Linux Game Publishing Remains Offline, Three Years After The CEO Shakeup

[curaga]

Sure it improves your situation, you'll at least be able to obtain said games again, just wait for the 75-90% off sales on them, sure thats not ideal becasue you've already paid for the games, but the company you got them from is deader then a dinosaur.

"Just buy the PS4 version, I don't care that you only have an Xbox One".

[Kivada]

First of all, Steam does not provide patches for games created by LGP, and I have an account on Steam, but I am not fan of this digital game store,

Secondly, the availability of game on Steam doesn't change too much in this case, and questions to producers do not change anything if the company was closed.

Lastly, LGP has worked on games that were not finished, and we do not have information about them.

I think it is time to look at games available on Steam for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows:

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows on Steam


Jets'n'Guns Gold
Postal?: Share The Pain
X3: Reunion

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam:


Shadowgrounds
Shadowgrounds Survivor

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but the Linux and Mac version of the game is not available on Steam


Cold War
Gorky 17
X2: The Threat

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but they are not available on Steam


Candy Cruncher
Creatures: Internet Edition
MindRover: The Europa Project
NingPo MahJong Puzzle
Software Tycoon

Games that are available for Linux, Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam.


Ballistics
Sacred: Gold Edition
Soul Ride

In this case, the Mac version of these games do not exist.

Games that are available for Linux, Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam:


Hyperspace Delivery Boy!

You can not buy the Windows version of Hyperspace Delivery Boy.

Games that are not published for Linux:


Bandits: Phoenix Rising - this game is not available on Steam, and the Mac version do not exist.
Disciples II: Dark Prophecy - I did not see this version of Disciples II on Steam, but I saw other versions for Windows and the version for Mac do not exist.
Unknown Title (Original LGP game)

Majesty: Gold Edition is available for Linux and Windows, but Mac users can only play in the standard version of this game on Mac OS X.
I know that Majesty HD is available on Steam, but this version was not ported to Linux and Mac OS X.

Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, but I think that on Steam is available a remake of Knights and Merchants for Windows.

Sure it improves your situation, you'll at least be able to obtain said games again, just wait for the 75-90% off sales on them, sure thats not ideal becasue you've already paid for the games, but the company you got them from is deader then a dinosaur.

[gbudny]

Most of those games are ON Steam, just not for Linux yet, the best you can do is make a Steam account and accounts on the companie's forums and join those of us asking them to have the ports brought to Steam.

First of all, Steam does not provide patches for games created by LGP, and I have an account on Steam, but I am not fan of this digital game store,

Secondly, the availability of game on Steam doesn't change too much in this case, and questions to producers do not change anything if the company was closed.

Lastly, LGP has worked on games that were not finished, and we do not have information about them.

I think it is time to look at games available on Steam for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows:

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows on Steam


Jets'n'Guns Gold
Postal?: Share The Pain
X3: Reunion

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam:


Shadowgrounds
Shadowgrounds Survivor

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but the Linux and Mac version of the game is not available on Steam


Cold War
Gorky 17
X2: The Threat

Games that are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, but they are not available on Steam


Candy Cruncher
Creatures: Internet Edition
MindRover: The Europa Project
NingPo MahJong Puzzle
Software Tycoon

Games that are available for Linux, Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam.


Ballistics
Sacred: Gold Edition
Soul Ride

In this case, the Mac version of these games do not exist.

Games that are available for Linux, Windows, but the Linux version of the game is not available on Steam:


Hyperspace Delivery Boy!

You can not buy the Windows version of Hyperspace Delivery Boy.

Games that are not published for Linux:


Bandits: Phoenix Rising - this game is not available on Steam, and the Mac version do not exist.
Disciples II: Dark Prophecy - I did not see this version of Disciples II on Steam, but I saw other versions for Windows and the version for Mac do not exist.
Unknown Title (Original LGP game)

Majesty: Gold Edition is available for Linux and Windows, but Mac users can only play in the standard version of this game on Mac OS X.
I know that Majesty HD is available on Steam, but this version was not ported to Linux and Mac OS X.

Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, but I think that on Steam is available a remake of Knights and Merchants for Windows.

[Kivada]

I do not care too much about Steam because I have many games published by LGP, and I just want to play them on the modern distributions of Linux. Steam is no a solution in this case because many original developers of these games are closed, or they do not create patches for any operating systems.

