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Oh, and as a footnote to the footnote in my last post... the indie games scene is a good thing for Linux afficionados. The smaller devs have two things at work making Linux more attactive.
First, at a smaller volume of sales, every sale counts, so even the small Linux market can still make a significant chunk of sales. Modern Warfare's made $310,000,000 in its _first day_ of release, so even if every Linux gamer bought a copy you wouldn't even notice the blip on the sales chart; a small indie developer might only make a few million dollars in sales, so Linux games can make up a very significant portion of that sales volume.
Second, smaller developers have less corporate pressure, less "big business" mentality, and individual developers have more of a say in things. While there are Linux geeks at every major game company (including Microsoft!), and many games/engines have unofficial internal ports, the business never wants to take the risk and release to a niche platform. In the small indie dev scene, if even only one developer says he wanted to do a Linux version, that may well mean all by itself that 1/3rd of the programmers are in favor of Linux, and he's free to do the port so long a his other tasks get done on time.
It still doesn't look good for the big product value games ever being on Linux (Assassin's Creed, Dead Space, Batman, etc.), since the content alone for those games costs $10's of millions to put together, but a lot more high-quality "smaller scoped" games may well be hitting the Linux market over the next few years.
Maybe -- just maybe -- it'll inspire some Open Source developers to finally stop tweaking ioQuake and remaking Quake3 for the 1,800th time and actually build something innovative, interesting, and engaging.
First, at a smaller volume of sales, every sale counts, so even the small Linux market can still make a significant chunk of sales. Modern Warfare's made $310,000,000 in its _first day_ of release, so even if every Linux gamer bought a copy you wouldn't even notice the blip on the sales chart; a small indie developer might only make a few million dollars in sales, so Linux games can make up a very significant portion of that sales volume.
Second, smaller developers have less corporate pressure, less "big business" mentality, and individual developers have more of a say in things. While there are Linux geeks at every major game company (including Microsoft!), and many games/engines have unofficial internal ports, the business never wants to take the risk and release to a niche platform. In the small indie dev scene, if even only one developer says he wanted to do a Linux version, that may well mean all by itself that 1/3rd of the programmers are in favor of Linux, and he's free to do the port so long a his other tasks get done on time.
It still doesn't look good for the big product value games ever being on Linux (Assassin's Creed, Dead Space, Batman, etc.), since the content alone for those games costs $10's of millions to put together, but a lot more high-quality "smaller scoped" games may well be hitting the Linux market over the next few years.
Maybe -- just maybe -- it'll inspire some Open Source developers to finally stop tweaking ioQuake and remaking Quake3 for the 1,800th time and actually build something innovative, interesting, and engaging.
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