The explanation seems obvious to me: the amount of time, effort and energy spent contributing to a project over which you have minimal if any control and for which people will most likely not remember you is far, far, far more than, say, the cost of simply buying the original game even combined with the social cost of telling other people to spend more money on same. I'd say even at the original full retail price, let alone the discounted amount you're paying for a 15-20-year-old game.Enjay wrote:I'm not really sure why it happens. There are plenty of people capable of creating original content - and they do - but very little gets contributed to these projects. Mind you, I haven't really helped either. If this project is still "live", say, 5 years from now, I expect that the IWAD will still be populated with many placeholders.
Further, quite a few mods use modified canon-IWAD resources that effectively (and, at least if you want your mod to work under Canada's new "mashup clause", legally) require that the modder at least strongly recommend the user to play with a legit copy of the commercial game. (Playing Brutal Doom with Freedoom doesn't really look too horrid given at least things are more or less in the same position, but the seams are frightfully obvious.)
And then there's just the fact that generally "community project" = "herding cats".
I don't want to be a huge downer with this post or anything, but I think I have highlighted a couple of the bigger pitfalls for such a project that might be avoided with some different structuring. (EDIT: in other words what LLL said below)
EDIT: A bit anecdotal, but basically every professional graphics person I know is pretty territorial about their copyrights (rightly so, given how cutthroat the trade is and the sheer amount of careless infringement that goes around) and would at best scoff, at worst boggle at a concept like free software, and even if they had the time and enthusiasm to contribute to a project like this without pay would almost certainly insist on something like a Creative Commons non-commercial licence.
