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E3: Linux Still Waiting In The Wings
This year's Electronic Entertainment Expo was a great disappointment. Not just to see the state of the PC gaming industry in the ongoing PC vs. Console war, but to see that Linux was even less prominent at this show than it was at Game Developer Conference just a few months ago. Two things can be garnered from this observation. The first is that, as Linux users know, the power of Linux comes from the people, not from the marketing guy in the corner office. GDC was a show for the programmers, artists, designers and tools manufacturers. E3 on the other hand is a show for the marketing and public-relations representatives to vie with their peers for coveted media attention. The second thing is that Linux gaming has gone nearly as far as it will go without increasing the number of Linux users who will buy Linux games.
This is not meant to be a gloom-and-doom piece, but rather a summary of where Linux gaming is today, and to point out a few of the more interesting Linux gaming products represented at the show. Several important issues still need to be resolved for Linux to be supported by mainstream companies. Today, the biggest obstacle is really threefold: It's to convince marketing people that 1. there is a market of Linux users who use the OS for more than just servers, 2. that the market is large enough to support first rate games, and 3. that the publishers can make money supporting Linux, or their developers can gain great enough non-monetary benefits to justify the expense of developing for and supporting multiple platforms.
While talking with marketing representatives from mainstream companies like Red Storm, Hasbro, and EA, each representative was familiar with what Linux was, but did not expect that they would be supporting the OS in the foreseeable future. However, nearly every developer I talked to was interested in supporting Linux. For the next year, it is important that we as a community not forget that while vast market share has been gained in the server world, the desktop is still an enigma for most marketing people. Many of these marketing people simply don't understand why anyone would use Linux on the desktop instead of Windows. The tend to share the often-correct assumption that "the Linux users all have Windows anyhow."
Only a handful of developers at the show actually promoted the fact that they supported Linux. Of these, none that I saw actually demonstrated their games running on it. However, when asked about their experience developing a game for multiple platforms, all said that it was a very positive experience. In fact, the result according to one was significantly improved code. This may be the way games come to Linux; as the standard Windows-based PC platform slowly erodes because of the ever increasing power of consoles, the Macintosh and Linux platforms have recently gained market share in the PC arena. If game developers begin designing their games for multiple platforms then Linux will be a great beneficiary, as will the quality of the code itself.
The availability of development tools and engines supporting Linux is something that I first noticed at GDC in March, and was well in evidence at E3 as well. Many 3D engines now promote the fact that they support Linux; one that stuck out as special was GameBlender, a 3D game development tool and engine from Netherlands-based Not A Number (NaN). The company is building a large community of developers. GameBlender's user-base is also growing rapidly; currently the number of registered users is upwards of 65,000, with more than 250,000 downloads to date. GameBlender incorporates a complete 3D-creation package with game design and game playback, allowing anyone to author and publish interactive 3D worlds and real-time interactive 3D animations. Unique to GameBlender is support for Linux on PPC, Alpha and x86 among other OS's The GameBlender User Conference recently held in Amsterdam illustrates the company's commitment to the community. For the event, NaN sponsored 24 developers from around the world who gathered to work with GameBlender on new projects. This engine, unlike many others available today, is not first-person-shooter specific, nor is it priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. GameBlender is aimed at the end user and games as diverse as mech combat, flight sims and racing games are already in production. A free demo can currently be downloaded from the Blender Web site, and the full version is planned for release at Siggraph 2000 in New Orleans this summer.
Also shown was the much-anticipated X-Box competitor from Indrema. The New York-based company is promising to change the way we think about entertainment on Linux and also to solve of the issues that game developers encounter while trying to support Linux. They plan to provide support for developers as well as a stable target platform for developers. This helps solve the issue of fragmentation that currently exists because there are so many 'standards' without support for things like sound and graphics under Linux. The company appears dedicated to open source and will be supporting OpenAL, Mesa 3D, and OpenStream for video and multimedia control. However the device will not support the standard X Window System. Instead, Indrema has developed Xtrema, a system claimed to be compatible with the X Window system components necessary to support the DRI. Therefore, existing X Window applications will be able to support Xtrema with little or no modification.
