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Loki Files For Chapter 11 Protection
yamla writes: "Loki is dead!" and points to a Linux Review article which says the gaming company has filed for protection from creditors under bankruptcy laws. Yamla continues: "Read about it here. This is terrible news! I have paid for some of their games and they were always at least as good as the Windows versions. I hope Loki can pull out of bankruptcy and keep going but if not, it will be our loss." There is also a story at LinuxToday (pointed out by reader Beee) which draws from the Linux Review report. Meanwhile, the Loki site appears business-as-usual. Filing for bankruptcy protection is not the same as being "out of business," but it's uncomfortably close.
A few people seem to misunderstand what Loki does... they don't need to sell as many games to be profitable as a normal software company would, because they don't have the same design and development costs. Their job is to port EXISTING games to GNU/Linux, much of the code in these games remains unmodified, Loki likely never even looks at much of it. The primary job of their programmers are to take care of graphics/display, sound, and input (keyboard/mouse), paths/filename work, and cleaning some of the code up to work with gcc and glibc.
None of this takes anywhere near as much time as the initial design and development of the game, thus it also doesn't cost nearly as much.
A significant portion of the work for games is artwork, this also is eliminated from Loki's work, the graphics/artwork/models are already there and done.
I'll buy it off you!
It just occurred to me that they may just be filing Chapter 11 to get people to buy more games from them. Hell, it worked on me, I just bought two games from them.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
When I installed the T2 server for Linux, for example, it had exactly what you're talking about.
Unpacked, ran the install script, it popped up a nice GTK dialog box that walked me through the install.
As for 3D stuff: Yes, DRI currently is a pain for a new user. I suspect that most prepackaged kernels will include agpgart and the various DRM modules, and setup on the X side isn't that hard; I know Debian's deXter does DRI setup automagickally.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
You know, in this country there are single mothers who are selling themselves on the street in order to pay for food to feed their kids. And you're worried about a few out-of-work California video game programmers?
I realize you spend 24 hours a day logged into Slashdot and thus have very little knowledge of the world outside, but please, try to maintain some sense of perspective.
Gee, I guess that copyright idea might be a good thing after all.
Red hat 7.1 seems better, but under RH 5&6 I had to be darned careful what video card I bought, and sound cards were almost as much trouble. I use Linux for 99.9% of my real work, but I simply gave up try to use it for games.
I'm not saying it was impossible, but when I could reboot and easily have sound and decent graphics it simply wasn't worth the trouble to fight to get games working under Linux.
I eventually bought a 2nd PC just for running windows so that I didn't have to reboot my Linux box.
Sean.
The fry's in Fountain Valley and Woodland Hills stocked quite a few of Loki's games. They were slow in getting them though.
Lots of Mac users were strapped for cash after buying stuff at Apple's prices, but only a few resorted to piracy. What's important is that even fewer resorted to buying another machine, and games are demanding enough that they're not that usable in emulation. But for Linux users, dual booting is oh so easy...
Want Linux games? Nuke your Windows partition.
Where can I get Quake 3 for Linux? It's not on the Loki website anymore. :(
+++
NO CARRIER
A game company can not hope to profit from a Linux platform simply because Linux isn't a mainstream desktop OS. It could be, but won't be until all the Linux ditribution companies unify around a single standard distro. (dGL I here you callng.) Stop selling OSes and start selling content!!!!
:T:R:A:N:S:
I believe Loki is really important for the future of Linux, and supporting it means supporting all Linux. It's just that buying game packages might not be the most efficient way to support it. It is also a company, and I would feel quite uneasy making donations to a company. However, buying stock would be a great way to "donate", while still getting at least something back. If not any actual dividend for years if ever, at least a feeling of owning something useful. ;-)
However, Loki's company FAQ page says:
Perhaps Nokia might want to go for rescue, if they're really serious about the MediaTerminal. If Loki goes down, Nokia loses all the best games for the MT. That solution might create some problems though, if Nokia at some point wants Loki to give MT a priority over the general Linux platform. That would be very harmful to everyone, including MT on longer run. Thus, if Loki would get support from Nokia, they should also make sure that they keep their independency.
The world economy is collapsing.
What do you expect? Capitalism servers the stock market. Once 'reality-based' && 'need-based' manufacturing of *stuff* took the backseat to 'brand managment' and 'intellectual property' pyramid scheme.
Im not surprised at all.
Start attending anti-capitalist protests - these morons are gonna strip the planet and leave the rest of us to pick up the pcs.
I will NOT make any statement on who's to blame for this.
just this fact:
I just went to their online store to order something (forget my previous rant, rune looks interesting, as does tribes2).
I also asked a friend on irc if he wanted some, to share shipping costs to germany.
He had NEVER heard of loki, and of the fact that they have a linux port of SoF, which he'd searched the 'net far and wide for months by now...
is that marketing? don't think so...
[L]
No, because they still have to pay the companies that own the games huge licensing fees that wouldn't be covered in this scheme.
woof.
Perhaps its time to change the business model. Maybe they should focus on becoming a service for game manufacturers that ports the games for a fee but doesn't sell them?
Another thought would be to get away from the damn 1st person shooters. I'm sick of them. Its getting old. Perhaps they could get in with a windows gaming company before a game is released (wishful thinking..) and simultaneously release.
Another thought would be to release bare bones versions with a CD only and a PDF of the manual for a lower price. Kohan is bloody expensive for me to buy in Canada (so I'm not going to purchase it from Loki). Maybe they should throw a wad of cash that they don't have into marketing with large chains. Up here Business Depot carries Linux of various flavours.. maybe they could get in there.
What it comes down to is this is/will be a big kick to the crotch of linux gaming. :(
- Jimbob
I think YOU are the one who is confused here. If you have read the GNU license, you will see clauses that are against capitalism. Businesses really have no chance of making a profit under the GNU license.
link: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
example:
The difference is that free software naturally tends to spread around, and there are many ways to get it.
