LinuxGames has a QuakeCon recap...

[Malikith]

@me262:
@Malikith:
I do not think it is a good solution to make a "Linux only" game. This way we would be locking a software down to Linux as they do lock down games for Windows which would only increase the "elitists" reputation and would hurt us in the long run. No the game and engine in question has to be fully cross-platform and the package has to sport a fat Tux logo. Even if people play it on Windows they get it to know and the see the explicit Tux on it. It's better to have this propaganda than having none of it.

Why not? I don't think its elitist at all, Frozen Bubble isn't considered elitist for only having a Linux version. Theres nothing wrong with a Linux only version of a piece of software. Infact I didn't even say Linux only I said Linux and Mac, thats NOT locking everyone out. And say if you did support Windows, it wouldn't matter how many Linux logos you stick all over it, people don't care about that, they care about the game, and if they can access the game on Windows, they don't care and won't care.

[Dragonlord]

@me262:
Nah, it's not ZP. Granted I have the tendency to rant in a similar way ( which is why I got at other places the title "Linux Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue" ) but this time it's not him. It has been articles on TE about these topics ( not about Linux but the general game dev drama going on ).

@Malikith:
I do not think it is a good solution to make a "Linux only" game. This way we would be locking a software down to Linux as they do lock down games for Windows which would only increase the "elitists" reputation and would hurt us in the long run. No the game and engine in question has to be fully cross-platform and the package has to sport a fat Tux logo. Even if people play it on Windows they get it to know and the see the explicit Tux on it. It's better to have this propaganda than having none of it.

[Malikith]

You know, I am probably very wrong or maybe my thoughts are flawed but I think as a community as a whole we can resolve this whole issue. The issue is not out there as much as its within us already. Meaning, Open Source development. What we need to do is create a cool but simple open source game that can rival the industries best on every front. People migrate to Linux all the time due to Compiz or whatever, but if we could get people to migrate to Linux for that big word, games. We could really dish it out to the industry and ultimately I think we could really get what we want.

Granted, thats alot of work, but I think with proper organization and the "right" people we could have the chemistry and all to build such a game. I know this could go right into another thread of its own but this covers the issue that we have been trying to fight forever now and there just doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel thus far.

Just like how Enemy Territory got the attention of the game industry or Counter-Strike. We ultimately could do the same exact thing, infact there are projects out there right now that could pull it off but their development just isn't moving fast enough. I also think the game would have to be Linux and Mac only. If Windows was supported and the game became popular it wouldn't matter if it supported Linux or Mac. It would come back to haunt us and that wouldn't really work. Publicity would be another thing we'd need, without it, well, no one will know about it then haha.

But I'm done ranting and preaching for now, thats just my two cents on how to solve this, we need AAA titles, we need all this and that. I don't think selling small time games that no one really wants to buy is the solution, I think the solution is a game of our own, but who knows I am very likely wrong here. But I'm just not sure what can REALLY work at this point.

[me262]

Are you finished with the lame ranting? Sorry to say this but it's a long time since I read such a garbage. Over at the Escapists there's a nice article about "game industries lies" or let's call it "excuses". People who do not support a platform and then go moan about the platform not having users is hypocritical. What we need is "action" and "solutions" not "excuses" and "fighting-problems-instead-of-solving-them". Sure Linux is not the same mass as Windows but if any minority ( no matter how small or big ) on Earth would be genocided would you call this "correct" or "their own fault"? Here it's the same. The AAA companies fight with daggers and swords against Linux so what we need are people taking up the weapons and fighting back with solutions instead of running from them. Attacking the common user unable to change something is plain utterly wrong.

That Escapist article wouldn't be done by Zero Puncuation would it? It sounds like his tone...

I do want to offer my arguments again as well.

- Linux just came on the big-league market for pre-installed computers courtesy of Dell. Windows and Apple have a long lead on us. For simplicity I'll use a running race analogy. MS is using steroids and has now run out. We're starting to see the after effects of that ill-gotten gain (the fact they had to have a commercial to toute Vista SP1 is proof). Apple burst out of the gate, got a good lead, fell flat on their faces, and is now back up and running, trying to catch up to MS. Both MS and Apple are in it for the prize at the end. We've been pacing ourselves, but we're in it for the fun, not the prize (although it doesn't hurt). We expect that MS and Apple will run out of breath and we'll just zoom by them, keeping our pace, with MS and Apple struggling to keep up.
-- I wonder how many analogies can be applied that fit...

