There isn’t really a catch to being open source. Some open source software companies make their money through consulting and support, rather than the sale of their product. Others, like the Blender Foundation, through training materials. By way of example, when I worked on an enterprise project which used Away3D, we contracted out to a consultant from the company for the duration of the project.
If I am not mistaken, Paradox3D is also part of a line of products from SiliconStudio, most of which are not open source and for which licenses are sold, so it’s not like the entire company’s fortunes are pinned on Paradox3D.
I also don’t personally think of it in terms of ‘catching up’ or being totally on par with a large, proprietary application. It’s more of a cost/benefit analysis. Do I spend money on licenses, or do I use an open source application and spend those resources elsewhere, keeping in mind that engines such as unreal may be provided for free or at a low monthly cost, but ultimately take a royalty on gross profits.
So, again, using the Away3D project as an example, our budget was something like $70,000 USD over a two month period. Each contracted artist, of which there were 5, received $5,000. This was also the company’s first time doing this sort of work, so we needed licenses of the software we were all most familiar with at the time, which was 3dsmax. We got a deal, and received each license for $2,000, of which we also needed five. Half of the game’s budget at this point has gone to art and licenses. There was also programmer payroll, of which there were two, travel expenses for meetings, and a small amount of petty cash to use furnishing the office, buying donuts, going to networking events, etc.
Seven single seat licenses of Unity pro is $10,500. Unreal 4 was not out at the time, so that would have been $700 dollars under their royalty licencing, plus an additional $7,000 royalty. Away3D, on the other hand, was free, open source, and written in a language the devs already knew (flex). Even with the contractor cost, it was far cheaper to use Away3D than it would have been to use any of the proprietary licenses, even though Unreal and Unity were both more feature packed at the time. The cost was simply too great for the fairly simple product we were attempting to achieve.