With free software, users don't have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. A high CD-ROM price is not a major obstacle when the software is free.
Since loki is kicking the bucket, why dont they release thier games for free download? =)
Loki has always done a wonderful job in porting games to Linux. While, of course, the actual games had to be proprietary, they made a number of contributions to the Linux community, including the SDK kit.
I don't know how to say this politely, so I will sa it bluntly: The average game player is the ultimate addict of the consumer culture. They want someone else to hand them entertainment on a silver platter. I can see why many gamers do not have the willingness nor patience to learn how to use Linux as a desktop operating system.
Which is a shame, because a lot of those same gamers become the corporate IT department, and end up responding to the word "Linux" with great hostility.
Anyway, enough of my rant. I hope a miracle happens and Loki is able to pull out of this one. I will make sure to purchase every Loki game I can see at Fry's later on this week.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Well, there are several successful (read: still in business) Mac porting houses. They succeed, mostly, by only porting the most popular of games, and do much better when those games don't also use Direct X. Macsoft is one of the most popular, but there are a few others.
As I mention in a post above, I was sorry to see Loki make no attempt to move to the Mac OS X market; I would've thought that once the work of porting to Linux was done, that they could increase their (paying) consumer base by following through with a port to OS X--although there are technical differences, it would still be easier than the original port. And, as I say, there are a few companies that have succeeded porting Mac titles.
--
$tar -xvf
You are looking for the wrong target audience. One of the reasons most people used Linux instead of other OSes is that they don't want to pay and they are usually willing to tweak the stuff by themselves. Linux games are no better than Windows ones because they are ported and Windows comes bundled anyway with most brand-name machines - so why bother buying Linux games, knowing that you'll have more driver headaches in advance? The market share for desktop Linux is still too small. I bet you wouldn't have suggested paypal accounts if Loki were developing games for Mac.
¦ ©® ±
because all those games are owned by other companies, i'm betting loki gets part of the profit while another part of the profit goes to the company that made the game.
Photos.
You're on drugs?
Q3A 4 linux was out over a Year ago... and runs well with all cards which have 3d accel support under linux, either through the drivers that come with q3a, or those for XFree 3.3x, or DRI in XFree4, or suplied by hardware company...
uhh and btw, Q3A was never PORTED by LOKI...
ID developed Q3A under linux 'cause it's more stable that way; there was an interview in a german mag where one of the developers said 'if it crashes under linux, we can be sure OUR code f***ed up; under Win, almost anything including next office's coffee maker could be the reason'
Loki just did the selling of the linux version...
bye
[L]
A reminder for us all to look around in our local HW shop "Are there any Linuxware in this joint" before putting our money there. Recently I discovered that Fry's didn't have Lokiware on their shelves. Result: I'm not gonna put down one more penny in that stinkin mess of a shithole they call a store. And that used to be quite some...
No, absolutely not.
They were told, and told and told.
No more FPS! No more RTS!
Did they listen? Nope.
Who would that be? Apple and Darwin? Tell us damnit! I'm on the edge of my seat.
Do you have anything to back that statement up? If its just your own experience, my own experience (as part of the Linux Gamers League has been that a low of the dual booting gamer folk who would (unforunatety) happily pirate a Windows game *buy* every title from Loki they can, because they know if they don't, Loki wouldn't exist and their favourite platform would die. A ;lot of new Linux users are the former Windows poer users / LAN party types, and want an extremely customizable environment to do their work in and play Tribes 2 and Urban Terror in it. The Windows Warez Weenie community doesn't care much abotu ethics, whereas the Linux community does, and Linuxgamers generally end up being more like your typical young Linux user than your average Windows Pirate gamer type.
Looking over Soldier of Fortune, Quake 3, Descent 3, Myth II, Quake II, Unreal TYournament, Kingpin, and Tribes 2 (all gakmes wghich run on Linux) on my own shelf, compared to System Shock 22 (which runs under some versions of Windows) I'd happily say that I'm generally buying more Linux games than Windows games too.
Rather, I'd say the chicken and egg problem with stores carrying Loki games is a big problem for Loki. People won't buy games till they can get them from a store, stores won't stock games until they know people will buy them. A lot of gamers are below 18 and don't have credit cards. Solution:
1. Buy them from a gaming store that takes money orders (most do)
2. Arrange with your local LUG for monthly purchases of hear from a Linux company to be sold after meeting. My local Lug, Linux Users or Victoria, has 1200 members and get a stack of goods from Everything Linux sold to us at the end of each meeting (the LUG gets a portion of the proceeds).
Hpowever, I'm not giving up on Loki yet and you shouldn't either. next meeting there will be a copy of Rune (a bloody awesome Tombraider style viking adventure game) waiting on the Everything Linux stable for me, and me with $AU90 to pay for it.
Listen! Loki is only $400,000 in debt. That's not that much. "Will someone with deep pockets save Loki?" No. But we can! They may have gone chapter 11 but the web site is still taking sales.
I don't know what their overhead is but let's assume they make $20 on each sale. That means they only need to sell 20,000 games to be back at ground zero. That's a small percentage of the slashdot population! I know many of us are starving college students and trolls but most of us are well-to-do IT people making real money!
Why stick out necks out to save Loki? I'll tell you why. They have not only made games on linux a reality, but they have made the ability to have games on linux a reality. They made SDL one of the best media layers for any platform. They made OpenAL, the only cross architecture 3D sound library. They pushed the XFree and Mesa developers giving them the need and the user base to make OpenGL on Linux stop being "ok" and start to "kick ass". If it were not for Loki, there would be no Maya for Linux, there would be no glx in XFree86, there would be no SDL. If they go we will lose one of the biggest forces pushing the linux desktop's quality. All of you who remember what 3D, 2D and sound were like on Linux 4 years ago - you KNOW how far we have come, and we owe much of it to Loki.
