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That's exactly right, and Microsoft has hampered opengl performance on Windows to promote their own tool chain.
Here's an interesting opinion piece.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/0...

Based on all the survey results I have seen, many people who use software that isn't properly licensed do so because the license terms are too painful, not because the actual cash outlay is too much. The biggest issues are DRM and buggy software (often caused by the DRM) that doesn't get patched. When you can download software via torrent and use it 100% of the time without worrying if the license server is available to authorize you, that software is worth a lot more than the version that requires you to jump through hoops just to use it. Add in the price difference (free vs. whatever the retail version costs), and it's really a no-brainer...people will always take a free Porsche over an expensive Yugo.

I really used to think that as well. What absolutely disgusted me and turned me bitter is when I read about the piracy rate of Humble Indie Bundle:

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

The bundle came DRM free. You get to decide how much you wanted to pay: Smallest amount you could put in those days was 1 cent (And many did). The proceeds went to charity, developers and further bundles with you able to change how much goes where. Linux, Mac and Windows versions were provided.

There really was no excuse for piracy! And yet piracy was rampant! It was all over the torrents. Just to save a penny?!

So that just proved to me that pirates are just plain dicks. Piracy for piracy's sake.

Your wish is unlikely to be fulfilled, because the only people who are going to respond to this accusation are the people who feel slighted by it, i.e., the people whose reason for pirating isn't just "having to pay".

The humble bundle is a poor example for your argument, since "having to pay" doesn't really apply to something that nominally costs one penny. There is an interesting analysis of that phenomenon and possible motivations for the people who obtained the games without paying.. Of particular interest is how little it seems to matter to creators that it's happening, and the recognition of the possibility of reaping recommendations from those that didn't pay that can induce further sales.

When Vista was released, it backpedaled on its OpenGL claims, allowing vendors to create fast installable client drivers (ICDs) that restore native OpenGL support. The OpenGL board sent out newsletters proving that OpenGL is still a first-class citizen, and that OpenGL performance on Vista was still at least as fast as Direct3D. Unfortunately for OpenGL, the damage had already been done -- public confidence in OpenGL was badly shaken.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

There are more benefits from porting games to MacOS and Linux aside from the Sales...

In the words Jeff from Wolfire: Why you should support Mac OS X and Linux

1) apparently the game was open source so it's not a complete rip off, just of the art. Stealing is stealing but this does make it harder to investigate.
2) the fraud was apparently taken down after a week which isn't stellar but not that bad of a response time either.

It all sounds pretty Wild West.

Sure does, doesn't it. Good thing that Apple keeps a close eye on such things.

I found this tutorial great for showing how linear algebra relates to gaming: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-developers-part-1/ I wish my linear algebra teacher taught this way, we never got any real life examples, just straight plug and chug linear problems. I went to Virginia Tech, freshmen math classes are a big disappointment there.

I agree with this post - and besides, this is just another annoying feature that people who pirate the game won't have to deal with. Also, the 90% piracy rate is largely irrelevant. Here's another perspective.

I think thats the crux of it. As a Linux IT professional, I spend a great deal of time writing complex software. A lot of the Mac crowd I personally know are either in the same Sysadmin specialization as myself, or are proficient in graphic design and web development. Either way, that type of user is a completely different demographic than the casual Windows user who likely has no interest in software, or the system itself.

As far as digital entertainment goes, I'd say the average Mac user is better served with the Apple store and the introduction of Steam to their platform than the average Linux user. I mean, sure we have games on Linux and have for years. However, its still a vastly under-served market by comparison to Windows/Mac users despite Linux making up a smaller percentage of desktop computer use. The original organizers of the Humble Bundle, Wolfire games, have a couple interesting blog posts about the effective size of these under-served markets. What I find interesting is seeing nearly the same purchasing stats for *each* humble bundle when the only advertising is word-of-mouth blogs and social media.

Well I have bought about 4 games for Linux in the last 6 months, and all of the Humble Bundles. You might want to look at the Linux sales figures for the Humble Bundles. So yes FOSS people pay for software.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble/
http://www.humblebundle.com/

Linux users when given a choice are even more willing to pay more than those on other Operating Systems. Windows users are cheap skates and always want something for nothing.

