For some arcane reason contributors spend their precious time on open source game projects. Why do they do this? And more importantly: What can you do to make them do it on your project?

FOSS game projects live on the motivation of their contributors. This motivation usually consists of two parts: The desire to contribute to FOSS game development in general and the desire to contribute to a specific project. While the former is very interesting to discuss, our ability to affect it is negligible. Thankfully, the control of the latter is definitely possible, and it is crucial to the survival of our projects. In this talk we will analyse different characteristics of FOSS game projects with regards to contributor recruitment and retention. We will try to present practical steps to lower the risk of your current or future projects dying to inactivity and obscurity.