I know money is tight (it's always tight), but we have an opportunity to save one of the coolest Linux companies around. Like games? Buy some right now, while we still can. Don't like games? Make a 'donation' to Loki to say thanks for all their hard work. Poor? Get one of the older 'on sale' games. Company just IPO'ed? Get two of each and give them to your friends. There are SO many of us!! Sure, Linux companies are dropping like flys but none fill the niche that will be left empty once Loki is gone.
>stronger video editing offerings Who the fuck do you think started SDL and SMPEG?
Yeah mod me down for flame, but he's got a good ppoint mr dumbass moderator. Withoutloki SDL and SMPEG wouldnt be arround - which would just be bad. We also wouldnt have that loki book - linux games prorgamming, which will hopfully start some more opensource projects.
Damn those double negatives!
Should read:
Sir, do you really believe that the "loyal" linux advocates who participate in this great forum would not have contributed to the hardship of this or any other sympathetic comercial venture buy simply not buying the products, with or with-out an economic downturn.
You, sir, are a blind, unaware, over-emotional ass.
It's all about the software... Win2k can stay up and IDLE as long as you want it to. Sure, even my Win95 system was able to stay up and running with a protection error(BSOD) for over 3 weeks. I remember I was off on vacation, with my laptop, and a week into the vacation I wasn't able to remotely access data. When I got back to the office, there it was, Windows 95 up and running, as blue as a beaten dog. Sure MS Windows can run for more than a month...but it'll do NOTHING. Linux is awesome!
without prejudice
Honestly, while you get instant advertising having a game available and already be a success under Windows, you also have most people who have already purchased it for Windows and no desire to buy another copy for Linux. How about taking a step back and coming up with an original game? You could develop it for simultaneous release with the Windows/MacOS versions and get the best of all worlds, money-wise, while satisfying your need to produce top-notch games for Linux. Eh, just a thought.
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
Or... thousands of people with shallow pockets could save the company too...
There seems to be only one reason why the chances of attaining a large userbase and a profitable cache of ported games (and other commercial software) seem slim. Well, it's because generally one can't exist without the other. Let's face it, linux isn't usually the first os introduced to the population. And while even i believe a truly accomplished os must be built on stability and performance, the rest of the population chooses their primary os (among other things) based on appearance, ease of use, or they're pretty much forced into using one. Of course loki games do have one quality that most certainly will appeal to the public: they're cheap (but once you go to buy them the cashier talks as if you've done something wrong, "i don't mean to startle you.. but...you DO know this is for linux right?") Yes it's pathetic but for the more than the cult following we ask for, we'd have to become more than the cult that just "talks about the same opensource communism and community nonsense", we'd have to become microsoft(ish). I'm happy with the way things are now.
you're wrong. There *is* an easy to find Warez scene for Loki games. Believe me.
I would say that the # of titles "stolen" are far more than those sold.
Ouch, that's some kind of generalization! It's right up there with "all internet users are perverts." A couple months ago, I bought copies of some Loki games for Linux just to support them -- I haven't even installed the games. I hope to. But mostly I wanted to freely give them cash for their products to encourage them to make more products. I do not think it is reasonable or accurate to paint the Linux community with such a broad brush. Some of us spend extra on open source software just because of the principle involved.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
"Any fool could buy the Windows SKU and "upgrade" it to the Windows one- a situation that explains the story with Doom III and official Linux versions..."
That should read:
"Any fool could buy the Windows SKU and "upgrade" it to the Linux one- a situation that explains the story with Doom III and official Linux versions..."
I need to not post before having my morning caffene IV...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why would you want to keep a company afloat which has no sustainable business model? That just makes no sense. The company is failing - ok, then they either did something wrong in their business or their technology.
:) and sell boxed CD-ROM's at outrageous prices. Added in the price is tech support, which can easily be gotten for free from tech-savvy geeks like myself.
/.? I think it is.
The message this would send to Windows-only game developers is "Ok fellas, here is the absolute maximim market size for Linux games, plus some contrived, inflated amount". This message probably does not say what you want it to.
Besides, even if you could keep them afloat, AND by some miracle they were able to take off and start being self-sufficent, and even start doing well, then isn't this the exact same point at which the OpenSource community would rally against them as a corporate behemoth?
For example, let's see what the definition of RedHat is on everything2:
"Evil company directly responsible for commercializing GNU/Linux and making "Linux" the biggest buzzword in the computer industry. They distribute GNU/Linux (commonly called just plain "Linux", but that's evil too
they have, however, contributed quite a bit of support (financial and otherwise) to some projects, I'll give them that."
Isn't this the prevailing sentiment about RH on
I'm glad the article noted that Chapter 11 does not mean you are going out of business. This is often confused. This merely means you are seeking protection from creditors to buy yourself time to re-organize and create a plan to pay back your debt, and become profitable.
In the tech industry, Chapter 11 frequently does mean the company is about to close its doors for good.
Companies file Chapter 11 in order to buy more time for a last desperate attempt to renegotiate debt or find a buyer or angel investor. If no such relief is forthcoming, the bankruptcy invariably proceeds to liquidation.
The latest example would be Rhythms. They filed Chapter 11, sacked all but a couple hundred employees, waited a week for someone to swoop from the heavens and save them with a few billion dollars, then gave up and sent out the disconnect notices anyway. Rhythms are toast, and so are Loki.
I feel bad for Loki, but there just isn't a large enough market for their products to offset the expense of licensing and porting closed-source software. When Linux approaches, say, Apple's desktop market share, maybe another company can make a go of it.
Game: $75 CDN
Shipping: Approx $10 (give or take)
GST on above: $5.95 (applied at the border and paid to the post office when delivered).
That puts the game at about $90.95 after taxes in canadian dollars.
