HobbitFoot

I literally gave the name of a non-profit game with my response.

And I recognized you can create a card game without a for-profit company running the design.

I feel like you are taking past me because you are conflating tying two design activities together as requiring a profit motive.

There are non-profit Living Card Games out there, including the current iteration of Star Wars: Customizable Card Game, but they still package card design together internally.

And you sidestepped my comment about cohesive card design. It isn't just designing cards, but the collection of cards together as well. Why separate these two activities?

And if the open source model could work, I feel like it could have been implemented by now. We've seen it implemented in RPG's and some board games, but why not card games?

I think of it more comparing a game like D&D which would work well under an open source model.

A large part of the appeal to a CCG is the interaction of the different cards together. It is a set of cards to play with, not a series of individual cards. Traditional trading card games, living card games, and deck builders are built on these card interactions. Sometimes it involves designing synergistic mechanics but it can just be creating the environment where different strategies can compete against each other. New cards get added in part to fit well with existing ones. Cases this doesn't happen is considered to be a failure.

The open source model does not work well with that design goal.

There is going to be an inducement by designers to push for power creep since designing stronger cards will get them played. There may not be enough headroom for a game to deal with the constant increase in power.

You also have the fracturing of different formats. It took a while for Magic to get to the number of formats it had and even then most constructed play defaulted to Standard. How are you going to be able to have a CCG work with hundreds of formats filled with cards that don't work with each other and can maybe even have homebrew cards that wreck the metagame?

A card game isn't like an RPG where you can have a base rule set while letting others create potentially clashing supplemental sets and adventures. Hell, we've even seen forks like with Pathfinder. There is a reason why RPG's adopted an open source mindset while card games didn't.

I think you can have a community designed game, but you are going to have an internal organization to it.

I agree your approach would be the way to handle it and it has been done for some games.

But I would call fan designed games open source. There is a closed organization designing it, even if it is non-profit.

This isn't defeatism, but pointing out potential flaws in a system being developed. If designers can't address potential fatal flaws, the system won't progress.

Other than that, power creep is always going to be a thing, regardless of the motives of the project owner.

But it is a major problem for closed source systems which can be made worse if open source methods are used on cardboard. Is someone going to want to keep playing a game when they buy some boosters but find out that some of the people they play with won't play with those cards? Even worse, there isn't a uniform way to define formats?

But the nice thing about open source is that if you don’t believe it’s a good idea, you don’t have to participate.

But no one else is participating either. There are fan made TCG's, but none of them adopted the open source model. There is one body that designs cards and I don't see that changing. Even then, the trading or collecting part of that hobby goes away; they become Living Card Games instead without the collectable nature of more traditional distribution systems

It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software.

It is even if you balance in an open source environment. "Closed source" successful games still have to invest substantial funds to playtesting. In an open source system, you are developing in the open. This is going to split the game already into beta and stable. You also probably aren't going to get individual cards approved since you need to design around the interactions between cards.

If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.

So now you have multiple versions of the game floating around with sets of approved cards. Unlike M:tG, these sets are developed to not be compatible and it may be difficult to figure out what sets are legal in the version you are playing.

To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.

And you still have the development process, which is hard to fix once you print cardboard.

If someone wanted to create a higher-quality card, they could.

I'm not talking about foils, but categorically better cards. You are going to have card developers with a vested interest to make sure their cards get played, and that generally means making cards at a higher power level.

The problem with an open source TCG is that you need a way to balance it, which can be hard with a distributed group of designers not in communication with each other. You definitely couldn't design something in a paper format; maybe as a computer card game.

I feel like Apple is taking a different approach to VR than other companies, making it a more mobile device than competitors.

Mergers of this type usually have one corporate culture win out over the other. In this case, Boeing's corporate culture lost out and with it, their safety culture.

Even at its smallest form, a federated instance hosting a community likely needs more than one person acting as admin and mod. It may not be a for profit corporation, but there needs to be some kind of collective organization.