What stopped the flow of big-name games?

[Svartalf]

You'd think there would be more profit to be made now than back in the "glory days" of Linux gaming.

In some ways, yes. In others no. As deanjo indicated, many of the studios and publishers want entirely ludicrous sums of money up-front before you even ever get the chance to publish.

The reason why so many of the ports are as expensive as the rollout price for the Windows versions (esp. at the time the Windows version's gracing the bargain bins or the closeout resellers' shelves...) is that the studio asked for something like $20k up-front, if not more (If you want UT3, I strongly suspect Epic would allow someone to bankroll/finish Ryan's work for something along the lines of $100-250k...got it in your pockets? ). For four thousand units sold, that expense is $5 per copy sold. If you end up selling two thousand, then the expense per unit is $10. Just for the 20k rights access deal.

That just gets your foot in the door. Once you do that, you've got to somehow port the game (and pay someone to do it if you're not doing it yourself...) which typically translates into $5-10k's worth of effort on average- there's another chunk, say about $2.50 per copy that needs to come out for a profit.

The packaging typically ends up being about another $1-2.50 per copy. We'll bet fancy like the big-boys on this one instead of on the cheap.

Then the studio/publisher wants their cut of the proceeds, which is based upon varying things and is owed typically the moment you press the production run. For something like 4k units, it typically ends up being something similar to the access rights amount.

So, at this point, you're out $25-30 per copy (selling all four thousand of them...) and you're just breaking even.

People often balk at the price that's being asked for ($40-55) thinking that the small-time publisher is gouging and keep looking over at that bargain-bin price and pointing to it, not realizing that the studio or publisher of that Windows title doesn't really see a dime of that copy's sales price because the retailer's closing it out. Selling it below costs, etc.

With the hypothetical title we've discussed up to this point, at $40, there's 15 dollars per copy that goes to profits to make it worth the business' time to do the work, have money to get other deals, etc. LGP has been getting deals that work with 1.5-2k units being the point for making decent profits at the prices they're selling them at. Some of it has worked out, some of it hasn't obviously.

[deanjo]

You'd think there would be more profit to be made now than back in the "glory days" of Linux gaming.

When your talking about a AAA title game, just acquiring the rights to a port can far exceed any small publishers financial ability. Their aren't many small independent studios anymore that put out AAA titles that would be willing to license out anymore for a price that would be within reach of the smaller publishers. All those guys were gobbled up by the likes of Atari, EA, Zenimax, etc.

[pvtcupcakes]

Lack of profitable market, (at least compared to what they are used to). If COD :MW2 for example was ported how many sales would it produce compared to the 1 BILLION dollars in sales it has pulled on the consoles and windows? It all comes down to profit.

You'd think there would be more profit to be made now than back in the "glory days" of Linux gaming.

[Melcar]

... and especially their financial troubles...

That was like some sort of epic tragedy. You can actually imagine everyone going "Yeah, this is so awesome. We are doing some great stuff", and at the end "WTF just happened?".

[deanjo]

I touched on this somewhat in my TuxGames thread, but I've thought about it a bit and refined my thoughts here.

If you look at TuxGames, they've got some big-name Windows games available there- none of them are terribly recent, and some of the bigger titles are from the early 2000's.

What stopped the flow of these titles onto the Linux platform, and how can we get that started again?

(I'm greatly enjoying the small indie titles that are available, and am quickly approaching the point where I have more games than I have time to play them.)

Lack of profitable market, (at least compared to what they are used to). If COD :MW2 for example was ported how many sales would it produce compared to the 1 BILLION dollars in sales it has pulled on the consoles and windows? It all comes down to profit.

[whizse]

I'm sure Svartalf will chip in here, but until then you should probably read up on Loki Software, and especially their financial troubles...

[dashcloud]

I touched on this somewhat in my TuxGames thread, but I've thought about it a bit and refined my thoughts here.

If you look at TuxGames, they've got some big-name Windows games available there- none of them are terribly recent, and some of the bigger titles are from the early 2000's.

What stopped the flow of these titles onto the Linux platform, and how can we get that started again?

(I'm greatly enjoying the small indie titles that are available, and am quickly approaching the point where I have more games than I have time to play them.)