- Jimbob
Er ... I don't even play games. Probably the majority of Slashdot readers don't play games. Why the hell should we buy them?
I suppose we could have also saved pets.com if every Slashdot reader had bought just one 50-pound sack of dog food.
1) Most linux users in my opinion are too cheap. 2) The bulk of game players don't use linux 3) Again why do linux users use linux .. cause they don't gotta pay for it.
If you wanna succeed in the game markey you gotta sell to the masses. Linux has not, still is not and probably won't be for another 5 years in the masses.
Loki can't survive under those conditions and put out more than a few ports per year. They gotta sell like 300,000 copies of each port not 300 copies if they wanna survive. Either linux users pony up and pay for this stuff or they ain't gonna get games on linux. Plain and simple
Kohan is scheduled to be out 08/15/2001 and can be ordered from the website for about US$50. How much are the games that you normally buy?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Maybe this will help the idiots dual-booting Windows for games realise that Loki isn't there to spend a whole load of money on a loss-making venture.
You have to buy their games to keep them going dammit. I personally don't play games but I have bought many games from them as Christmas & birthday gifts for my brothers and friends. This has had the side effect of making my brothers and friends of theirs switch entirely to Linux, and buy Loki products themselves.
I wonder if Loki put up a donations page like Mandrake, how many people would contribute? Probably not many of the hypocrites who advocate Linux right up to the point where they have to spend money.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
This happens all of the time in the commercial world. The people who do this are called Venture Capitalists.
No data, no cry
Grab a clue. There are plenty of profitable games companies around. There always will be. Just because some can't make a business model work and others are led by idiots you shouldn't conclude that there is no future. Of course, you have to be good.
Preordering should be safe -- if they were filing for Chapter 7 I'd worry, but a Chapter 11 means they've at least got some time left, very likely enough to get their current WIP out the door.
I'm not much of a gamer (and when I do game, ZAngband is usually good 'nuff), but I'm thinking real hard right now 'bout buying some of Loki's stuff.
They probably do first person shooters so much (which actually isn't that much afaik. How many have the put out? Quake3Arena, Unreal:Tournament, Tribes2?) except: 1. They can only port games that companies pay them to port, or they buy the rights to, or however it works. They can't just decide they want to port GameX and do it. There has to be an agreement. 2. They have to try and make sure whatever they port will have a good chance of selling well. Unreal and Quake were already proven brands, and many gamers would probably buy it just for the id Software or Epic Megagames logo on the box (plus the penguin). It would be nice if they could port a great variety of games (and they actually have ported some more offbeat ones such as Railroad Tycoon II and Call to Power 2), but they would have needed a large budget to do it. If they would have had Blizzard and EA Sports games ported I would probably have tried Linux myself by now. Unfortunately it looks like the market and contracts just aren't there (yet?). Linux has apparently made great strides, but as people have pointed out on slashdot it may not be a desktop OS just yet. Being a gaming OS directly ties in with that.
I think there are enough users (in terms of Linux desktop installations) but not enough people who use exclusively non-Windows OSes. Anybody who dual-boots is going to be hard to sell to.
I gave up using Windows entirely (at home) about the time of my last hard drive crash, so I was naturally excited about Loki, and own two of their games. (And will probably buy Kohan if it's still available...) But I'm not a typical game-player--- and I can understand how someone who spends more time would have a Windows partition available and make use of it. Heck, I'm still tempted to buy Black and White and try to play it on my work laptop...
*sigh* I really hope I don't break my promise to give no more of my money to Bill G...
I bought four games and they are great! Loki is going to suffer the same fate of the Amiga with people pirating the games off!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
That's a load of crap. I've purchased every game that Loki has released and they are consistently more stable, faster and better maintained then their Windows counterparts. Loki has even complained on their newsgroups on several occasions that they found bugs that they *couldn't fix* because that bug wasn't going to get fixed on the windows side (they would have broken compatibility with the windows version if they had fixed it).
I won't disagree that Loki might have bit off more than they could chew, but they sure as hell did a damn fine job in porting those games.
Look, you probably don't realize this because you're a Quake addict, but Q3A really sucked. The models were a complete turnoff for me. It looked as though Quake had decended into a god damned comic book. Also, the whole "oooh, fight the dark and evil monster" genre is wearing a bit thin. I'm SICK of playing first person shooters where 95% of the levels are so dark I have to turn the brightness of my monitor all the way up AND adjust the gamma all the way up. What is this sick fucking fascination Carmack has with darkness?
This issue is distinct from that of the performance of the 3D; when I got it to work, 3D in Linux was at least as good as that in Windows. But getting it to work was the issue.
I learned my lesson that way: the Linux box is great for *serving* for multi-player games, but as a client it was too big a pain in the ass. Much easier to just buy the game for my Windows box. It's not Loki's fault - nor anyone else's, really - that this is the case, but it's just the reality of the situation. I know that this isn't everyone's experience, but it has been the experience of friends of mine. The variety of distributions and the spottiness and inconsistancy over hardware support over different libs and kernel versions and X versions is simply too daunting a task for an OS that is already a small minority.
At least on this post, timothy acknowledges that filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy is NOT liquidation, but he qualifies his statement by saying that Ch11 is "dangerously close" to the business failing. Countless times on replies to slashdot articles I've seen people talk about how a company is "dead", "through", "finished" because they go into Chapter 11. This simply isn't the case at all--Chapter 11 gives them extra time for restructuring to pay off their creditors. Yes, it does mean that they're having trouble paying their creditors, but it does NOT in ANY WAY mean that they're liquidating. People should do their homework.
I not only second this motion, but want to add something. The posting on The Linux Review says they owe $430,000. That's more money than I have, but we're not talking about millions here, people. How many games is that, really? If all the Linux users on SlashDot bought one game, I bet that'd make them break even. So I say, go out there and directly help a company which has directly helped the Linux community.
