Hi everyone. I am creating a gaming site where people will play games and compete and win prizes. I want to have a lot of games and I'm not clear on how games are available.

I have seen many games downloadable from big top 1,000 sites but I want to be sure I'm doing things legit. I simply want to have free games on my site (I have no issue given credit to the developer of the game) and I want to host it on my site.

Is there an open source market where dev's are ok with this. Or do I have to pay license fees.

One example, just so you see what I mean is gamevance.com

Any input greatly appreciated

If you want to distribute a game, you'll have to get permission from the copyright holders of that game, unless that game is in the public domain (very very unlikely). It does not matter at all if you're willing to give credit or not.

thanks guys

but i would think there must be open source games where dev's simply by having their games in this forum they have given up their rights

do you know of such places?

like look here http://www.ultimatearcade.com/content/games-for-your-site

http://webmasters.miniclip.com/

but i would think there must be open source games where dev's simply by having their games in this forum they have given up their rights

"Open source" does not mean "I give up my rights to my game", it means, "I keep all my rights, but I let you have more rights than other developers normally give".

Open Source does not mean "Public domain". Open Source doesn't even mean free, though usually that is also the case. Open source just means the source code (which you may have gotten for free, or may have paid for) is available for you to play with, recompile, and sometimes even redistribute, if you meet the legal requirements of the Open Source license used by that project.

http://webmasters.miniclip.com/

1) Get the game embed code
2) Paste the code into your site
3) Watch [s]your[/s] [color=#ff0000]our traffic grow[color=#ff0000], as your users play our games, and then follow the links back to our site. But don't worry, we won't even link back to your site, and your users will quickly forget about your site as we distract them with MiniClip-branded games, with our own advertisements built into the games, of which you get no cut of the revenue.

Their third line is false, and you can smell it if you pay attention. Whenever anyone says, "Hey, this is how we're going to help you at no cost!", stop and analyze what they are saying very very carefully. In no way does embedding their games help your traffic grow, but it fully helps leach your traffic back to MiniClip's website.

Go ahead, try embedding one on your website, and then ask yourself, "How does this actually benefit me?". I mean, sure, you might have some banner ads around the embedded game, but sooner or later (most likely sooner), each user is going to click through to MiniClip itself, and then say, "Hey, why don't I just come to this site directly?" - You just lost a user for life, and MiniClip just gained one for life. "But hey, thanks for doing our marketing for us!"