You are flat wrong on a few points:

It's not the access to high performance video drivers, as they don't exist.

Bullshit. The nVidia drivers benchmark comparably on Linux and Windows. ATI might still be worse.

And this is where I think the Linux community missed an opportunity. Back when Quake 3 was the hot new shit, and was how benchmarks were done, someone benchmarked Windows vs Wine vs native Linux. They found the performance went roughly in that order -- Quake 3 was faster under Wine on Linux than it was on Windows, and the native Linux port was faster still.

So you're right that gamers need something better -- but we had that. We had a significant performance advantage for awhile, and that was out of the box. This was also back when desktop GUI environments were still fairly resource-intensive things, so you could get even more performance out of killing off your entire GUI and running just that game in its own X server (with no other X apps) -- and PC gamers were always looking for little tweaks like that to give them an edge.

None of these things are true anymore. Linux is no longer a performance edge by itself, and whatever performance there is to be gained isn't really going to make your framerate go up. That's where it's even comparable, because since then, Direct3D got better and much more popular. There was a point where OpenGL was just faster and better, when games would ship with multiple renderers (OpenGL, D3D, and software) in case one happened to be faster or better supported on your machine, but as I remember, after a certain point, Half-Life always ran faster under OpenGL. But again, things just aren't comparable anymore -- too many games are D3D only.

That, and there are so many new features (all of them high-performance) that you're not likely to get the best experience out of open source drivers, so if you're stuck with ATI, Linux is going to be significantly worse than Windows, even for an identical OpenGL game.

I feel like if we'd kept that edge just a bit longer, we might've seen a lot more start to change. I played an MMO with a friend, and aside from his Norton Anti-Virus always interrupting his game, I could run it windowed (via Wine hacks) while he couldn't -- and eventually, when the game's auto-patching system not only worked on Wine but not his Windows, but we "patched" his copy by pulling files out of my Wine copy, he was convinced -- a few months later, I set him up with Linux. That kind of thing happens much less often these days.

Anyway...

It's not the access to ubiquitous and non-finicky audio systems, as they don't exist.

I don't know, ALSA pretty much met that goal, and I haven't had issues with Pulse since I switched to it, though I did wait awhile before making that switch. For a gamer, though, I don't see needing anything more than ALSA. For that matter, I also don't see a game developer needing to use anything more than OpenAL.

You are, however, almost right about this:

The gamers need something better than what they have if they are going to move away from their current situation and negate their library of games... The majority of game companies won't make games on Linux until there is a market, which doesn't exist.

Linux support is still a very good idea for a new indie game. And if anything, I'd expect it to be easier to build a portable game than other kinds of applications -- the game's entire interface with the OS can be reduced to OpenAL, OpenGL, the filesystem, and the network. OpenAL and OpenGL are already ported, and the filesystem is almost automatically portable if you don't assume stupid things (don't add a bunch of backslashes; forward slashes work on Windows, too).

But then, indie developers can't really afford to exclusively support Linux, which means the game itself isn't an inc

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/The-state-of-Mac-and-Linux-gaming

Explains it all, 'nuff said.

The problem with Vimeo is that it doesn't appear to want, say, videos about video games. If you developed the depicted game or obtained permission to post a video, it's "commercial use"; if not, it's copyright infringement. Start here; if you want more citations, I can provide them.

Bundle 2 offered a single torrent download legally if I recall. Bundle 3 might as well.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/12/Download-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle-2-using-BitTorrent

The last two bundles did make it on torrent sites. Wolffire Blog tried to estimate how many people were pirating a bundle they could have had legally for a penny.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

Bundle 2 offered a single torrent download legally if I recall. Bundle 3 might as well.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/12/Download-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle-2-using-BitTorrent

The last two bundles did make it on torrent sites. Wolffire Blog tried to estimate how many people were pirating a bundle they could have had legally for a penny.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

Sometimes it's hard to make a distinction.

I'm always looking for ways to be supportive of FSF's stances, but they are a puritan organization. As such, they present views that they know won't gain mainstream acceptance but that's ok, since something more reasonable will gain it. And that's where I stand: I don't consider words of FSF to be holy, but I will support a more "secular" view.