WH0 CARES!1!! XB0X IZ COMIN N NOVBER!!1!1!1!!
</sarcasm>
On a serious note, I like the idea posted about slashdotters chipping in. I'm sure most of us can afford at least the cheapest game they have.
I'm also very aware that the job market in California is very poor right now. Especially for game programmers. And while the job market is down, housing prices haven't fallen that much. Also when companies go under like this, any money left over usually goes to pay off investors, leaving little or no money for the departing employees. With the high cost of living in Silicon Valley there is a very real chance that after a few months of unemployment these programmers (especially the younger ones) will be in financial trouble.
I'm trying to do my part to help these people and to support an industry which I value. Please do not slam me for doing so. Who know's someone at Loki may even be a single mother.
Alright. Let's put the /. affect into action. Each of us order one game from Loki. It is a very simple concept, but it would deepen their pockets all the same.
I never bought a Loki game.
Why?
They didn't port anything I liked, and it would seem to me, the ports they did do, where not mainstream. (Selling many millions of copies.).
They should have immediately concentrated thier capital in cooperating with Blizzard.
Ports of Diablo II, Warcraft III, StarCraft I&II.
Oh, did I say Starcraft II? Sorry for the slip.
:-)
But seriously. Heavy Gear II was a step in the right direction in my opinion, but I would have liked to have seen Mech Warrior 4 and Mech Commander II ported more than Heavy Gear 2.
Most if not all the games they ported do not interest me in the slightest.
One can arue whether or not Microsoft would have cooperated with Loki, but I think they would have given the number of lawsuits to come, and the ones they are going to have to deal with currently, DOJ.
If I was going to do ports, for Linux, the company I would have concentrated on from the start, if they would listen, would be Blizzard.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Even high-quality Windoze-centric shops have gone away - just look at Looking Glass studios for one. Gone! And they didn't do ANY linux. And they had great games, and excellent sales. And they were liquidated just last year.
Your analysis is a bit superficial. I recently spoke to one of the senior people at Looking Glass who specifically told me that the failure of Looking Glass was due to a rocky relationship with Eidos, the publisher on the Thief series and System Shock. While their games sold relatively well, their business relationship assumed that an acquisition would occur at some point, and since this never occurred Looking Glass went under.
Strangely, these days, the home console market is the only place where sophisticated computer games have a fair chance of being profitable. The sales volumes are significantly greater than those sales for Linux... and Windows.
You're substituting hearsay for actual sales numbers. A typical PS2 or Dreamcast title is considered to sell well at around 200K units; sales of over 500K are uncommon. Hit PC titles regularly sell upwards of a million units, with no royalties paid to the platform manufacturer. That's why TRSTS breaks out game sales by PC and then by console; hit PC game sales, at this time anyway, always eclipse sales of hit console games.
The reason why PC games are not very profitable right now is because the retail channel is stuffed with PC games. It's much harder to sell into the retail channel if you're a PC game publisher than it was 2 years ago. I would say that all US game publishers have laid off staff within the past 12 months.
Loki took a risk by developing for an unproven game platform. They took a further risk by trying to sell games into a slower game market; consumers last Christmas bought more lower-priced software and spent less money on A+ games. In other words, more people bought more games at $19.99 and $29.99 and there was less of a market for premium games. So even though the size of the market increased slightly, margins dropped on those games, and developers and publishers took it on the chin. NPD says things are looking up. I hope that's the case. Until then, take a clue from the dot-com plague and try not to develop any games for unproven markets, kids.
Not to mention the game totally blows anyway; it'd be a waste of Loki's talent to bother porting it.
A lot of the problems I have seen is from people who already own the windows version of the game and automatically expect to have the right to own the Linux version. The thing these people don't seem to realize is that Loki just buys the right to port the game to Linux, they pay their employees to port it and work hard to get the game to linux, essentially making a completely different piece of software. How would Loki make any money if they ported the game and then give it away free because you already bought the game from another company for a different OS.
There is no end of posts on Loki's Tribes2 newsgroup of people complaining that they bought the Windows version so they should have the linux version for free just because the software has the same name, looks the same and connects to other Tribes2 servers.
Don't people think that Loki should be paid for their work? Obviously not, which I think plays a major part in their downfall. People that don't understand this won't pay $50 for a game they already own for windows.
Look at one of the things that happens. You buy the windows version for cheaper(more orders, can offer it cheaper), Loki ports it (pays money) offers it for a higher price than the windows version, People are unwilling to buy a game twice(even though the software is essentially different) and Loki doesn't reap anough money to pay it's bills. It's the nature of people and one of the main reason I think is responsible for Loki's downfall.
I for one only bought the Linux version of games, and the people that do that, as you say are few, the others don't want to pay twice.
It's a very sad time to see Loki go, they done a lot and gave a lot back.
This is not the end of Loki yet. Their president issued a statement that they will be continuing operations and putting out new titles, while trying to pay off their debt. I don't know if they'll pull off or not, but best of luck to them.
I started off with pre-ordering Q3 for Linux; I still use it, especially in Win98. Why? The cash, as I saw it, went to Loki; the performance is only decent on Linux. My 64M DDR Radeon, for example, pushes around 50 frames at 800x600x32. In windows, I get around 75 frames at 1024x768x32. Add the drop in framerates during all the action on CTF4, for example, and Win98 seems to take the lead. And, yes, this is used with the "timedemo 1; demo demo127" commands and not "cg_showfps 1" stare at the walls ****.
Secondly, pricing. With the exception of the $10 games at EB World, the Linux games can be more expensive than the Windows counterparts; I still refused to take EB up on their $10 offer. The more I spent, and I hope I am right ;), the more money would go to Loki. I could be wrong, who knows. Anyway, let's look at a sample of the games I personally purchased:
These prices are from Tux Games and the local EB and Gamestop.
