After a long, thoughtful process, I’ve decided to open-source my Facebook game, “Empire“.

I had originally intended to do this as I was writing the game, if nothing more than to serve as a tutorial, or breadcrumbs, for others who were trying to learn this new landscape.

Before I even officially deployed it to a public server, however, I noticed something unusual… A large amount of people were inviting their friends to the beta server I had left public, and it was growing at much faster rate than I expected.  Additionally, my constant readings of the facebook developers forums left a bitter impression about the less than ideal characters that were floating to the surface, and I didn’t want some cheap rip-offs to distract from the early growth of the game.

So I stopped making the SVN commits, added some more features, and set it up at the excellent Joyent hosting servers.

Indeed, the growth has been incredible, if not stable.  Some of those growth issues were due to some performance issues I ran into, which I finally corrected when I had the time.

Now, the game sits at a regular 1000+ daily active users, and it’s developed a hardcore fan base.  Indeed, there is an excellent user-generated wiki describing strategies for the game, and an enourmous amount of activity on the forums.  People enjoy the game, despite it’s simplicity and somewhat haphazard release process.

On the downside, the CPM rates for the application seem to suck.  It just maintains enough to pay for the joyent hosting costs, and that’s it.  Perhaps there are better strategies to employ to increase the CPM rate, but that’s not what I am in the businesss of doing.

So, as a dedication to the entire Empire fanbase, I’m opening up the source in a GPL, and others have already expressed interest in actively partcipating in it’s future development.

I’ll continue to manage the game, and I’ll be the sole release coordinator, at least for a while until I or somebody else trusted and clever manages to put the time and effort into properly manage the process.

Tags: Empire