Same here. It's unreasonable to consider an offering "libre" to be truly possible without being fully "unpaid". Not because they are linguistically indistinct concepts, but because they are not to be expected. Licensing schemes, as they exist today for end users, typically allow software that costs thousands to develop (if not monetary, then in food) to be available for lower prices. "Splitting the cost."

Software needs funding before it exists. It's unreasonable to offer people a "donation jar" to fund software that doesn't exist yet and is unproven. Rare examples of success are not always truly success. Most software is funded a-priori in good faith that somehow one can pay it back. How? By selling a-posteriori. Selling software that must be freely copyable by the recipient is possible, and explicitly supported by FSF, this is rarely feasible nowadays if developing software is your primary work in life. This is because you will rarely have the success of Blender in order to sell other merchandise. A lot of work done under free software platforms is done by volunteers, but a lot of highest quality work is done by companies that have other means of earning money. It's really hard to get quality software written fast when it's not your primary thing in life and with free software, it's hard to make it a primary thing. And if you can't think of writing free software as of a profession because you don't have the financial backing to write free software, FSF bluntly says you shouldn't think of it as your profession. I can't dig it out right now, but it's either somewhere on FSF's site, on GNU site, or on Stallman.org.

It's easy to pretend "libre" isn't followed by "unpaid". It's also easy to see that it's just a pretense. Let's hope that FSF's list of high priority projects does prove me wrong, that you indeed can stick out a donation jar and expect the money to flow a-priori. Because then I will indeed dedicate myself to working on tons of free software projects that I've either started already, or just wanted to work on. I want to work on a good blogging tool for GNU/Linux and Mac. Can I get a-priori funding for that? Or is it easier to dismiss pride and ideals and just sell on the Mac App Store, not opening the source since something like this might happen?

I wouldn't bet on that.

O rly?

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/12/Humble-Indie-Bundle-2---IT-S-ALIVE

One of the comments says:

The official statement is: We're looking into it. We are contacting steam, but they are very busy, and sometimes take a while to get back to us. However, they did make it happen on the first bundle! :)

He's referring to the analysis they did on the first HB which found that 25% more people downloaded it than 'paid' for it, even though they could have obtained it legally. Explained in their blog post here:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

The games that promised to go open source from the previous Humble Bundle did follow through. From the humble site:

As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source.

Announcements and source code links:
Aquaria goes open source.
Lugara goes open source.
Gish goes open source.
Penumbra goes open source.

The games that promised to go open source from the previous Humble Bundle did follow through. From the humble site:

As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source.

Announcements and source code links:
Aquaria goes open source.
Lugara goes open source.
Gish goes open source.
Penumbra goes open source.

The games that promised to go open source from the previous Humble Bundle did follow through. From the humble site:

As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source.

Announcements and source code links:
Aquaria goes open source.
Lugara goes open source.
Gish goes open source.
Penumbra goes open source.

A few more for your list:

Minecraft isn't American, but is really good and so popular these days that the guy behind it has flown to talk to Valve and had to shut down his registration and payment system (which also means it's free to play right now!).

Dwarf Fortress, of course.

Lugaru HD is another classic indie title, and I think the non-HD version got open sourced as part of the Humble Indie Bundle deal. The game is a bit sparse at times, but for me the gameplay was top-notch.

Darwinia will make you more attached to little green pixel men than should be right.

These are some of the well-known ones. Really there are too many to list, but I HIGHLY recommend buying fresh, innovative indie games. They don't have the polish of AAA big-budget titles, but they make up for it in interesting gameplay mechanics and sometimes genuinely good storytelling that wipes the floor with the "everything you do must be epic to the extreme!" plots that the AAA titles have. I've gotten more hours of fun from VVVVV (look for it on steam for $5) than I got from playing Gears of War 2 which cost 10x that much.

Seriously, support your indie developers. The more people who buy their games, the more they get to make. Here is a good place to start looking.

They concluded that after removing those that paid less than five cents, the average price was around $9.20.

Why on Earth would they *remove* data? Of course the average price seems higher if you remove a significant amount of low numbers.

I don't download stuff I didn't pay for. However, I also think it's very rude to sneak crap like this into my hardware, movies, game and music.