Hrm. Ack! Yes, I have purchased all of these games, with the exception of Shogo: MAD, Unreal Tournament and the Rune series, as Linux ports. In short, Linux games can be, almost, twice the cost of their Win98 counterparts. For the economically challenged ( or conscious ), why spend the extra cash on a Linux port when you could get an additional game?
Unfortunately this is not the kind of game I like best. I'd buy something like the Air Hockey game from Broederbund I once used to play on the Mac or Bolo (a kind of super mega break out game) for the Atari. Maybe a flight simulator.
So can you recommend me a Loki game? If it has to be a shooting game which one is the most intelligent or less brutal? I've seen the Solitaire but is it really worth it to buy a Solitaire game?
Wow. I don't think he said anything about "saving" Linux. I also think you're a cunt.
Keep in mind they port existing games, and have a pretty good sized selection of existing games that they're selling. They may still need to sell 200,000 games a year to break even, but that's 200,000 copies across their entire line, not just one title.
I know almost zero about Chapter 11, but I do know it means that a company doesn't necessarily have to pay its debts to all its creditors. Is it possible for Loki to take my money and not send me my game? Unlikely, I'm sure, but is it possible?
I'm sure they can fail to ship me the game if they actually go out of business. If the Ch11 thing doesn't go well, how soon could that happen?
I know Slashdot is a lousy place to ask this sort of legal question, but given the current economic climate in the tech industry, I suspect some people know a fair bit about this sort of thing.
You've gotta give him credit for calling CmdrTaco "our leader" though. LOL
Too bad, they just released the new Demo of Kohan. And it looks nice! Very nice! For more information go here. But, I guess they might pull of a chapter 11. But it wont be the same company after that. Maybe many things will have to go ... Many things as in free things ...
You can essentially forget about it anyway, because it was programmed with Direct3D/DirectX, and would be way more of a bitch to port than would be worth it.
I always liked to look at Loki as the poster child for proprietary Linux software development. I told people who doubted that Linux could have paid software to look at Loki, and how it sold ports of popular games. I was very, very close to getting Call to Power for Linux. Unfortunately, I found out that Call to Power II was already out for Windows, and I just had to get the newer version. I wish I would've gotten the older Linux version, I've heard it's stable and many of the playing features are nicer than the Windows version of CTP I. CTP II has crashed on me a few times and I needed a patch and mod pack to make it worth playing. It's a mistake I don't feel like spending another $30 to correct.
This Kohad game looks very promising though. I probably won't get it right away, but if Loki is around for another 6 months I'd definately consider it for my next game purchase (I never buy FPS, I prefer strategy and RTS, and Kohad looks like a perfect balance between the two).
I wonder how much per game Loki has to pay in royalties, that has to kill the bottom line.
Funny, before Linux I never really felt company loyalty. I'm no fanatic, but I like seeing companies that compete with Microsoft with good products prosper (Red Hat, Mandrake, Progeny, Loki, etc). I'm not even that partial to Linux, I just like *nix better, and I would definately consider using a *BSD for my next play computer or test server.
Oh, and to those that whine about Loki games being released long after the Windows version, look at Tribes 2. It was out 2 weeks or so after the Windows version. Too bad retailers are actually taking a loss to get the foot traffic in their stores to sell the Windows version.
Perhaps the overall Linux desktop audience needs to grow a bit to include people who feel more comfortable plunking down chunks of money for good software. I myself haven't even bought a distribution yet after two years, but I haven't quite found the perfect distro for me yet after trying a few.
In short, if you're looking to kill some time, go buy a Loki game and support a company who's given back a fair share both in free software (the SDK looks cool) and excellent software (I've heard little but rave reviews).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Don't port to linux. Don't port to mac, either.
Write a decent compatibility library, or tweak SDL for your own uses. Port to that. It would be a bit more work to try to cover up all the loose places where the compatibility library doesn't fit that os well, but you'd be able to simulteneously release for linux, mac, mac os x, and linuxppc, and maybe later on put together a SUPER HAPPY FISH BONUS PACK! with playstation2 versions of like four of the games you just ported to linux/mac.
If you're going to bother with the herculean task of porting spaghetti code (which most games are) to a different operating system, take the extra time to work in a sane portability architecture. In doing so you'll probably at least double your possible target audience with not *that* much work.
That being said, you probably could make more money off the mac users. Mac users probably aren't as heavy into gaming, true, but mac users are a captive audience. Unlike (((the majority of!))) linux users, mac users do'nt have the option of booting into windows. Now that bungie is dead, they have only what can be ported or emulated, and because there have been almost no new mac ports to speak of in nearly forever they are mostly starved for decent games and will probably run anything even mediocre that runs on their computers.
What? Bitter because Loki seems to be gone, and dynamix seems to be gone, and i will probably never get that mac os x version of Tribes 2 i've been wanting so badly? Who, me?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Yes. There is a ton of information about various sites that sell unpacked/packed sets of debian cds, of which most of the profit goes to Debian, or other OSS projects.
I was somewhat disturbed to see this today, as I just ordered two games this morning (Railroad Tycoon II and SimCity 3000).
I dunno, I guess that if you're worried about the company, you may as well buy something before they go under.
Whoa... He's not? What the fuck am I doing here, then?
*grumble* A man just wants something to believe in *grumble*
Dancin Santa
First, you can play Linux Quake 3 without buying another copy of Quake 3. ID provides Linux binaries free to download (or at least used too), all you need is the PC CD/data files.
Yes, this is true, but none of that notierity goes to Loki.
I suppose we could have also saved pets.com if every Slashdot reader had bought just one 50-pound sack of dog food
I bought a 50 pound bag of dog food, and I tell you what it sucked ass. I mean it didn't even taste like real dog, more like fake filler substance and beef. I had to make meatloaf out of it and smoother it ketchup to just get it down.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Most of these target people probably... did not play games as a primary occupation.
