Battlefield 4 Developers Would Love To Get Into Linux

[Mike Frett]

I am of a different mind-set than most you. I would rather continue having the great, original Indie games we have today on Linux, rather than rehashed "AAA" games from two years ago with a new skin slapped on and a premium price. I'll never buy any new AAA game on Linux, and it seems currently that most people are of the same mindset, thats good. I secretly pray for the day when companies like EA, Bioware, Bathesda etc finally just go away.

[Apopas]

SteamBox is nothing but spec for game developers to rely on as far as i see.

Good catch, bro!

[GreatEmerald]

Which is fine for what you want, but there is many of us who want triple A titles which need the video card proprietary video drivers to take affect of the whole video card, for different games and features. All these developers are noticing thanks to valve and valve is drm and you have to live with it. I bet most of the games that are gonna be ported or developed for linux will be developed with SteamOS in mind and all support well be for SteamOS. There is gonna be DRM in there for sure. You want more games for Linux you get more DRM. I am fine with this personally. I wanna see AAA titles running full tilt, that is going to mean proprietary drivers.

You're missing the point. The point was that you can't say "If you wanna play good games on Linux use the binaries", because that's not true, there are plenty of good games that you can play on OSS drivers. Now if you said "If you wanna play modern AAA games on Linux use the binaries", it would have been true.

As for modern AAA games and DRM... I don't care about modern AAA games, because they don't bring me anything that older games wouldn't provide (aside from largely irrelevant graphics). I'd take Unreal Tournament 2004 over the latest Battlefield any day. And I surely don't want any DRM. I am, and will continue to, boycott any game that has DRM that relies on the publisher's servers to be online. Because sooner or later they will stop being online, and then your game is forever lost. If that means not playing modern AAA titles, so be it, there are plenty of older/open/indie titles that are just as good and don't have DRM. If anything, this policy saves me money and time.

[vaudevillian]

Just want to point out something that most people forgot. This is EA we're talking about. EA are greedy greedy anuses, which shouldn't be much of a surprise as they are a publicly traded company and their only goal like any good capitalist sociopath is to make money at all costs. They are legally beholden to their shareholders after all. New IPs and originality pshaw, COD 26 Supple MurderGoat, sold!

Valve is not a publicly traded company, they can go any direction they want at any time regardless if they lose money, hence the support for 10+ year old games (which is goddamn good support I don't care what anyone says). And Gaben is an aging billionaire, I would be willing to bet he is to the point in his life that he solely does what personally interests him and little else.

If Value starts raking money in hand-over-fist with their new hardware/OS you know these AAA gaming companies who only have allegiances to gobbling money will follow, thats a fact, these companies go where the money is. They could care less about open source, the linux ecosystem, it's users, etc, they want money. Cocaine and whores are not free, any good marketing parasite will tell you that.

Here's what I would watch for in the next year or so: how well SteamOS is accepted by the public and how much revenue it makes value / revenue made by the first aging AAA game released for linux (CS:GO, Portal 2) / the money the first genuinely new AAA game on linux or SteamOS makes (comon HL3!).

I would also bet on something we cant see. Firstly valve is still going through with this, there was only a slight uptick in linux use on valve survey. But there is also something we can't see and I bet its a big one. I would hazard a guess that linux games on valve even ones bought for windows have had a huge uptick. I personally know I have been buying games that have that nice penguin logo beside them. Thats why I see them still going through with this. I bet they only planed on having a slight increased linux count then settle back down. But the one number that is all telling is games that are selling with linux support.

[Nevertime]

EA has never supported Nintendo much in any way.

Nintendo's strength lies in its in-house game studios and first-party titles; it's practically the only console maker that can survive on its own without third-party studios. And to top it off, there is no lack of Japanese game studios that are keen to support Nintendo.

Even if all the western game studios were to cease producing titles for Sony and Nintendo they will still continue to sell extremely well in Asia because of the huge JP studio support.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm a viscous Nintendo fanboy who'll show so called "mature" gamers what real violence is if they dare speak ill of Mario.

