Ryan Gordon On Valve's Steam, Linux Porting

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ryan Gordon On Valve's Steam, Linux Porting

Here's some interesting comments from Ryan "Icculus" Gordon about the latest state of Linux gaming and what's ahead...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI0MDI

[johnc]

I would love to do what he does. But I ain't got the OpenGL skillz... (yet).

But I think the connections are key. It's not like any jabroni off the street could walk up to a random publisher and say, "Hey! Let me port your game to Linux!" But if we had a bunch of Ryan Gordons who were willing to work on terms that were enticing to the game publisher (say, % of Linux sales; or, in some cases, maybe even volunteer), we could really bump up the Linux game library in no time.

[Xilanaz]

I would love to do what he does. But I ain't got the OpenGL skillz... (yet).

But I think the connections are key. It's not like any jabroni off the street could walk up to a random publisher and say, "Hey! Let me port your game to Linux!" But if we had a bunch of Ryan Gordons who were willing to work on terms that were enticing to the game publisher (say, % of Linux sales; or, in some cases, maybe even volunteer), we could really bump up the Linux game library in no time.

isn't that sort of what LGP did or still does, but back then Linux was even smaller and publisher had less reasons to allow others into their "kitchen".

[johnc]

isn't that sort of what LGP did or still does, but back then Linux was even smaller and publisher had less reasons to allow others into their "kitchen".

I guess they really don't like the NDA aspect of it. I suppose I can understand them wanting to keep things in-house.

[dolo]

Nice

Google Earth is Ryan's favorite project to date that he ported to Linux.

Oh great. It's awesome how "favourite" means hideous messed fonts on multiple systems and other problems people have to fix by hand (just look at the forums for Ubuntu, Fedora etc for problems with Google Earth)

[Kristian Joensen]

isn't that sort of what LGP did or still does, but back then Linux was even smaller and publisher had less reasons to allow others into their "kitchen".

From the perspective of Linux gamers the Ryan C. Gordon model is far superior to the LGP model. Since LGP have to negotiate rights to distribute games on Linux. It is harder to sell to publishers, it is harder to get the LGP model to break even and the LGP model gets in the way of stuff like Steamplay. The Ryan C. Gordon model has publishing/distribution rights for Windows, Mac and Linux gathered in one place with the SAME company. So they can allow Valve to do Steamplay on the games. Seperate Linux SKU's = bad idea.

[Xilanaz]

From the perspective of Linux gamers the Ryan C. Gordon model is far superior to the LGP model. Since LGP have to negotiate rights to distribute games on Linux. It is harder to sell to publishers, it is harder to get the LGP model to break even and the LGP model gets in the way of stuff like Steamplay. The Ryan C. Gordon model has publishing/distribution rights for Windows, Mac and Linux gathered in one place with the SAME company. So they can allow Valve to do Steamplay on the games. Seperate Linux SKU's = bad idea.

my comment was to Johnc 2nd suggestion

[Fry-kun]

offtopic

Article reminds me of a family guy gag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtP8rO7kYIA

[tomato]

Isn't that one of the common problems with most of the close-source applications running on Linux anyway?

My Opera experience was anything but that. It even detects that it runs under KDE and uses QT save file and open file dialogues (you know, one that can do such advanced stuff like showing multiple file thumbnails at the same time)

[entropy]

There is another interesting read from Ethan Lee (the guy who is porting Vessel to Linux).

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/14j9ed/how_difficult_is_it_to_port_a_game_from_windows/c7dmjbp