We designed Rivet with a strong philosophy of building on top of open source infrastructure, and we believe you should too.
Watch out for copyleft open source software
Read more about our licensing philosophy.
Gaming and game development has always been strongly community driven. This is well proven by community-driven game dev resources like the Unity Asset Store, Sketchfab, Itch.io, Discord bots, Steam Workshop, and Roblox.
We want the game development community to be able to extend and experiment with Rivet to try new things. We'll be able to bring some of these ideas to benefit everyone.
GitHub Issues also enables strong transparency on our development process and community input.
Gaming infrastructure companies have a long history of being acquired or shutting down, leaving game developers to clean up the mess. At Rivet, we see it as our responsibility to pursue sustainable growth in order to avoid a similar fate.
However, it's worth considering what happens if your hosting company were to disappear. If you build on top of Rivet, you'll always be able to use the open source solution to run your game indefinitely.
Rivet is built to be as flexible as possible, but there will always be use cases that we can't forsee – especially in gaming.
Want to do something crazy with Rivet? Fork it and give it a go!
Large game development studios invest a lot of money in to games that have relatively small margins. Risking choosing the wrong tool for the job can have dire consequences.
By providing the source code for Rivet, we can help large studios be confident that Rivet is the right tool for the job without being constrained to a trial window or POC.
Unlike many other industries, game developers often have to live off scraps to bootstrap launching their game or simply want to develop a game as a cheap side project. Anyone who's been there knows that feeling of worrying about even an extra $10/mo.
We also see open source as a way to make running Rivet as affordable as possible while bootstrapping your business by using your own hardware to run your game.
Want to use Rivet Cloud?
We offer one free server with Rivet Cloud to help accommodate for indie and hobbyist developers.
Most software sucks. We think ours sucks a little less. Read the code for yourself.
If you find something that you think sucks, consider making a pull request.