2014 will be awesome with all the lovely Nintendo games coming out. :3

Third parties aren't really going to switch focusing to any of the next gen consoles until 2015, it's the xbox 360 and ps3 that currently has the large install base. As for EA, I'm not bothered about BF4, but in the future I might have to get a second console (almost definitely a steambox) to get all the games I want.

[Sonadow]

A good sign considering EA see steam as a rival and have had a patch history with them. I wont be buying BF4 but some people might like to get it.

Interestingly, this game is not coming to wii u so it looks like EA likes steambox more than they like Nintendo.

EA has never supported Nintendo much in any way.

Nintendo's strength lies in its in-house game studios and first-party titles; it's practically the only console maker that can survive on its own without third-party studios. And to top it off, there is no lack of Japanese game studios that are keen to support Nintendo.

Even if all the western game studios were to cease producing titles for Sony and Nintendo they will still continue to sell extremely well in Asia because of the huge JP studio support.

[Nevertime]

A good sign considering EA see steam as a rival and have had a patch history with them. I wont be buying BF4 but some people might like to get it.

Interestingly, this game is not coming to wii u so it looks like EA likes steambox more than they like Nintendo.

[monraaf]

Just want to point out something that most people forgot. This is EA we're talking about. EA are greedy greedy anuses, which shouldn't be much of a surprise as they are a publicly traded company and their only goal like any good capitalist sociopath is to make money at all costs. They are legally beholden to their shareholders after all. New IPs and originality pshaw, COD 26 Supple MurderGoat, sold!

Valve is not a publicly traded company, they can go any direction they want at any time regardless if they lose money, hence the support for 10+ year old games (which is goddamn good support I don't care what anyone says). And Gaben is an aging billionaire, I would be willing to bet he is to the point in his life that he solely does what personally interests him and little else.

If Value starts raking money in hand-over-fist with their new hardware/OS you know these AAA gaming companies who only have allegiances to gobbling money will follow, thats a fact, these companies go where the money is. They could care less about open source, the linux ecosystem, it's users, etc, they want money. Cocaine and whores are not free, any good marketing parasite will tell you that.

Here's what I would watch for in the next year or so: how well SteamOS is accepted by the public and how much revenue it makes value / revenue made by the first aging AAA game released for linux (CS:GO, Portal 2) / the money the first genuinely new AAA game on linux or SteamOS makes (comon HL3!).

[AJSB]

I have read a few times how much better linux is to windows for gaming because valve says so. Did anyone bother doing tests themselves ? Most of you are so anti windows it is hard imagining any of you using it .

Anyhoo thus far windows still outperforms Linux on every gaming test i have done.

I can get on average a 20to 30fps improvement by using a custom Linux kernel over vanilla ( in my case a custom zen kernel with ,1,000Hz timer frequency,voluntary kernel pre emption,Auto use SCHED_ISO policy for X set, Nvidia tweaks = MSI interupts NVreg_EnableMSI=1 and PCIe3 NVreg_EnablePCIeGen3=1) but it's still 10 to 15 FPS behind windows with TF2/heaven/valley.

Anything else i can do ?

Well i'm anti-Window$ but i have no problems in using it in the past or even now if i have to...as for games , ET:QW used in both OS and in the case of Linux, in several distros.

My experience with ET:QW is very similar FPS in both OS, maybe just a little bit more FPS in Linux...but one thing is for sure....ETQW in Window$ stutters more....in Linux its more fluid.
This is not something new...it was always this way, IIRC.
...and IIRC, same goes to W:ET that i also played a lot.

This was using native clients for respective OS, not using WINE.
It's also using Nvidia dGPU and blobs.
I also always compile the most recent stock kernel with my own parameters.
Several distros used:
UBUNTU
XUBUNTU
Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)
Slackware

Of all these the worst is always UBUNTU and the best by far as for FPS and Lag goes is Slackware (using XFCE and not KDE that isn't even installed except some of its libraries).

