Battlefield 4 Developers Would Love To Get Into Linux

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Apopas]

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

Good catch, bro!

[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.

[nightmarex]

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.

Some games are just plain good regardless of graphical tier but their communities are driving forces upon themselves. Minecraft looks like crap but my daughter loves it ( I really hate this game ). She enjoys many user maps and that's key. I logged many hours on Diablo 2, it was an arms race and a hard addiction to wave off. QIII Arena, Everquest (WoW if you're 12), CS:S and many others were driven not by state of the art graphics but by amazing communities and online play. The only game I can think of that really throws a gear into this is Skyrim. I love that game and it is arguable both high end graphics and non communal.

[sirdilznik]

Yes Linux, and more specifically SteamOS, does need a killer exclusive title to help launch it, and the Steam Machines, into the mainstream gaming market. The company that brings said killer exclusive won't be DICE, though. It will be Valve, and the title will be Half-Life 3. It will probably be an exclusive only temporarily, as Valve likes money. My guess is 6 months. That's long enough to induce people into buying a Steam Machine and hopefully establishing it as a player in the market.

As for DICE, I'm all for them bringing their games to Linux. I have no interest in Battlefield 4 myself, though I'd be quite happy to see that game ride the penguin wave. The DICE game I really want them to bring to Linux is Mirror's Edge 2. See Faith run. Run Faith run.

[doom_Oo7]

EA, Bioware, Bathesda etc finally just go away.

Seriously, you can't say that. The Mass Effect series is one of the best of the last ten years which made me cry like a little girl more than once. Likewise, I still occasionnaly play Skyrim after two years. Can't say that of Tuxracer or Armagetron...

[clementl]

I secretly pray for the day when companies like EA, Bioware, Bathesda etc finally just go away.

Bioware is a division of EA nowadays, and why would you want that? Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls are some of the greates game series ever made. We need them to run on Linux, not to dissappear.

[ronybeck]

I won't give a penny for a linux game, no matter how exclusive it is !
Atleast until they fix those goddamn crappy drivers !!

With my hybrid GPU intel/amd... on windows i can play Counter-strike source with around 180+ FPS... on linux... 30 fps ?! + Lots of lagg and stutter...
i can't play almost anything...
This is the case for all amd based gpu's ...

I'm going to give "the finger" like Linus did, but this time for Linus/x/amd .

The operating system has only one purpose ! - to make the hardware work and communicate with the software... since linux in general has so many problems, especially in recent times... ( all wifi drivers are crap + almost all gpu drivers ( without the nvidia blob )) it can't do it's only purpose for me... so it's useless...
I was using linux for 9 years... but no more!
I have more than a 100+ games in steam, and i can play only 3 in playable condition!
So either i'm buying a mac, or i preffer to give 200$ to microsoft and end all the pain, lag/desktop lag/stutter and even DE crashes...

You don't need to look hard to find people complaining about AMD/ATI drivers on linux. I had only a short time with an AMD video card and found it quite buggy as well. So based on my experience with AMD, you are right. They need to fix the drivers. The NVIDIA experience on Linux is completely different. I can't say I have had any bugs at all really. Valve demonstrated that games on Linux can run faster than on windows (mostly owing to OpenGL though).

But are you really surprised that your AMD experience is so bad? There is a lot of speculation in many forums reporting a less than satisfying experience with AMD drivers. Whether or not it is really true is up for debate but I am surprised you missed this point. Especially over 9 years. 9 years ago, you would have needed to be a bit more careful to choose hardware that had a good Linux driver available. I can't believe you didn't learn that back then. It is less true now as almost all common hardware is supported out of the box. If you couldn't (be bothered to) do the research before making your hardware purchases, a Mac is definitely a good choice for you. Everything will work out of the box. But maybe buying windows and re-utilising your existing hardware is more economical.