No demonstration model or screenshots of the interface were available at the show however, and no specifics available on what developers would be supporting the platform. The product is exciting nonetheless, and I look forward to a Linux-based console. They promise to unveil the first generation product in the July or August but not necessarily at Linux World Expo. The L600 will contain a PIII-600, 64 megs of RAM, a hard drive, and an upgradeable, next-generation GPU developed by nVidia. At launch, Indrema expects to have web browsing, e-mail, mp3 and DVD playback as well as at least one game title included and ready to go out of the box. The output from the device is for HDTV and standard TVs but no monitor out is planned. This is an entertainment console, not a PC. At an expected $299 MSRP, this may be the gift of choice for the geek on your holiday shopping list. I can't think of anyone who doesn't need a mp3, DVD player, and console so they can play their favorite Linux games.
Over the past year Linux has come a great distance, but it has long way to go before first-tier developers and publishers support it. Neverwinter Nights, a tremendous title that was demonstrated at the show, may be the first AAA game to support Linux out of the box. It was shown in a private booth in the back of the basement of the main hall but I am convinced it was just because they wanted to keep the secret to themselves. This title promises to take the world of the Dungeons and Dragons universe and allow gamers to develop their own adventures and share them with other gamers online. While the title is still at least a year from release, this product is amazing and deserves an entire article to itself. The developer, BioWare, is supporting several platforms with the product, including Windows. Not only is the game going to have a significant online potential, but also the developers are promising a well developed single-player game as well. Everything from the beautiful game engine to the attitude of the developers and their track record of having developed such complex titles as Baldur's Gate promotes optimism about it.
Overall, E3 this year was disappointing for Linux gamers. The enthusiasm so evident at Linux Expos, at user groups and among developers has not trickled up to the marketing people. Until it does, it doubtful that Linux will have a steady stream of first-class games like Windows does. Linux as a platform has reached the threshold where any developer who wishes to support Linux can do so fairly easily; now it is a matter of us developing the user base so that marketing people can be convinced to develop more games for us. I don't fault the evil marketing people for not supporting Linux today. In fact I am excited to hear mainstream developers remark to me, 'Wow, a lot of people are asking me about Linux,' as several did when I asked them about their plans for the platform. Over the next year, as more new developers such as Vicarious Visions and Bioware, join Loki in developing for the Linux platform, we need to remember to support them, so that they continue to make that decision for future products.
The future is still bright for Linux gaming, though. Linux is an operating system that has only recently come into the radar screen of mainstream companies. As such, there is a significant deficit of proven marketing statistics and developers with proven track records. To a great extent, it is up to us as Linux gamers to vote with our dollars, pounds, pesos, francs and deutsche marks and buy the Linux games that are available. At the same time, we must strive to increase the sheer number of Linux users in the desktop arena. Until publishers feel there is a market for Linux games then most likely there will continue to be a deficit of high quality Linux game titles.
1. The LINUX desktop market is still fairly small. It may have overtaken SCO, FreeBSD, and maybe even MacOS (I haven't seen the numbers lately), but we are still talking about a platform with no more than about a tenth of the number of Micros~1 machines out there.
2. It is well known that many LINUX users (not all) dual boot their systems, or have a separate Micros~1 box set up for games. I have to count myself among this number... In addition to my various LINUX and MacOS systems, I a tricked-out Micron in the den, with Win95 on it, strictly for use as a game console.
3. Porting games after the development phase is over is usually cheaper than multi-platform development. This may be counter-intuitive, but when you consider that over the time-span of a game's development from concept to release, there are going to be several OS patches and new drivers released. Keeping up with the changes on more than one platform means juggling more balls than most game companies want to do.
4. Most game companies (not all) are small mom-and-pop organizations. They often extend themselves to the limit just to get a release out the door for one platform. The only way they can afford to do the ports is to wait for the profits from the initial release to roll in.
A good example of this is Starship Titanic. You will never meet a bigger Mac zealot than Douglas Adams, but when developing the game it became obvious that a MacOS-first or simultanious release was beyond the resources available to him. Titanic was released as a windows-only game (even though D.A. did not even own a PC to run his own game on!), and was ported to the Mac using money from the sales of the Windows product.
Bottom line: Game developers will care about LINUX if and when they must write for LINUX to be profitable.
For now, the best hope for Tux fans is the development of open-source projects like WorldForge.
Who knows? Maybe some GPL game, designed by some free-beer advocate, might come along and prove to be the killer app that gets all hard-core gamers to put a permanent LINUX partition on their PC's. Until then, get used to sounding like Rodney Dangerfield when the subject of games comes up.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The biggest challenge might be that distributors do know something about Linux: namely, that the most visible aspects of the community seem to be comprised of people who don't want to pay for closed-source software.
