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Linux Gamers Command 90% Of Initial Unigine OilRush Sales

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  • #11
    I'm going to buy it as soon as it's released. Wanna see some gameplay footage first.

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    • #12
      eventhough I only use linux I still visit bluesnews every day, and I noticed that there was no oilrush to be found there, so I think the low number of sales might have something to do with it not (yet) being in the news really or ?

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      • #13
        I've really only heard news about Oil Rush on Phoronix, so this game is really lacking publicity in the Windows market. If they can get a preorder up on Steam, that would definitely help their sales I think.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by pvtcupcakes View Post
          I've really only heard news about Oil Rush on Phoronix, so this game is really lacking publicity in the Windows market. If they can get a preorder up on Desura, that would definitely help their sales I think.
          Corrected :P

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          • #15
            Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
            Corrected :P
            Steam, Desura, Impulse, Gamers Gate, Direct2Drive, whatever. They need to get more exposure than just the Phoronix crowd.

            But perhaps it would be better if they waited to really start marketing the game once it's closer to release.

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            • #16
              I posted it to Freegamedev forums and somebody preordered it. Do you think I should ask my comission?
              Usually user recommendations are better than developer promotion. Users trust other users, but expect developers to exaggerate the good points of their games.

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              • #17
                Thank you guys for spreading the word, it's really helpful.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by dimko View Post
                  Come on guys!
                  You are naive if you think sales will sky rocket first day? It's not even over yet?(the day!)
                  That's not naive at all. Entertainment titles -- movies, music, games, and game hardware -- are often measured by their opening day or opening weekend sales figures. Interest for an entertainment item is always highest when it's first released. The sales figures most often only go down from release date.

                  Of course this is a pre-order, not an actual release, but it's still very indicative of sales to come. If pre-order interest is low that usually means that release date interest will be low, which in turn means that overall sales will be low.

                  First of all, who will buy preorder of game of not VERY known company(I agree, it is somewhat known fro tech demos)? Point one.
                  And that's part of the problem with the sales for this game, I think. The ONLY place I have ever heard of Unigine or Oil Rush is on Phoronix... and I'm in the games industry.

                  They aren't doing much marketing of either their engine or their game to consumers or even to tech people. (I'm not at GDC this year, which is currently running right now, so maybe they're doing all their engine marketing this week and developer interest will explode in the weeks to come.)

                  It's not surprising for sales or pre-orders to be low if nobody even knows they exist.

                  For most commercial titles, marketing is budgeted at about 30% of the development costs. So for a $10,000,000 game that means $3,000,000 should be spent on marketing. I don't think Unigine has spent much of anything on marketing yet, so far as I know.

                  First of all, sound did not work. After looking into config file - i found game was not using alsa. After messing one line of config file - it became apparent that alsa is not supported by game, at least not in beta. Fear not! Game was playable over openAL, but problems didnt finish there.
                  This is normal. ALSA does nothing interesting for sound other than get it to the card. Nobody in the games industry is going to code against ALSA directly; nobody in any segment of audio programming is going to code against ALSA directly, unless they're writing a low-level sound API library or daemon.

                  OpenAL is an actual sound API that's moderately decent for games. It's still only 1/100th of fmod, though, which is unfortunate as fmod is not FOSS and there is nothing even remotely equivalent to it in the FOSS world. On the upside, fmod is free to use for free games and has Linux support.

                  Well, checked "bin" fodler of the game, turned out game is x86 and not x86_64, implying that openal has to be 32 bit too... Installed emulation for 32 bit sdl(gentoo thing, your distribution may and probably calls it different name), and there you go, game with sound.
                  Also expected. You should always have a complete 32-bit user space library install if you plan on running many proprietary applications, particularly cross-platform ones. The Windows world is still catching on to 64-bit and a lot of apps just don't have any 64-bit support because of that, unlike most native Linux and even OS X applications.

                  Unfortunate for games, as the larger address space makes a lot of memory management issues disappear. And memory management is one area where games are still heavily optimizing things while everyone else is moving to generic garbage collectors and using general purpose memory allocators with no thought towards allocation patterns, deallocation/reallocation performance, or cache behavior.

                  I personally consider it yet another misdesign of the common Linux distro that their libraries aren't automatically shipped in dual architecture support in the native packages (or build scripts, for things like Gentoo). Hard drives are massive, bandwidth is cheap, and adding a few hundred extra KB to extra lib package/install hurts nobody (but a few very special case users that should stick to special case distros) but reduces confusion and compatibility problems for the rest of us.

                  Granted, I also think it's stupid that many Linux distros still default to shipping x86 install CDs, or that they even _have_ x86 install CDs. And Woe to those distros that still don't support x86-64. The third world can bite me, the rest of us have moved on and want systems that actually take advantage of our hardware we bought and paid for.

                  I'm equally irritated at all the PC vendors who still offer or even default to 32-bit Windows. And irritated at Microsoft for even having a 32-bit version of Windows 7.

                  Sigh.

                  Hope error will get soon corrected. Will be more than happy to debug game to developer, if i knew how and where to.
                  I'd be surprised if they asked for help. You're unlikely to get the debug symbols you need to help do anything useful because they would aid too much in reverse engineering. Proprietary software doesn't work that way. Which is one of the primary weakness of proprietary software, of course. They might appreciate you sending in a coredump, though then only if you're using a standard distro with an easy-to-reproduce runtime environment (because the libraries all come from the same set of compiled binary packages, rather than being tweaked and customized like Gentoo does).

                  One thing I was very curious to see, but didnt see - if SMP is used.
                  If better be. Otherwise their engine is a piece of crap not fit for use in 2011. Even new phones are dual-core, and the Xbox360 has been tri-core since release. Any game engine that's not capable of scaling up with the number of cores is dead weight technology. Like Bethesda's engine.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by elanthis View Post
                    That's not naive at all. Entertainment titles -- movies, music, games, and game hardware -- are often measured by their opening day or opening weekend sales figures. Interest for an entertainment item is always highest when it's first released. The sales figures most often only go down from release date.
                    so true.

                    Originally posted by elanthis View Post
                    They aren't doing much marketing of either their engine or their game to consumers or even to tech people. (I'm not at GDC this year, which is currently running right now, so maybe they're doing all their engine marketing this week and developer interest will explode in the weeks to come.)
                    Our demos were running in public NVIDIA booth, we decided to skip GDC this year due to high load. However there was a Unigine booth previous year.

                    But anyway you are right, we are more concentrated on development rather than marketing.

                    PS: Unigine engine is fine with multi-core systems, don't worry =)

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                    • #20
                      separate windows/linux licenses?

                      Anyone know if you have to buy windows and linux licenses for this game separately?

                      I've got a gaming rig that runs windows and my main machine is linux, I'd love to be able to run it on both. Not sure I want to buy it twice though.

                      Might have to buy just windows, but I want to support the right half

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