As a result, I don't have an HDCP compliant monitor or Blu-Ray drive. I haven't bought any DRMed games or music in the last 5 years or so. I don't have any Apple products or a Steam account. I intentionally avoided laptops with BluRay drives and TPM. The few videos I bought were DVD, which is utterly broken, and as soon as I find a source of DRM-free downloads, I'm switching to that.

I won't pirate it, but it disgusts me so much, I won't touch the legal stuff with a 10 foot pole. My money now goes instead to the EFF, FSF, pirate party, and initiatives like Musopen and the Humble Bundle.

There have been multiple cases of "pay what you want" in the last year alone.
 
Hell, even Slashdot ran an article about this back in march: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/11/1932233/Indie-Pay-What-You-Want-Bundle-Reaches-1-Million
 
They concluded that after removing those that paid less than five cents, the average price was around $9.20. Hell, they even break it down by OS for you.

This one's pretty interesting: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth

It's a "rabbit ninja fighting game" ;), free from DRM and they are even developing for Linux (just as they did the predecessor). They are also designing it very modder friendly by using open formats, allowing anyone to to add content and making the engine accessible by scripting (python). Even now during the alpha stages they are already offering support to the modding community.

Check out the hilarious dev/tutorial videos on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/WolfireGames

If you donate you get access to their weekly alphas too! Yes, every week not only a progress report, but an actual updated usable product alpha to play around and mod with.

But more Linux users will actually pay and pay more for good native games. They just won't pay for something of which they can legally get working free equivalents

I got the Humble Indie Bundle for my Ubuntu machine. All the games had different installers but they all worked just fine. If some small indie game developers can get their games working on Linux I can't see why big developers can't do the same. Something like quater of the sales came from Linux users despite it's not the platform any of the developers had in mind when they made their games.

1) The games themselves will more or less not care about Cocoa because they'll use the least that they can to get an OpenGL window open and usable.

2) Non-issue, if it's closed source and the person who buys it complains about the driver being closed but the game not, there are bigger issues that person needs to work on. The 100% FOSS users obviously aren't going to want either. So again, they're not going to complain that a closed source game needs a closed source driver to work. As for the closed drivers themselves, AMD/ATI are descent (if you have hardware that they support) & nVIdia's Linux drivers are quite good. The OpenGL renderer for the games will likely need little to no changes to run on these drivers.

3) Short answer: yes http://www.wolfire.com/humble http://2dboy.com/2009/10/26/pay-what-you-want-birthday-sale-wrap-up/ Long answer: more than likely. The most common complaint I've heard over the years from Linux users is the lack of commercial/popular games that are only available on Windows (or Windows and OS X)

Perhaps you've missed the stats from here where Linux users paid more than Windows users.

If you look at sales of the Humble Indie Bundle, you can see that about one quarter of the money came from Linux gamers. I don't know how many of these gamers feel stongly enough about DRM that they wouldn't have buy the game if there was DRM on it, but I think that making a DRM system that works reliably on an Open Source system is really hard. So they would probably not have made a Linux version if they have used DRM, and they would have lost 25% of their revenue.

Note that those figures are for an Indie game, and it will probably be quite different for Half-Life 7.

Here is one page...granted, Linux is only 5%, but it's not the 0.05% that some people will claim.
Here is another. The percentages here are much more impressive, with Linux share at just about 25%.
Here is a blog post by Hemisphere games about the viability of supporting Linux.

I'd say it's worth it. I may be a little biased, of course (I don't have any windows machines)...but whenever I hear about an upcoming game with Linux support I preorder it immediately.

Here you go

So I should stop trying?

I just want you to understand where you're going to end up if you do -- and I don't think it's worth it. I don't think it's effective to essentially remove yourself from technology and society to try to change technology and society.

You didn't answer a single one of my questions. Let's start with this one: Are you actually running gNewSense? If not, why not?

Once you understand the reasons you don't run gNewSense, you'll have an understanding of why I'm willing to compromise and buy hardware which licenses DRM.

If you do run it, we'll just have to work a bit harder to find where you're currently paying them and draw a similar analogy.

I should explain my reasoning a little more, though: I just bought a new monitor. I made sure it supports HDMI, and it does support HDCP. But it's also a fairly high quality monitor, it does exactly what I need. It's likely to make me a more efficient student, and a more efficient software developer when I go back to work.