This is a potentially serious dilemma. There aren't any open source business models that allow for making money on software whose only value is the software itself--that is, you're not going to be selling subscriptions, service contracts, commercial OEM support, and the like.
Now, you might be saying "that's irrelevant--the games don't have to be open source." Well, theoretically, you're absolutely right. But are you going to devote significant resources to developing for a platform whose proponents are nearly always focused on free software? You may be more interested in the free speech part of it, but if your definition of "free speech" includes "you can't restrict my right to give the software you wrote away," the distinction is irrelevant to an accountant.
I'm sure people will think I'm being facetious or flippant, but I'm not. Right now, showing companies that you can make money doing Linux games means showing companies that Linux users are willing to pay for old-fashioned, closed source commercial software.
As you said, computer games differ from "usual" software. Games are entertainment; they're not mission-critical, they're not really "tools" to do "real work". They're more like movies and music than they are like "usual" software; like movies, many "big title" games are huge endeavours, which take a lot of work and cost a lot of money to get done - and much of that work is not on programming the game logic itself, but on things like sound effects and music, text, artwork, et cetera.
At the same time, a programmer outside the game industry wouldn't gain much from having the source code, specs and APIs to a game - he doesn't lose much from giving away his freedom to freely inspect and modify the code. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that it's competition between game companies in the quest for speed and features which makes it necessary for most of them to keep their source code closed; that's why it was reasonable for iD Software to release the Doom source code, ages after the game's original release.
As Stallman himself said when he came to Rio, copyright remains necessary, at least in some weaker form, for certain kinds of immaterial goods, in order to help ensure the producers' income and thus at least enable them to recover the money they spent on the work. He also pointed out that this kind of copyright should be recognised as a social contract, not as a tacitly accepting the nature of these goods as "intellectual property".
Stallman used movies as an example of immaterial goods which still need to be covered under copyright law, but I think that the same applies to computer games, since they're not "utilitarian" goods (I think that's the term he used; evidently, IANAL), but entertainment goods.
Like it's happening to music right now with Napster/MP3s/etc, things may eventually come to a point where the public no longer finds it reasonable to trade away all their freedom to copy computer games (or full-length movies, for that matter) in order to keep the game industry alive and thus ensure their continued production. When this happens, the social contract implied by copyright law will need to be changed again. Even then, though, the user's freedom to inspect and modify a game's source code will remain unessential enough for most users that "closed source games" will remain a reasonable trade, and thus game companies will remain protected from unfair competition.
In short: I don't feel that proprietary computer games are a problem, even in a platform made up mostly of free software, and even in a world where games are traded freely amongst users on the Internet. That is, as long as the game companies keep in mind what copyright law is really about, and are willing to be reasonable. Luckily, game companies seem to be different from, say, the big music labels and big movie studios which make up the RIAA and the MPAA, respectively, so I think this may actually be feasible.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up what I had to say. Flame away!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
We really need to get a corporate education program going. Somewhere that can help create demos for these shows as well as providing people access to information that they can present to their bosses. Maybe if we could show these companies that you can make money doing Linux games, we'd get more support.
kwsNI
Note: I work for a game company.
The bottom line is that most people don't obsess about operating systems. Windows lets people run Word, Excel, use popular email managers, edutainment software, and lots of games. Right now the Linux desktop market consists mostly of people who *do* obsess about operating systems and people with other agendas (e.g. all software should be free; Bill Gates is a fag). This is not generally not a good target market for games.
The other thing, something that I wish weren't true, is that there's a definite attitude among Linux zealots. I don't mean that in a trolling sorta way, just in a "everybody has noticed this except you" way. The Macintosh market is similar in some ways, though not as extreme. If you don't do a Mac port, you get flamed for liking "Windoze." If you do a Mac port, you get flamed for bringing "peecee" software over to a superior machine. From following Slashdot, I can see that companies showing an interest in Linux development walk a thin line. Metrowerks gets slammed for claiming "RedHat only," though most distributions are the same internally. Borland gets trashed with a headline on Slashdot because someone misinterpreted the license agreement. People get annoyed simply because Borland is *giving away* a full fledged C++ compiler and they aren't including the source. There are twisted rants about how Emacs is better than Word and The Gimp smokes Photoshop, which are just plain uninformed. Nobody wants to get involved in such silliness.