Currently, legacy GNOME games are included in the ‘GNOME’ GitLab group, some use GNOME branding, and ‘org.gnome.Foo’ app IDs. This certainly isn’t great because they aren’t Core apps. Games should probably be moved to the World group on GitLab, should join Circle, and need to change branding. Using the name of the project’s maintainer for branding works well sometimes, but other times it is better to use “The Foo Contributors” or “The Foo Team”. Except, “The Foo Contributors” isn’t great branding, in my opinion. Maybe something like “The GNOME Games Team” would be better, but that would require special permission, since it uses the GNOME trademark.
App devs need to want to join Circle. Its fine if they don’t. Evolution or Geary are in GNOME group too due to historical context.
Personally, I disagree 
“Team” makes it sound as if some company made this.
Yes, forcing anyone to join Circle would be a bad idea.
Changing branding seems tricky, since “GNOME” is in many cases the only current branding. In some cases, like Nibbles, it’s probably safe to simply drop the “GNOME” from the app’s name and let the app live on as Nibbles. But this won’t work for GNOME Sudoku or GNOME Chess or GNOME Mines. What else would we call them? If these apps were created from scratch today, then of course they wouldn’t be allowed to use GNOME branding, but applying new rules to existing apps that have been developed by GNOME for 20 years would be pretty harsh.
I have no objection to moving games out of the GNOME GitLab group, but keep in mind there are currently there are no rules for what can go into this group. (Except Ptyxis got blocked due to anticipation of future rules that were never created.) I have a general sense that many developers want to limit this group to core projects only, which seems fine to me, but we don’t seem to have consensus on that either.
I wouldn’t ever touch the app IDs, since changing app ID is very disruptive.
“The GNOME Games Team”
This actually existed 10 years ago. Nowadays, not so much; all the games are developed separately….
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Yes, especially since app IDs aren’t particularly user-facing.
Yes, but this puts games in a sort-of gray area. They aren’t acknowledged as GNOME (surrounding) apps at all (apps.gnome.org)
I don’t think this is even a very big issue, either. If doing moving non-core apps/libraries out of the GNOME group was really important, it would probably already have been done.
Many of the game apps would not meet GNOME Circle criteria
True, that gives even more reason to do the other things I mentioned.
Good point. Most of the games won’t be able to meet the accessibility criteria without significant additional work.
But if a game does meet the Circle criteria, then I don’t see any reason not to apply for Circle.
GNOME Circle is an option for interested maintainers, if user-facing GNOME branding is removed. As previously mentioned, several games will also need additional work to meet the criteria. I submitted Mahjongg for review here: New app: Mahjongg (#228) · Issues · Teams / Circle · GitLab
I don’t have a say on where the games should live, but I wouldn’t move them out of the GNOME group unless there’s a good reason, and a way to keep pushing releases to Index of /sources/.
Somewhat related post I wrote some time ago: One Year of Mahjong Solitaire – New and Familiar
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It’s very off-topic here, but I want to thank you for the Mahjong game! It’s great and I play it from time to time when I want to kill some time.
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Many games have removed the legacy GNOME branding by now, but there haven’t been any releases because they are unmaintained, I guess. So they are not changed on Flathub etc. There is an overview about the rebranding here
Of course, games can apply for Circle. Mahjongg already did so:
That’s that pretty weird argument, since “GNOME” is not part of the name of any Core apps either anymore. But the right way forward would be to just change the app name. For apps like Chess that’s really not hard, there are so many potential names like “Checkmate” or “Roque.” Just knowingly ignoring our branding rules, while basically everyone else follows them, is quite something.
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I thought the branding rules were intended to apply to new apps, not longstanding GNOME apps?
Anyway, the naming convention for GNOME games is: appstream metadata says “GNOME Foo” but the desktop file just says “Foo”. It’s already a little confusing that they are not the same. We can change the appstream metadata to match the desktop file easily enough without hurting anything. It might be a little weird for the name of the app to not have any branding, as if it were a core app, but oh well. Let’s just not start renaming binaries and git repos and distro packages and such.
Looks like I already proposed an exception 2.5 years ago in your own issue report, Fade out legacy app branding (#35) · Issues · GNOME / Initiatives · GitLab.
I don’t like these ideas because that would almost require really completely rebranding the app: changing the git repo name, tarball name, binary name, etc. Otherwise, it would be really confusing why the app is called “Checkmate” but everything else is “gnome-chess”. And renaming everything is much too disruptive; it’s especially annoying for downstreams that have to retire their existing packages and create new ones with new names, or suffer name mismatch until they do. The other games that debranded only changed the app’s name in the appstream metainfo, and those are marked as successfully completed in your initiative issue, so presumably that should be adequate.
“Instructions to achieve the goals” in the initiative mentions which changes are needed. In Mahjongg’s case, it was essentially:
- “GNOME Mahjongg” → “Mahjongg” everywhere in the repo (app ID and repo URL can remain the same)
- Author changed from “The GNOME Project” to “The Mahjongg Team”. What the replacement should be is up to the maintainer, as long as it avoids “GNOME”. Some use their own name instead.
- Removed the GNOME tile from the Postmodern theme. This case was exclusive to Mahjongg though, I’m not aware of other games that use the GNOME logo in-game.
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