A Year Later, Linux Game Publishing Is Still Irrelevant

This coming week marks one year since there was the big shake-up at Linux Game Publishing where Michael Simms, the founder and CEO of twelve years, stepped down. A new CEO stepped in, and there were promises of future work, but so far there's been any major announcements and LGP continues to fade away.

It was on 31 January 2012 when Michael Simms announced his resignation. LGP has had a troubled history, especially in recent years with their 2010 server mess and only porting really old obscure titles to Linux. With being burned out, he threw in the towel while saying that Clive Crous would step in as the CEO. When stepping away, Simms said that Clive possessed "some big plans, and I won’t steal his thunder by telling you what he is going to be doing, but I think you’ll be happy with the new and revitalised LGP."

In early February, the new CEO of LGP wrote about the new LGP. He promised expanded efforts for digital distribution channels like Steam/Desura, CD/DVD ordering improvements, old titles like Disciples 2 and Bandits were still being ported to Linux, and that they were working on some unannounced titles. While last year they said they were working on new ports, the same was said in 2011, but nothing came to fruition.

Since last February, there's been a lot of activities in the Linux gaming space from Valve confirming Steam coming to Linux to a variety of large and small game studios announcing Linux ports. 2013 is going to be the year of Linux gaming and already year to date there's been a number of surprises and Valve has even been bringing their original titles to Linux. Linux Game Publishing hasn't been part of any of these recent Linux gaming milestones.

In 2012, LGP remained silent on their "new ports" and basically were busy just pushing outdated crap into Ubuntu's software store. The announcements on their blog and web-site came down to releasing a Cold War patch to fix game launching problems, game releases on the Ubuntu Software Center / Desura / Gameolith, and a couple of media interviews. There was also a Cold War game giveaway for the holidays and then also sharing news they are no longer able to sell the X2 and X3 games for Linux since their license agreement with Egosoft expired. (Egosoft is working on new Linux game releases, but they're doing the work in-house and not using LGP.)

One year later, there's still no word on the new LGP ports. The Linux ports of the long-in-porting Bandits: Phoenix Rising and Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy have not seen the light of day. There was also an original LGP game in development for a few years (circa 2009) that is some sort of puzzle game, but hasn't been released or detailed.

Sadly, I don't expect much to change from the company in 2013. After going hard for a decade and seeing a few high-profile Linux ports, it's sad to see Linux Game Publishing just fade away.