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Actually according to PC Data of Reston, VA The Longest Journey sold 351 copies from 1 Jun to 31 Dec 2001. Yes, the game was excellent according to every reviewer and gamer I talked to about it, but it was also independantly published by Funcom (soon to be MMORPG entrant for Anarchy Online. To win market share, you need big bucks. I hope Funcom can do better with AO than it did with TLJ.

Meanwhile, I just bought Sam and Max from the Lucasarts retail page. There's big bucks for you. And it runs on a 386.
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While I personally think paying real-world money for virtual items is ridiculous, I do believe in the idea that people should be able to sell their accounts with their characters intact. Everquest, Civ II, and the software for my digital camera are the only reasons I have my Windows partition. I retired from EQ about eight months ago and then returned. My account was still on reserve (though my characters would have expired had I not deleted them by hand) because it was tied to the activation codes on my CDs. If I had sold the CDs without selling the account, the new owner would not have been able to play the game without contacting me first. Also note that the Everquest EULA was amended to ban the sale of characters and in-game items after it had become standard practice. They freely tweak the EULA and require every player to click the 'I accept' button every time they play the game (or restart after every client crash). This guarantees that people are agreeing to things they haven't read, because even periodically reading the EULA every couple weeks may mean missing a change in the licensing (and there is no copy or changelog on the client machine). And for the benefit of the person who posted the portion of the EULA above: Let's try continuing that happypuppy article with the following: "You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload (i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii) data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion, determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest." That's a piece of legal dung that no Open Source user or decent lawyer would accept, and it's one I missed being added in the time I was away. (It was also, according to The Register, hastily scrapped after an obvious outcry by users.) It's also one more reason I'll be happy to chuck everquest off my hard drive if I get into the Anarchy Online beta next week. (Yes, I'm addicted, but I'm not willing to use the online equivalent of dirty needles. I've already told Sony to fsck themselves over their predatory banning of people who post stories based on their characters in forums Sony doesn't own (see The Register again, Oct 6, 2000), and their unwillingness to honor Windows refunds for Linux users. My next laptop will NOT be a Vaio.)

but the market has to start somewhere.

There have been several simultaneous ports [Unreal Tournament, Quake III: Arena, Terminus, Theocracy, the next Doom game, Anarchy Online (a non-fantasy-based MMORPG), Neverwinter Nights (the multiplayer AD&D RPG), Tribes 2 (well, nigh-simultaneous), and probably some I'm not thinking of off-hand] shipped or announced in the last 12 months, and the only way to maintain momentum is if you, the community, vote with your dollars.

Moreover, one of Loki's more recent ports, Soldier of Fortune, shipped only 4 months after the original Windows version, so the lag time on porting should hopefully be decreasing as well.

The gaming industry is ruled to a large degree by inertia, so it'll take time and effort to ensure a viable and diverse Linux gaming library, but I intend to do what's necessary to ensure that for all of us :).

Check out Anarchy Online.

It's not exactly Shadowrun, but it doesn't look bad.

Screenshots Looks kinda sweet.