Linux Games Not Selling

Patrick McAllister was one of the folks who wrote to us about a report talking with John Carmack [?] regarding id's sales of Linux games. Apparently, it's been pretty absymal - enough to cover costs, but "they wouldn't make a bean-counter blink". I wonder what Loki's experience has been.

Comments

Err... That would be Carmack's /. post...

[Temporal]

The quote you see was taken from a post by John Carmack to Slashdot a couple of days ago. So, Slashdot is essentially reporting on its own user comments and it doesn't even realize it. :)

I don't know what's up with the Win2000Mag link. Anyone figured that out?

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Simple reasons for games not selling (duh)

[xtal]

This isn't rocket science.. these articles are stupid because they paint linux in a bad light without really looking at the underlying issues, that people like Carmack, Redhat, et al. should be working on instead of useless installers that don't really do anything new.

• USB support. Yeah, it's there, it works OK, but it's a sweet fuggin pain in the ass to get working. In windows; I plug my rio/joystick whatever in, it's detected, the driver prompted or in most cases automatically set up, and then through the magics of DirectX, all games see it. Linux doesn't have anything even CLOSE right now. Although - the underlying USB stuff is slick - the intergration into the desktop (Gnome, etc) isn't there yet.
  
• 3D support. See above. You can "get it working", but it's a sweet pain in the ass. Hopefully XF4.0 will fix this. The support isn't out of the box, like it is for windows. This is a major impediment to most people who just tinker with linux.
  
• Retailers. They don't stock the linux versions, and most of the time, you can just get a free upgrade and get the linux binaries to play the game (Quake).
  
• Windows is everywhere. Like it or not, Windows does a much much better job with games and multimedia right now than linux. TV tuners, video codecs.. you name it. They have linux counterparts, but they all work better and the new stuff always comes out on windows first. As a result of this - most people will dual boot or have windows available for playing games, which is what I do. As a result, the hobby developers don't waste time on the gaming / multimedia aspects of linux, or they have patent and other issues to deal with, and can't do anything. Redhat, ID, or SOMEONE should -fund- yes -fund- some development to get a standardized system like DirectX in place, and act as a standards board so we can get things like video codecs available in linux - even in binary format. A lot of that is patented by companies that aren't ever going to give up those rights, unfortunately.
  

Linux has a long way to come in the multimedia/gaming/video arena, and I don't see anyone offering any real leadership. I'm still pissed that RedHat can't use that billion dollar market cap to grab NVidia and the other 3D manufacturers by the balls and get drivers released. Oh well.

Re:Simple reasons for games not selling (duh)

[AndrewHowe]

I'm a game developer, and I've got a problem with what you're saying.
Why should John Carmack be making Linux better? Sure, he worked on the Matrox driver, because he was "scratching an itch".
But he makes games. He needs to concentrate on what he does best. If members of the Linux community want games to be viable on their platform, then they need to sort it out.
I'm not entirely convinced that Linux is at all suited to games right now. Consider the console vs PC situation. Consoles provide a known environment that's relatively easy to program for. PCs running windows are more variable, but still pretty reasonable. A Win32 binary runs without too much trouble on any Win32 platform.
Linux is pretty scary for a game developer because there are so many configurations out there. Also you have the basic level of contempt that the general Linux user has for closed source products. Sure, one answer would be to go Open Source, but I suspect that few games companies are about to go down that route; Also we effectively work for publishers, and whereas we're happy to work for not much more than the satisfaction of a job well done, you will find that "money talks and bullshit walks" a lot of the time.
I can see a time when Windows and Linux developers will meet somewhere in the middle; I just hope we won't all be carrying weapons when we do...

It breaks even ... that's good news...

[Ami Ganguli]

I wouldn't have expected a Linux game to even break even. Linux is doing amazingly well in the Internet server market, but I didn't think the Linux desktop market really existed yet.

If it's true that the port paid for itself then game manufacturers can now afford to support Linux without losing their shirts. Seeing more games available will encourage users to switch to Linux. Seeing more users will encourage more game producers. Once the positive feedback loop is established things will snowball.

Getting to that break-even point is the hard part. If we've really reached it then this is a significant event.