EA Begins Their (Sad) Ubuntu Game Push

The first native Linux games from Electronic Arts are beginning to appear within the Ubuntu Software Center.

As mentioned last week, Electronic Arts is at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week in Oakland. News of EA going to this Ubuntu Linux development comes after I exclusively reported days earlier a big game publisher was working with Ubuntu.

As I said in last week's article, "Valve's Linux plans will likely prove much more exciting than what the effort that Electronic Arts will have towards Linux." That still looks to be the case. I've also tweeted other comments since then. The first two EA games have arrived in the Ubuntu Software Center today and it confirms this so far...

The first two games? Lords of Ultima and Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances. These are free-to-play games out of Electronic Arts. Lort of Ultima is written in JavaScript and has already been platform independent, but now you can get it (still for free) out of the Ubuntu Software Center.

Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances is a browser-based MMO strategy game using Flash. It too has obviously already been platform independent and just needs a modern web-browser.

So if you were hoping to see some nice AAA titles out of EA on Ubuntu Linux, you're still stuck waiting... From my sources, there's some better stuff coming down the pipe in the long-term, but nothing that looks to be overly exciting at this point. I would be happy if that information was incorrect this time and something really interesting was coming out of EA for Ubuntu/Linux, but at this point it's nothing worthwhile and almost as bad as LGP's porting efforts of ancient games. What Valve is doing in the end should prove to be a hell of a lot more interesting for Linux gaming and for the Linux desktop overall.

More on Twitter and perhaps EA will make some more details public tomorrow during their brief session at UDS-Q in Oakland, but again don't expect anything too exciting.