That is a list of companies that still exist:

DestraX Entertainment Software (Software Tycoon)
Strategy First (Disciples II: Dark Prophecy)

That is a list of companies that still exist, but they do not publish new games:

Creature Labs (Creatures: Internet Edition)
Hyperion Entertainment (Gorky 17)
Slingshot (Soul Ride)
Pyrogon (Candy Cruncher, NingPo MahJong)

That is a list of companies that were closed:

Ascaron Entertainment (Sacred)
Cyberlore Studios (Majesty: Gold Edition)
CogniToy (MindRover: The Europa Project)
Eon Games (Hyperspace Delivery Boy!, NingPo MahJong)
Grin (Ballistics, Bandits: Phoenix Rising)
IGIOS (Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds Survivor)
Joymania Entertainment (Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom)
Metropolis Software (Gorky 17)
Loki Software (MindRover: The Europa Project)
Mindware Studios (Cold War)
Monkeystone Games (Hyperspace Delivery Boy!)
Tribsoft (Majesty: Gold Edition)

That is a list of companies that sell/will sell own versions of Linux games

Egosoft (X3: Reunion)
Frozenbyte (Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds Survivor)
RakeInGrass (Jets'n'Guns)
RuneSoft (Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom)
Running with Scissors (Postal?: Share The Pain)

That is a list of programers that ported games for LGP:

Ryan C. Gordon (Candy Cruncher, Postal?: Share The Pain)

Finally, you can still see games published by LGP that you can not buy for Windows or Mac OS X e.g. Hyperspace Delivery Boy!.

Most of those games are ON Steam, just not for Linux yet, the best you can do is make a Steam account and accounts on the companie's forums and join those of us asking them to have the ports brought to Steam.

[gbudny]

And me - though the only game I worked on didn't get released...

Should I expect more programmers on this forum who worked for LGP?

[gbudny]

This would depend on how successful people are at making WINE or CDProjekt's solution work- or how many games Ryan and other people, like myself, can convince studios to move over. Do they want GOG or Steam sales? If so...deal is I port it, we share in proceeds. No charging me up-front for things. NDA me and bind me by contract to either provide or not the game on Linux and then we're off to the races. We'll see what comes of it all.

When, I wrote this comment I thought only about games that use Wine because the source code of these games were lost, and that is one of the reasons why these games won't be ported to Linux.

[gbudny]

That hurts... You forgot me. .

Sorry. I have not expected that you will come back to this forum, and I mentioned Ryan Gordon on this short list because he was the only programmer who worked on the Linux version of Postal 2. Now, I think that with Candy Cruncher it is not exactly the same situation because he ported this game to Linux x86, but the unknown programmer ported this games to Linux PPC/Sparc.

However, I have to admit that you are one of the few programmers who ported some games for LGP, and you are well-known person among Linux users.

The list of programmers that ported games for LGP includes myself.

That will be a long list of programers, and for many years I have always heard that LGP is a small company.

I don't know if Soul Ride's a big deal, to be honest. Source is out there to fix most problems with that game to make it run on modern distributions- if someone actually wanted to. Data's a differing story. That still belongs to Slingshot or their successors in interest. The FOSS code base will run the assets as if it were the provided binary running them- so long as you don't "improve" upon the data read routines. Game's quite old, to be honest, it'd need to have someone take an emory board to it and polish it up a bit to matter, to be honest.

I expected that LGP will publish a digital version of this game because that will be the only way to have a backup copy of Soul Ride for Linux. This game has a music, but I didn't know how to turn on in the game. I know that someone ported this game to AROS:

http://bszili.morphos.me

Ballistics and Bandits present an interesting conundrum.

I still have a box version of Ballistics, and I think it would be cool if LGP will publish Bandits for Linux.

Disciples II - Strategy First is still around, but I don't know if they were the publisher or the studio. Since Valve ultimately owns Strategy First and they're flogging Disciples II on Steam, I might be able to get THEM to sign off on something. I'll ping my contacts in Valve (if they're still around...) to see what the story is there. The game would do well for Linux out of Steam, Desura, and/or GOG.

I know that Strategy First was a developer for the Windows version of this game.

[random]

That hurts... You forgot me.

And me - though the only game I worked on didn't get released...

Disciples II - Strategy First is still around, but I don't know if they were the publisher or the studio. Since Valve ultimately owns Strategy First and they're flogging Disciples II on Steam, I might be able to get THEM to sign off on something. I'll ping my contacts in Valve (if they're still around...) to see what the story is there. The game would do well for Linux out of Steam, Desura, and/or GOG.

At some point I had a more or less complete Linux port of Discipes II - if you're interested I can check if I still have it (NAS migration went badly and I lost some datas...)

[Svartalf]

Haha, I bet with Svartalf posting Phoronix will immediately pump out a follow up article about it.

Very probably so. I won't bore people with the details. Let's just say I've no love lost with certain people, including my former employer. 60+ hour work weeks without break tends to leave you with no bandwidth to work on things.

[Ancurio]

Haha, I bet with Svartalf posting Phoronix will immediately pump out a follow up article about it.