a reason for fewer Open Source 3D games, as developers can still do the traditional polygon-based graphics rather than voxels or raytracing. Though yes, it does mean GPUs are less interesting for people wanting to do some kinds of graphics.
The PC's 2D graphics chips of the early 90s were also useless for 3D gaming, though yes, the point is still true that dedicated 2D chips couldn't be used for 3D, and game developers instead turned to using the CPU. Unfortunately Commodore management had increasingly focused on the low end, perhaps relying on the 2D chips, though they were also having to deal with Intel x86 pulling increasingly ahead of Motorola 680x0. I don't think it was short-sighted to use 2D chips; newer models could have come with updated 3D chips, or simply faster CPUs - but Commodore had then of course gone bust.
Also note that this age of CPU-graphics was very short-lived, with hardware companies and developers switching to 3D hardware as soon as they could, because doing it in dedicated hardware is faster (who cares if it's less general or shorter term, people will need to upgrade to play new games anyway). Another example would be the Playstation, which again showed that dedicated hardware meant you could get decent games at a low cost. Since then, dedicated graphics chips has continued to be almost always the norm.
It did however mean a period where 3D games looked all a bit the same, because of the lack of freedom in 3D graphics hardware, but as I say, with shaders, graphics hardware is now fully programmable, so we get the best of both worlds :)
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