EA Frostbite Games Unlikely To Be Ported To Linux

[mmstick]

I suspect another reason for this is that a LOT of linux user are people like me who keep all paid software off their machines. Since we are not part of any market for paid games, the actual Linux market for paid games is less than the prevalence of Linux on the desktop would suggest. Also, they have to figure putting DRM'ed anything on Linux exposes the DRM to aggressive attack. No protected media paths, no DRM baked into the operating system, etc. In the Linux world we have made a social and technical decision not to support locked content at the OS level. A Linux desktop controlled by a hacker and a game console are polar opposites even if they are exactly the same hardware with a mod chip used to defeat bootlockers.

There is a big difference between paid software and paid games, and I happen to be a purchaser of many of these Linux-ported games. In any case, this is all complete nonsense as the Steam DRM is working on Linux, Linux users pay the most during Humble Bundle sales, and there is clearly strong demand for Linux ports in the community (see the Steam forum of any game).

[Deavir]

Steamos can't offer anything over a console, in terms of efficiency...but it can be better than any windows pc gaming machine. The issue is tooling and how many changes need to be made to the kernel to offer something substantially better.

How about efficient use of money? Cheaper games, cheaper hardware after a year after console release. Backwards compatible with your last one, also games compatible with your desktop. Play games with your computer friends and not be on a different network. Convincing the masses that it is a console I think it is the key. Windows has more games but they also have more games then PS4 and Xbox one put together.

[Luke]

"Nonsense?" I don't know if any gaming devs use it, but WIndows offers DRM at the kernel level with things like protected media path and detection of "unapproved" software that can auto-unload DRM'ed applications. In Linux we don't have or want any of that, so any DRM in Linux is in userspace only, thus attackable from kernelspace. Also, the point I was making about markets is that the potential linux paid game market (barring Steam machines/consoles) is Linux desktop usage minus those Linux users who don't use ANYTHING that asks for money, such as myself. As others have said, Steam's project is insurance against Windows ever being locked to the Windows store. If it deters MS from doing this, Steam Machines will have done their job even if not one is ever sold in a store.

[Luke]

Moonmoon, I do not pay for software an in fact have no income from which to do so. Try suggesting paying for closed-source games on one of the GNU lists or something along those lines and see what kind of responses you get. If nobody in Linux was hostile to closed/proprietary code paid or otherwise, we would not have deblobbed distros like Trisquel (which require effort to create), probably we would not have good open source drivers like radeon r600g or RadeonSI, and so on. yes, games are different than say, video editors, but there are quite a number of FOSS games out there. There's really only three games I play: CriticalMass, Scorched3d, and 0ad plus some chess.

[atmartens]

The percentage of people using Linux isn't relevant. What matters is the cost of porting a game to Linux versus how much revenue it will bring in. Example: If it costs $10 million to port the game, and there are 100 million total customers each paying $50 for a copy of the game, then 1 million of those people running Linux (1%) will pay a total of $50 million. That's a $40 million profit, which would clearly be worth it. I don't have a good sense for how much a port costs, but I'd be interested in seeing what the numbers are, as well as typical sales for the popular games like CoD.

[liam]

How about efficient use of money? Cheaper games, cheaper hardware after a year after console release. Backwards compatible with your last one, also games compatible with your desktop. Play games with your computer friends and not be on a different network. Convincing the masses that it is a console I think it is the key. Windows has more games but they also have more games then PS4 and Xbox one put together.

Well, consoles area pretty much always going to be the better value (as compared to a gaming pc) as they get most titles that the desktop gets and many released just for the consoles.
Consoles also go down in price as time goes on (though not to the degree they should... but then neither does the hardware--try putting together a new system from scratch using five year old components).

[Qaz`]

The percentage of people using Linux isn't relevant. What matters is the cost of porting a game to Linux versus how much revenue it will bring in. Example: If it costs $10 million to port the game, and there are 100 million total customers each paying $50 for a copy of the game, then 1 million of those people running Linux (1%) will pay a total of $50 million. That's a $40 million profit, which would clearly be worth it. I don't have a good sense for how much a port costs, but I'd be interested in seeing what the numbers are, as well as typical sales for the popular games like CoD.

If you look around a bit on vgchartz for example you'll see that even fairly successful games usually don't sell more than a million or so on pc (with only a handful of exceptions). VG chartz are probably quite off on pc sales (too many non-traditional sales channels), but still, probably ball-park. 1% of a million is only 10000, and at $50 each that is only 500k, before retailer etc take their cut.


(It seems like the new text box for the forum blocks the firefox dropdown, hence the spell check suggestions, a bit annoying.)

[atmartens]

If you look around a bit on vgchartz for example you'll see that even fairly successful games usually don't sell more than a million or so on pc (with only a handful of exceptions). VG chartz are probably quite off on pc sales (too many non-traditional sales channels), but still, probably ball-park. 1% of a million is only 10000, and at $50 each that is only 500k, before retailer etc take their cut.


(It seems like the new text box for the forum blocks the firefox dropdown, hence the spell check suggestions, a bit annoying.)

That's interesting. So, how much does it cost to port a game? If you pay 5 developers $100,000 / year for 1 whole year, then that's the whole $500k right there. Then again, the porting probably carries over to OSX to an extent, so there's that market too.

[Amarildo]

I hope that on the future other companies will stop making agreements with EA and release their games on Steam once SteamOS is big.