Game Developer Who Ported To Linux: "I Don't Think It Was Worthwhile"

[profoundWHALE]

Hmm so let me get this straight - you & others here are saying to me that their business has a runtime expense of $350,000 to $1,000,000 per month and they spent the whole time "waiting" on Unity to fix a bug?

So at no point did they say to themselves - hey maybe we should throw 1-10% of our operating cost aka 10,000 - 100,000 to ensure our smooth operation.

Neither did they say hmm maybe while I'm waiting on this bug to be fixed I could work on this other code over here.

Also - how does someone get in on this making $350,000 - 1 million dollars a month waiting around and reading reddit all day and where do I join?

According to Wikipedia in 2008 they had 135 employees, but let's say it's 150 (despite me only counting about 61 on their website picture of their employees) and the average salary for that city is $75,000-$85,000 which is $937,500 to $1,062,500 per month.

Benefits at Obsidian

Being a part of one of the few remaining independent developers in the world creating role-playing games is only the start! Obsidian offers many benefits to its employees:

• Competitive salaries
• Immediate 401k with matching and no vesting periods
• Complete comprehensive employee health coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
• Paid vacation, sick leave, holidays and an additional week off during the December holidays
• A well maintained games, book and DVD library with hundreds of titles available to borrow
• Movie Fridays where the company takes a workday field trip across the street to see the latest and greatest blockbuster movies

And I only included the employee costs, not even the hiring or building costs.

[justmy2cents]

Gabe should be (and is) doing something in-between. RedHat's business is servers these days- they walked mostly away from the desktop/workstation space ages ago (Loki Games was a going concern and they were toying with subsidizing them just before that...) Unless you can convince them about the value of supporting GPGPU functionality in that space, you're going to find that this wasn't a thing they're interested in. Valve is because it's an escape plan for them to keep alive and profitable (MS is slowly cutting their air supply off, if you hadn't noticed...) and if the Graphics support sucks, you fix it. Seriously. If you've never been in the CxO level of a company, you wouldn't "get" this. I have. Now, what he's talking to is an extreme and would be insane (and I'd question Gabe's sanity at that point as well...) but what they're doing right now? Not so much so. Right now, you've got people like me that're happy to take "less" to get it up and going (Hint: I work with Indies and the like...I'm a Steamworks developer and I can help you get there if you've got titles to move to the world we're talking about.) and further some of the key FOSS pieces to make it less stressful for a studio to do this. I can't front the cost of LunarG's services, but I can pitch in MY abilities and make them these nifty cross-compilation environments that allow you to build for not just Ubuntu or SteamOS, but for all current major Linux distributions and know it will work right on all of them, and make it quite a bit easier for someone to get it on SteamOS (Pick just about any modern Linux you're comfortable with- target SteamOS.).

It's all out there. This is someone trying to make public something best left internal- because odds on, this person didn't think it was something they should be doing in the first place and they'd committed to it from the Kickstarter. All the "extra stuff" he's claiming is "fishy" because knowing what I know about all of this...it's largely a 1-10% difference between the OSX and Linux ports in most cases and if it's not, you very probably did something wrong in your code that needed to be re-worked for all platforms ANYWAY.

i think you misread my post. Valve is doing more than i could expect in my wildest and wettest dreams. and Redhat is the only Linux company that actually cares and employs people to work on drivers, Gnome,...

sad part is that Redhat is exactly like you specified... in server business and still doing lot more we could ever expect.

while companies like Canonical who claim they care about desktop... i'll keep quiet here. don't want to start holy war. not to even mention how sad it is to see people bashing on Redhat or Valve after all the work they put in

[justmy2cents]

Red Hat won't put serious money into OSS GPU drivers because they get almost all of their revenue supporting servers and workstations. Linux gaming isn't part of their business model.

I think if Gabe wants his company to be as big or bigger in 2025 than it is in 2015, that's the path forward. Every Windows 8.1 or newer PC comes with Windows Store preinstalled and visible in your start screen or start menu, and Microsoft is going to work hard to add more games to the store selection. That's going to gradually eat into Steam's market the same way IE still has a huge market presence - most users just go with the default.

i think you misread my post. look how many people Redhat already employs in that department and now consider you're spot on with your claim "they are in server...". now look at companies that were supposed to be all about Linux desktop... Canonical... cough

the only one doing work is actually the one company (Redhat) that has least to gain from it.

[Svartalf]

i think you misread my post. Valve is doing more than i could expect in my wildest and wettest dreams. and Redhat is the only Linux company that actually cares and employs people to work on drivers, Gnome,...

sad part is that Redhat is exactly like you specified... in server business and still doing lot more we could ever expect.

while companies like Canonical who claim they care about desktop... i'll keep quiet here. don't want to start holy war. not to even mention how sad it is to see people bashing on Redhat or Valve after all the work they put in

Won't have me bashing them. Quite simply put, I know precisely how much blood, sweat and tears went into it all- I was one of the ones contributing it all these years.

[Svartalf]

It's not Steam's fault Linux video drivers are slow and buggy. Every time I buy a new bleeding-edge laptop it takes six month to a year of struggling to get Linux working. I don't think it's worth it either. Just play games under Windows for a year then install Linux when Torvalds finally get his poop in a group.