[justmy2cents]

just my take on this

1st of all, i'm avid gamer and linux enthusiast and this is just how i see it. also, this is not some global truth, just truth in circles i live in, since i talked with quite a lot of ppl on this topic

- small percentage on Steam store?
well, lot's of gamers that will probably go with SteamBox are like me (well, more or less all my friends from games already decided on switch) since ps4 will require monthly net subscription and i never liked MS, not to mention Sony doing everything to detract customers with ps3 non support. SteamBox is next gens only choice basically where you don't get milked on every corner. and it's not about not being willing to pay for games... hell, my ps2 library has 180+ games and ps3 240+ games which were more or less all bought on full price around 65eur per game. i just refuse to pay for same thing multiple times, in fact i'm so strict about it i never even thought to buy dlc for few of my favourite games (example, Dark Souls... dlc is not addon, it should be included in original game as it was constant reference trough all the game, they just didn't make it well enough since they released it too soon). i don't mind paying extra for Fallout or Elder Scrolls dlc, hell... that's addon. SteamBox for me means one more thing. i can finally get decent multimedia machine that runs on my favourite OS with software of my choice since it is basically deb distro and console part is more or less nothing but overlay software running on it, which also means valve will surely put some work into SB being extremely TV friendly, which PC (any) with any drivers, sorry... it is not.
and please, don't try to comment on persuading me to play on PC. i used to play on PC long time ago, but got fed up of "this is too old, this is too small, need this or that, doesn't work here" and moved on console where you pop in disc and play. been happy ever since i did that. but, so far... i only installed Steam to see big picture mode and that's it. didn't even bother to try one of free games coz i know it would lead to fiddling with drivers. now,... when console hits, it's a 1st day buy for me with most games that i want to play that are available at that time, i never spared money there. but, i'll wait for release, until then, i or none of my friends will touch it. until then i just check store online to see if any new interesting game shows up and put it on my list. and even if i didn't already know 10 or so games i'd buy console on day 1 if nothing else than just because it runs on linux. and like me, lot of gamers just want to play games, not politics about Foss

- linux not suitable for games?
hmm, 1st off. ps3 for example runs on modified FreeBSD and the only thing where linux might not be suitable is the fact that there is multitude of hardware where driver quality really varies. so, *x for games is more than possible and valve console spec should do exactly that. specify which hardware REALLY works and more... SteamOS will probably go step further and make it really finalized as in you plug in tv and play.
funny thing is that i remember ppl saying linux is not suitable for phone in the past... times really changed there and Valve is basically doing the same with more open approach than google with android (well, so far it seems so)

- proprietary or foss drivers?
don't give s__t about that. ok, on my machines and servers... YES, foss only, don't touch proprietary with 10 foot pole. on console? i don't want to play with settings, i'd rather play with games, thank you. it's SteamBox or nothing for me and with that, i'll play as valve sets it up. there are 2 good things about it as far as i see. 1st of, as any console it should have longer life span than PC whose main problem is that there is no specs what it is capable off which leads to never ending upgrading game which i refuse to play. and 2nd is that there is no limitation on games not being capable of doing more than that if machine allows it. SteamBox is nothing but spec for game developers to rely on as far as i see. besides that, all the sayings never excluded you can't set up your own box as you see it (which is also good for Valve as they are not dependant on going bankrupt with underselling consoles like Sony or MS)
all i really hope games will simply include "SteamBox (version)" in their settings if they allow more capabilities than SB will be capable off. last thing i want in game is fiddle with settings to find decent frame rate. having preset SB option would sure be nice, especially if auto detected since game probably won't be limited to console when it can run on any PC.


here is a question i'd like to pop if someone can answer. as much as i was impressed with controller design... is the trackpad thumb twitching to move left or right everywhere or will you be able to simply hold finger like with normal stick? everything else was gorgeous, that one... big nono in my book. i really hope that was just the "direct mapped keyboard and mouse" part. if you could hold finger on surface and provide constant directional movement, that would be insanely nice. i can't remember how many times i cursed the tranction of ps3 stick when game required more or less whole time being pushed in one direction, twicthing on the other hand is even worse in prolonged game session

p.s. i apologize on bad english, it is not my native language. so, spare me with commenting on that