<p>
Naturally... Everyone knows that professional video game players only use the Windows platform.
I suspect there's a greater number of Windows pirated versions of any Loki port than Linux versions. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone that uses Linux is a 31337 h4x0r. ;) I personaly own upwards of six Loki games (actual count questionable after this many beers. ;)) - and the point of that statement is NOT to come across as some elitist view as 'well, i bought it, you didn't, nyah!', but to realize the point that many linux users buy the windows version because the windows version is simply available before any announcement of the linux verson (much less a release). Were there at least a notification of an upcoming port for Linux at/around the Windows release date (yes, I realize this might have happened already for at least some of the games - I don't pay that close of attention), I suspect many Linux users would postpone their purchase until the Linux port is ready (well, at least the 31337 h4x0r's. :)) However, gamers tend to have little patience when there's a perfectly available version out there and no knowledge of alternate versions. Luckily (I suppose), I don't have Windows partition (there's the aforemention elitist statement. ;)) so I'm forced to wait for the (hopefully continuing) Loki ports. Alas, I went through this same scenario with BeOS. :(
I agree. I just spent $90 credit even though I'm a starving college student because I want to see gaming succeed on Linux. They're not dead yet. Go spend your money and maybe they can make it through this economic downturn.
But I don't need a game. My Linux distro came with Shisen Sho and it's really more addicting than Solitaire.
Tell me again. Why do I need to support a company that doesn't provide anything I need?
I dunno about you guys but I reckon the idea of an open standard easy-to-code library that is the audio equivalent of OpenGL is such a sexy idea that I don't want to see it die.
Loki have put out weekly builds from their CVS tree every week since OpenAL began. Does anyone know if sourceforge and OSS people are going to take it over?
I know that Creative are also major partners in that, but ya gotta admit... Creative Labs being in charge of an Open Audio Library project is like leaving Microsoft in charge of an Open Data Base Connectivity library... oh wait. ];-)
-OzJuggler
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
Keeping
It would definitely be interesting to hear what companies ex-Loki engineers went to.
They file for chapter 11 and you Slashdot them.
:p
Think of the bandwidth bills they have to add on to their debts...
Do you like German cars?
Hear hear!!!!!! ^^ I wouldn't necessarily say that $200,000 automatically buys a cheesy game, but this would be a step in the right direction.
Fix the economics first, then the game market will do much better.
I agree about the console market too. Console games are less expensive to build and more reliable, therefore more profitable.
The game industry needs to stop this "one more $10 million engine and we'll finally be like Hollywood" business model and start concentrating on gameplay.
Just my $0.02- You have quoted someone else without his permission (shame shame)
- I hardly think that an employee who left seven months ago is in a position to judge who is still employed.
I have it on solid authority (namely, personal experience) that the count is significantly higher (5 technical, 2 artistic, and at least 4 administrative).Shame on you for kicking a puppy only trying to serve the community while it's down.
I would think the Linux game marke is about the same size as the Mac game market at this point, yet there are several very successful companies out there porting Windows games to the Mac. They have the same problem of releasing the games much later, usually six months to a year after the Windows version ships, although I would guess that the warez problem is much lower on the Mac side. Is this why Loki failed yet Westlake et al succeed?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I like Linux very much as internet gateway, server, and game server its also useable as desktop platform, but i never wanted to play games on linux...
well, i'd be more than happy to go all the way to the store to buy them. except none of the stores will sell linux game titles. i really think that retail stores' refusal to stock linux games has much more to do with loki's failure than piracy. but i suppose that piracy hurts a lot more when you don't have the sales to make up for it.
I've never bought a Loki game nor do I use "linux on the desktop" (my Linux boxes are headless). But, I would be happy to give $5-10 to Loki to help them out.
Loki didn't do their marketing, Linux is for servers, real computers don't have video cards. They should of been writing a great volume manager, high availability software, a better load balancer.
Ouch, that's some kind of generalization!
No it's not. I'd say it's a pretty accurate assessment of the open source community as a whole.
To start, name one popular piece of software for Linux that can't be had for free. Okay, now from that list name one whose market is to individuals rather than to businesses.
And before you spout off about how open source alternatives are always better, please explain why Applixware, Wordperfect, Abiword, and Staroffice were totally ignored for the last 5 years when there was no viable open source word processing application. Then explain why when SUN relicensed Staroffice under the GPL (i.e. made it free for download without restrictions) it suddenly shot up in popularity.
Frankly, one major reason why people use Linux is the fact that it is free. If some company sold a technically superior UNIX-like operating system for $100, source code included, and licensed it with the same terms as the GPL with the exception that any core changes to the OS could only be distributed as patches (which forces one to always pay for a copy of the OS), would it have anywhere near the popularity as Linux today?
One company is doing that right now. Try to guess which one.
If you look on this page, you will find a list of Debian vendors, some of whom allow you to donate directly to debian when you purchase. (Or something like that - i've never done it). This is similar to buying a boxed set; you buy a CD from one of Debian's recommended vendors, and they will donate to Debian for you.
I'm surprised usually the accountant is the last employee.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
Speak of the Devil, just caught this on Linuxgames:
Loki Software President Scott Draeker sent in the following regarding the bankruptcy report:
People should not confuse this with a Chapter 7 liquidation, where you close the doors and sell off the assets. That is not what we have done.
We filed a Chapter 11 reorganization. This will allows us to deal with our creditors fairly and equitably and at the same time continue to operate the company. We are still shipping products and porting new games and expect to be doing so for a long, long time.
Send me the money for a new video card, or entire computer (currently PII/400 w/ATI Xpert 4MB video) and I will buy their games.
That isn't true at all. There are many individuals, companies, manufacturers, schools, and foriegn governments to whom the low cost nature of free software is a huge incentive.