Stop RIGHT THERE!

Going to be brutally blunt since I do know something about this. You see, I've worked for one of the "Big Two" over the years. Most of the drivers aren't actually buggy. It's craptastic code that gets done by the studios and other places. Stuff where they violate API rules on their code and one driver silently compensates for the bad code, and the others? They don't. Speed comes from doing only as much validation as you need to do. It's skipped, in general- and you have one company doing a silent compensation that has the game code "work" and then the others are a mixed bag because someone didn't DO that particular cheat.

Slow? Possibly. More likely you've got idiot code (There's a Linux game that it's engine...heh...flatly does NOT do the right things with VBO operations unless Aspyr fixed the boo-boo in it... I know, I had to find the bug to hand it off to the devs for ATI/AMD's drivers...) that does stupid things to drag framerates down, render triangles wrong, or the like.

Buggy? Perhaps... Most likely it's more what I'm talking to than much of anything else- which is why I'm kind of KEEN on Vulkan- it has the potential, even if it's "harder" to code for to prevent this rubbish.

[Svartalf]

No they don't, Wheel of Time was canceled years ago. Their current announced projects are the next Pillars expansion and Armored Warfare.

Given the fact that they spend ~$1 million US a month keeping the place open and development was stopped for close to a month waiting for Unity to fix a blocking bug in their linux code, linux really wasn't worth the effort.

Also, having played through KOTOR II retail without patching, I think you're full shit when you call the game buggy, but look at where you work.

You're telling me that a somewhat small studio (and, YES, they're somewhat small) has a $1mil burn rate per month? Seriously? Damn, that was like epicRealm (epicREAM?) that flamed out with over $90 million in private placement money in just shy of one year's time. That's actually impressive. It's also stupid. They aren't doing anything worth speaking of if this is the case- because even the Windows versions won't be generating enough proceeds to keep that going for very long. (Hint: That's ~12 million per year. You do the math on how to generate proceeds that exceed that so that money people are happy with you on the burn rate (you need to make money, not just break even...)) Something tells me you've not a clue about anything in this industry and you're repeating some other trash talk from someone else.

As for being full of shit... Nice trash talk...from someone that doesn't get "interframe" and "intraframe" and knows jack about the OpenGL spec. At least I've ported games, was one of the people that implemented Embedded Linux from scratch, and the like. Come back and talk when you can actually manage 30+ years in the industry like I have. Otherwise, little boy (and that's what you really are) spare us.

[Svartalf]

One of the Obsidian founders thinks it was worthwhile: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gamin...nd_one/cumfr5j

There's a hint for you there.

[Ardje]

i'm sure it is counted as linux. you could check it yourself - on linux steam store shows only linux games in large picture list at the top of front page - so you know that they count you as linux user.

I see only non-linux games in the now available on chrome on chrome-os, on chrome on intel amd64, and on iceweasel on armhf.
The biggest problem is that when I start steam, it always pops up a screen with buy now with non-linux games.
And I already had to revert one purchase because I thought linux was supported, but it wasn't.
I really hate that.
But I see things have changed now in the steam client itself... The steam client on linux only shows steamos games... finally... Except for that popup though.

[ElectricPrism]

According to Wikipedia in 2008 they had 135 employees, but let's say it's 150 (despite me only counting about 61 on their website picture of their employees) and the average salary for that city is $75,000-$85,000 which is $937,500 to $1,062,500 per month.

And I only included the employee costs, not even the hiring or building costs.

I don't mind you hypothesizing scenarios based on what information you can gather - however let me hypothesize aswell.

Human Resources, Marketing, Leadership, Building Costs / Facility Rental Costs, Hiring Manager, Accounting, Sales, Affiliate Relations, Customer Service, Artwork, 3D Modeling, etc... and I'm sure many other areas are completely 100% agnostic to OS-Specific Development Teams (Not to mention that the Mac & Linux team are likely the same 1 team.)

Next, on to your salary estimates - that estimation of 75k-85k is fair considering their Headquarters is located in Irvine, California.

However what is also likely is that their staff is also comprised of incompetence - why do I hypothesize this? Well, one reason is that Irvine California is a city overflowing with students, no doubt they likely have found this to be a rich resource they benefit from at their present location. Last time I stayed in Irvine California "students everwhere, as far as the eye could see."

But the problem with hiring Students and Interns is that their skillsets and knowledge have not been refined and tested out in the practical real world.

In this day and age sure, some people can barely comprehend the difference between a JPG and a GIF, my point is incompetence is the problem, and it is ignorance to blame their lack of performance on porting to Linux. But hey, some people kick their dogs and beat their wives when they have a bad day at work - this is a ego defense mechanism - and it doesn't surprise me that a ignorant person would make remarks about something they don't understand.

When Gamers transcend to Steam Machine consoles I'll be laughing because I know the sales figures will widen out for sure. But hey, some people whine and kick - but someone at Obsidian was smart enough to know Linux & SteamOS would be a huge success.

[profoundWHALE]

In this day and age sure, some people can barely comprehend the difference between a JPG and a GIF, my point is incompetence is the problem, and it is ignorance to blame their lack of performance on porting to Linux.

Ah. That would also explain why so many members on the team were so young.