Originally posted by spykes
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Maybe, they would have to discuss with Vivendi Universal who should hold the rights for Blizzard's games.
As their publisher doesn't want to support Linux because of the market size, they may be OK if another company proposes to do it instead. Because it's not only a development effort, but also a support one.
This is one of the reasons why they ask for a royalty up-front. Everyone keeps making the mistake of presuming that "more sales" equates to "more money". To them, support issues, development issues, possible piracy (a 5:1 to a 20:1 ratio on Linux game titles currently available does NOT help there...) end up negating sales unless you're talking 10k units sold. To them, we're this big bottomless money pit.
Blizzard's games like Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 are really strong IPs for PC gamers. Having those games running natively on Linux, would certainly help our favorite platform to gain popularity among gamers.
Want it to change? That's going to take showing them that we're not a money pit, either by having a demonstrable sales number (10k units sold is something that they start taking notice with...) or a definitive userbase size that indicates that we're nearly half of the worldwide potential sales base for their product at which point they'll take a risk on us.
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