15·
5 months ago- Beyond All Reason (Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation clone)
- Warzone 2100
- Liero
- Hedgewars (Worms clone)
- OpenTTD (especially JGRPP fork)
- GZDoom / Woof / DSDA and other DOOM 1 and 2 source ports
And some that require original assets:
- OpenMW (The Elder Scroll: Morrowind engine replacement)
- OpenXcom (especially OXCE and Brutal-OXCE forks, they all have great mods, like XCom Files, Harmony, XPiratez)
Also, check this open source or source available games list: https://osgameclones.com/
I don’t know where are you getting the “have always been … and have always been paid for with donations” thing from.
IMHO, its a “recent” thing, folks were doing mods/indie games without getting paid before Patreon/ko-fi/etc. existed. I remember the times when ModDB and IndieDB were popular and so many games in there were completely free. Then Steam Greenlight happened and now everything is early access paid game. Also game demos died.
About the mod slop, its already happening for example in the Minecraft modding, they’re filled (mod listing pages and even some mods themselves) with ads, paid access or forcing you to join the discord.