- The industry situation definitely is a catch-22. There has to be a market before there can be a market. Some of the small time games may help, but a lot of people are looking for more recent games that they will enjoy. I like the quote about some companies stepping up to the plate, leap of faith and all.

- The main reason that prices are so high on the Linux developed stuff, is that the studios have to try and recoup the prices they paid to get access to the code they ported. The Windows games have been out so long, everyone has been paid fairly thuroughly, and they can afford to drop the price, now that they have recouped their costs.

- There are moral people in the downloading community. Why do you think gamecopyworld has continued to exist? I had to go there all the time because I ran a CD-Less gaming system for some time. Heck, I still have the data stored on an external hard drive on my desk!

- There are people spearheading (and oddly enough, the pun wasn't intended) a drive to change the industry's thinking on the matter, Svartalf is one of them, Icculus is another, but he is being stringed by Epic. I hope to be too once I finish school (Thanks for helping with ideas for my X-platform IDE, Svartalf, I'll be setting it up soon, I'm procrastinating because I don't have my EVDO card set up in my Windows partition yet).

- From what I read on the first post, Carmack may not officially support it anymore, but he won't stop any of his office staff from porting it on their spare time. He's still for it, but I get the feeling it's coming off to him as more of a hassle nowadays it seems. Chances are someone will take him up on that. I know I would.

- The Windows emulation is definitely killing us. What we can't run natively, we can emulate. I'm lobbed into this group because of game popularity. I most likely will be getting Starcraft II, and unless there's a Linux native binary, I will most likely be using Cedega to play with my friends. It's one of those "We'd love it for our system, but we'll settle for second rate emulation". This is causing the numbers to skew very badly, against us. We don't have a relation with the developer or the publisher. We have a relation with the retailer selling us the game. The shop I saw selling Quake 3 for Linux was the only package I saw, and I have not seen a "for Linux" game package after that. I agree we need better distribution.

- I cannot begin to recall all the posts I've seen asking for a linux native binary. A lot of them also say that "if this comes out on linux, I won't need to dual-boot to Windows anymore". This goes back to the leap of faith part. More people will abandon Windows if their favorite games can be made on Linux. Even more piercing is the arguments "The server doesn't count.", "It's leveraging Linux stability for an otherwise unusable game.", "Let the unstable software run on their unstable servers.". These definitely do hurt our image by saying if we can't have it, we don't want it, period. Problem is, someone always does want it, there is a market, see leap of faith. The only way I see it is that it has to be developed in parallel, or it's hardly worth it.

- People can change things, right now. That's the beauty of Linux. You don't like it, you write it. Unfortunately this attitude is also part of the problem.

- There's more... but I'm tired, and it's light out again.

- Svartalf, you have every right to be upset, I am too, but I am not in direct view of your looking glass (I don't know most of the data that you have).

- I think we need to take a step back and survey the situation. What we can do to increase support? (Get the product to the retail store shelves. Any more?)

... not bad for someone up at 6:16a EDT and hasn't gone to bed yet... ^_^

[Thetargos]

NEWSFLASH!!!!

1) Apple users bitched an complained just as loud and as verbose as linux users and they are getting games now.

Two observations to this MacOS users point:

• Like Svartalf said, these same users (though there has undeniably been piracy as well) did buy the products (not only games, mind you, but apps in general) at whatever price was requested at release.
• MacOS users also had the benefit of God Almighty Steve Jobs pouring a hefty sum of cash to get at least some of these games on MacOS (from what I've seen there are rumours stating as much as 1 million per title to some studios). I've not heard some Linux-enthusiast millionaire or company willing to make such an investment (and yes, by that I mean Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat or Mark Shuttleworth)

Edit
Just wanted to clarify that the alleged pour of money from Jobs (or Apple) for games, was with the migration to the x86 architecture.

[RobbieAB]

Wine is detrimental to the adoption of Linux by third party developers (i.e. 99% of ALL commercial software) because it allows them to develop for Windows and say to use wine.