That's likely to give me more money, which means more money I can spend on independent artists. I can and do buy things like this, and I'm sure my contribution to any one developer involved is more than my recent indirect contribution to HDCP licensing.

And that assumes this money would go to the MPAA -- it doesn't. It goes to Intel, and I run Intel processors lately, too. Should I audit Intel and AMD to find out which of them has fewer ties to the **AA before I buy a CPU? Is ARM any better? Or should I forgo CPUs entirely?

Again, I'm not against boycots, in principal -- I can and do boycott Sony. It's just hard to find a good, new monitor these days that doesn't support HDCP, and it is important for me to have a good monitor -- so I'm stuck.

Ah, yes. Unfortunately there's no binary to make life easy on us. Open source isn't the same as free.

From the original developer's blog:

Getting the game data:
The game data is not shipping with the source code. Please buy a copy of the game (your copy from the Humble Indie Bundle will work just fine).

Forget about the Humble Indie Bundle (http://www.wolfire.com/humble) already?

I suggest that from now on, articles about far-out piracy number thrown out by special-interest should include a link to Wolfire's excellent analysis of video game piracy. Choice quote:

This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.

They opensourced the engine, but not the data. Unless somebody creates alternative data, then this is a non-story. http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Aquaria-goes-open-source#disqus_thread

There isn't even a public beta, let alone source code. Sorry, but it's a lot easier to get excited about this stuff than a bunch of screenshots.

And now that Steam is being ported to Linux and OS X, will this project be portable? Will it be open source? Will it integrate with local package managers, or other distribution systems?

That's a very encouraging statistic. To the GP: Jeff Rosen (one of the guys behind Wolfire) wrote an enlightening blog post ("Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users") on the subject too.

You should definitely read more of the Wolfire Blog. One of my favourite posts is about their reasoning for why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

That's a very encouraging statistic. To the GP: Jeff Rosen (one of the guys behind Wolfire) wrote an enlightening blog post ("Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users") on the subject too.

You should definitely read more of the Wolfire Blog. One of my favourite posts is about their reasoning for why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

That's a very encouraging statistic. To the GP: Jeff Rosen (one of the guys behind Wolfire) wrote an enlightening blog post ("Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users") on the subject too.

You should definitely read more of the Wolfire Blog. One of my favourite posts is about their reasoning for why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

If it's only available via digital distribution, then I guess I'm not the target audience, no matter how much of a gamer I am.

Some digital distribution is entirely DRM Free.

http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/
http://www.wolfire.com/humble

Many indy games certainly are.
http://www.torchlightgame.com/

I've even sworn off of Blizzard with their announcement that they're killing LAN play on the sequels to the games that practically MADE LANs proliferate. I'm not going to say that the original StarCraft and Diablo games singlehandedly made LANs popular, but they sure as hell helped, and they were so supportive of it that they'd let you install spawns on your friends' computers so they could play too. Now that Blizzard is ALREADY filthy rich, they're just getting greedier? Fuck that.

Apparently you connect through the lobby (requires an internet connection), then do LAN play locally. Not the best solution, but meh. I can understand, considering all the pirated copies of their other games that are in use. However, understanding doesn't make it any less annoying.

In fact, you can still legally purchase it for $0.01 for the next couple days.

Though if you're not a dick, you'll choose to pay a reasonable amount.

Linux users, not so much.

Actually, check out the contribution chart for the Humble Indie Bundle (scroll down to almost the end, look on the right).

Anyone can enter any price they like there - the breakdown so far:

Windows users: $8.06
Mac users: $10.23
Linux users: $14.54

That's an average over all the users of that platform that bought software, so that speaks really highly of Linux users appreciating games for the platform and willing to pay.

How appropriate that this appeared just under the 'pay-what-you-want reaches 1M' post. What to do about the piracy is obvious: release software as a 'pay-what-you-want' option, and the piracy rate will drop down to 25% — that's a saving of almost 30 billion dollars!

How appropriate that this appeared just under the 'pay-what-you-want reaches 1M' post. What to do about the piracy is obvious: release software as a 'pay-what-you-want' option, and the piracy rate will drop down to 25% — that's a saving of almost 30 billion dollars!