This is not a problem of wine itself, but a problem of all compatibility layers. It is often said that the DOS compatibility layer in OS/2 hastened the demise, as many software developers simply developed for DOS, and as a result people were more inclined to buy DOS, as the programs just worked better on it.

[Chris]

If just those who buy the games to play them using wine would *not* buy unless there is a native binary, this might already help a little. Though the publishers will then probably just say "hey, our sale figures dropped, shame on you pirates!".

Followed by "PC gaming is dying, lets focus on consoles!" That'll help.

Unless maybe a big player like valve makes an offer for Linux and show the other big publishers that there is a big market to conquer things are unlikely to change.

id Software, Epic, and Bioware weren't big enough? id has supported Linux for a long time (weren't there Linux ports of the original Doom? and even if it may not be "commercially supported", I'll be surprised if we don't see official native Linux binaries for Rage and Doom4), Epic has supported it since gobbling up what was left of Loki until this UT3 fiasco, and Bioware made at least Neverwinter Nights for Linux (one of the expansions even came with a (broken) Linux installer on-disk), which they were still providing patches for until just last month when they stopped patching the game altogether.

[ivanovic]

1) Apple users bitched an complained just as loud and as verbose as linux users and they are getting games now.

Oh yes, apple users bitched. They bitched a lot. The difference between the bitching by apple users and Linux users is simple:

When apple users were bitching, they were simply not buying the game since there was *no* way to run it. That is at that time (yes, it was before the switch to x86 when EA started shipping eg C&C Generals for mac) they had nothing like wine. When they had no PC beside their mac, they had no way to run the apps. So they did not buy it. Some publishers saw that there is a demand, a group of players who did not buy a single copy. So they started to support it and got a raised profit from it.

For Linux it does look a little different. That is many users do bitch loud. This is identical. What is not identical is that users do buy the game since they either dualboot with Windows or run it in wine. Both were no options for Mac users in the days when they really bitched.

Since the Linux users (at least parts of them) buy the game anyway, even if there is no native binary (no matter if compiled against winelib or how it is done), why should the publishers change their view? How large are the numbers for those Linux users, who would buy the game when it is released natively for Linux and not when it is not? The studios don't see this as a too large cut in their profits, so they don't see a need to change things.

If just those who buy the games to play them using wine would *not* buy unless there is a native binary, this might already help a little. Though the publishers will then probably just say "hey, our sale figures dropped, shame on you pirates!".

The only thing that counts for the big players in the market is money. So far they have no seen that they really make more profit when supporting Linux and they just look at what they think who much they could lose by supporting it. Lose as in "hey, normal copy protection will not work, everyone will pirate it anyway" and "hmm, we have to invest money to port and later on to give support, which callcenter does also give support for Linux without charging insane prices?".


I do understand Svartalf being upset about things since with the current attitude by many players things are unlikely to change. Yes, the prices are rather high compared to windows releases of the same games since those are often in budget range when the Linux binary is out. Even if they (unintentionally) run nicely in wine, you are using a Windows product and thus support the creation of Windows products. Nowaddays PC gaming is largely Windows based. It is sad, but that's the way it is. You don't have too much choice when you want to play those AAA games from the big publishers. The only thing you as players can do is talk to indie studios to offer native ports. They are more likely to be nice to you. Some of those indie games are really nice products and often the price is affordable, too.

Unless maybe a big player like valve makes an offer for Linux and show the other big publishers that there is a big market to conquer things are unlikely to change. That is either many small studios show that they can gain a great profit from supporting those "special" platforms or one of the big players is brave enough to give it a try. I don't think that those ports of "released long ago" games will help a lot to show the big players that there is a market. It will just cater some smaller need for some core Linux users. I really appreciate this, but I do not think it will change the big picture. The players feel that the games are out too late and as such "totally outdated".

[Svartalf]

Burned out and jaded arent we this morning? See? Thats what occurs when you try to sell games on a platform only suited for network servers.

ROFLMAO... Yeah, I was a bit over the edge upon reading what John Carmack had to say on things.

[Svartalf]

1) Apple users bitched an complained just as loud and as verbose as linux users and they are getting games now.

They also BOUGHT what was offered to them at what prices it was FIRST- we're not. Not a valid remark, deanjo- and you know it.

2) Windows/Mac users suffer from greater piracy then linux, but yet they get games.

Numbers are larger but the ratios are MUCH smaller. They don't HAVE five to one ratio.

3) Saying buying a game for wine is a vote for windows is a cop out. EA started using cider and games started being ported faster NATIVELY to OS X then at any time in it's history from other companies. Next gen are all going to be native.

If that were the case, deanjo, why don't we see the stuff for us- cider's intrinsically winelib for MacOS. Since we don't, that's a NULL argument. Transgaming's been flogging the abstraction lib play for Linux and MacOS for some time now. If they're doing it for MacOS, why can't they do it for Linux? Because of the shifting target perception? Heh... It's not hard at all to do it and you're using the same tools for MacOS in the large.

4) Lately, anytime a closed source developer has asked the opensource community to make a accomodation for the closed source community they have responded with a "f*** you" response. It's a game of give and take. Something the FOSS community seems to have forgotten. Establish your marketshare before making demands.

Actually, what they've done is asked for unrealistic things in many cases. What they asked for was intrinsically asking Microsoft to open up Windows to use an analogous thing- DRM is a problem. And it's not been a "f*** you" that they've gotten as much as a "no way- that's not how things get done" and then a counter proposal was given. LGPL is one of those "concessions" that was given. There's been others. And this has less to do with the FOSS community saying anything of that nature (considering that a game doesn't run afoul of a lot of this) and more to do with perceived dollar amounts.

5) What there is for piracy on linux games, sorry to say this but it is TRUE, is because the games ARE overpriced but more importantly for the mass is the ONLY way they can get them. Piracy of games on linux is more from lack of availability then it is the "screw you, I'll take it for free"

Won't argue that, but in the same breath, they're cutting their nose off to spite their face- which is what I was getting at.

6) Linux with it's inherant moving target makes it a PITA to ensure a working product across the vast selection of implementations out there. Perfect example is X. Christ there is a new memory management every week it seems. Submit the code, next week pull the code.

Okay. You need to just DROP that FUD. It's not at all hard to target that "moving target" as the API is all you should concern yourself with- if it doesn't change semantics and it's use doesn't change, it will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and kernel/X11/etc. revisions out of the gate. How you basically do this is that you pick X11 (which the memory management might cause X11 bugs, but if you're not using X11 and OpenGL...), you use autopackage's autobuild to pin the glibc version to 2.1, you statically link libstdc++, and then the rest can be dynamically or statically linked as needed. At that point you have a stable binary (your game or other code being stable, that is...if it's not there, it's not there for any platform, really) that will run on Debian Woody and most everything else out there.

You've been able to do that now for the LAST SIX OR SO YEARS.

7) Developers have a fallback that they can call upon with Win/OS X. You don't have to post a question in a mailing list hoping it didn't get lost in the kerfuffle of 10.000 other mailing questions.

ROFLMAO! Do you HONESTLY believe that one? Have you EVER relied on that "fallback"? I have. It's not any better than the mailing list answers- and I always seem to find the results I've looked for in a timely manner for the last 12 years now.

Sorry but these are reality checks.

They're nothing of the sort, deanjo.

Out of everything I probably use Windows the least, I keep it around for 2 reasons, 3dsmax and gaming. 90% of the time I'm in OS X or linux (I'm not a big gamer, more on development (for myself or clients usually). I DO talk to commercial developers on a daily basis and the above reasons are what I get thrown back at me the most from them when I ask "Any plans for a linux port?" .

To be sure it's they're what they see with Linux- doesn't make it true or the reality of the matter. The reality is quite a bit different- what's needed is trying to shift the perceptions. Something, I daresay, based on your remarks, you don't even try doing. I get told differing things, really, when I ask. Nothing like what you threw out. I get told the things I keep griping about. Perhaps there's two sides to this, but the reality of the matter is, it's all about the perceptions of the people in question. And Dragonlord's right. You're going to have a fun time of it trying to convince them of anything because of the stuff I've pointed out going on and the perceptions of the things you've pointed out (which are not true, but with the other crap going on you're not going to even get them to listen to you...). We've got to quit worrying about AAA titles from people like Epic and iD (if they make it for us, great, if not, it's just a damn shame...) and go after getting the Indies to make stuff for us.