I use Linux mostly for idealogical and technical reasons, but it certainly doesn't hurt that it saves me a few bucks I can spend on hardware.
Given the cost for W2K server + client licenses, the cost makes a huge difference for companies running webserver farms. In many cases not as important as the technical issues, but important none the less.
TiVo could have probably used WinCE, VxWorks, or QNX on the TiVo. But I am sure the $0/unit software licensing costs of Linux makes a huge difference to their bottom line.
Schools, especially outside the US, are deploying Linux left and right, because especially on low cost hardware, the cost of windows is a big chunk of system price.
So, yes, when we speak of free software, we mean freedom, but many people use Linux because that includes the freedom to copy it without paying licensing fees.
I'm buying more games. I already have seven of them, which I enjoy very much.
If they are accepting pre-orders for Kohan, I'm plunking my CC# in and doing it. I'll have to buy their book now, which I wasn't planning on doing. I may even buy another copy of CivCTP, because I lost the CD I bought first.
I'll do this this despite living in Canada, where I'll end up paying a shitload of taxes across the border.
Somebody mentioned PayPal, which I was also thinking about when I read the headline. If that happens, I will donate and I'm sure others would, too. Isn't the whole point of the community helping each other out?
If they immediately die out and I don't receive anything, no big deal. I'm trying anyway. I don't have Windows and I'm not going to start using it just to play games. If I can't get games for Linux, I won't get games at all...
Yes, it would have been nicer for me to ask permission before quoting.
No, but I assumed that an ex-employee still had ties to people with more updated information. Even if the quote was wrong, it wasn't claimed to be factual information. At the least, it gave a close picture to the reality at Loki, and with your reply, brought out the (assumed) facts.
Not to make a bad joke, but I wonder if there should be a spinoff website called fuckedlinuxcompany.com
By the time the Linux version comes, the Windows version is on the $10-20 "Deals" rack.
:p).
:)
I have both Windows and Linux installed, as most gamers do (GAMERS, people, people who play *games* a *lot*). Linux doesn't have the titles that Windows does, so Windows is necessary for games (Frankly, that's all I use it for
The thing is.. When the Linux versions finally come out, they're at the same *original* price, if not more, than the Windows versions were.
As a result, people either buy the Windows version when it first comes out, or when it's on the deals rack, rather than waiting and paying the original price months later to get the Linux version.
If companies want a Linux gaming market, they either need to have simultaneous release dates, or cut back on the price of the Linux ports.
One or the other, though, there's no way a gaming company would be able to have simultaneous release dates *and* lower prices on the games (Nor should they! But I refuse to pay the full price for something months old.).. Windows-only people would get annoyed.
One comment that seems to have come up a couple of times is that many linux users use their machines for work (whether it's "recreational work" [e.g. kernel hacking] or otherwise) rather than play, and that they have a playstation/playstation2/N64/etc. console for pure games...
I wonder if Loki's in a position to concentrate on working with Sony to build a PS2 emulator for Linux...that would instantly make a fair number of top-notch games available for Linux. I know I'd actually buy such a beast if it was available for me...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Think about it. Dynamix close their doors. Tribes2 is doing ok for Loki, but now without Dynamix about to pay guaranteed money for patches and upgrades, they don't have the money to stay with their current financial setup.
I'm guessing this is what some of the companies that Loki have ported games for were obligated to, assuming here that the patches were GAME fixes and not PORTING fixes. I'd expect porting issues to be the responsibility of Loki, and game design changes to be the company that wrote it in the first places problem. I may be wrong, but it seems rather likely to me.
Plus, there is no maintenance money for Quake3Arena now that ID Software have taken over the support for the Linux port themselves (happened a while back). This probably makes things a little hairy, and now that Dynamix have gone down the tubes, it sounds like they have just been pushed over the edge, and need a little security, hence the Chapter 11 reorganisation.
Well, I'm off to buy more Linux games from Loki, because while they are still around, I'm still going to support them. And this time I'm buying them direct from Loki. None of these places in the middle that absorb some of the cost themselves. Every little bit helps.
PS: Those that suggested cutting down on manuals and stuff, and putting PDF manuals on disk, well thats what they did with Tribes2. You get the CD in a plastic DVD-style case (the semi-decent ones), an 8 page (4 x A5 sheets of paper with double sided black and white print, stapled down the center) guide that tells you your Tribes2 Serial Number, the minimum system requirements, a quick "Getting started" install guide, how to register online with the Tribes2 system, tech support info, customer service info, a quick guide to the in-game voice menu keys, and a keyboard layout map of all the keys in the game. Everything else is in the PDF. I've yet to even open that PDF file though. *grin*
I hate to piss anyone off here but game performance on Linux really sucks. I waited for almost a year and a half just to have decent opengl support on my system. The libraries on all the different Linux systems are incompatible eg. Glibc 2.1, 2.2 2.3. I believe only nvidia has true opengl support but its a pain to setup and you need to purchase an expensive Linux distro that costs as much as the game to upgrade if you can't get xf864 with dri support going.
In other words Linux is a nightmare in dealing with gaming and constant compatible game libraries.
I myself refuse to pay twice for quake3. I bought the windows version when it came out expecting a downloadable Linux version but ID wants me to pay for the product again for Linux. ??
I prefer to buy the windows versions because they are faster and they work right out of the box. Until Xp comes out and ms force's me to rent my os, I will not change. The game developers know this so they only develop the games for windows. They assume myself and cmd-Taco will buy the windows versions and they are right. Sorry guys but Linux needs to get its act together in decent graphics and library support. I am quite surprised it took years just to get graphics to work in kernel via a framebuffer. Many Unix legalists who think graphics cards are for only printing text in a terminal need to wake up and realize that framebuffers are ok. How is kernel level graphics different then kernel level I/O in terms of stability?
Anyway this is the real problem why Loki is losing money. The vast majority of Linux users also use windows.
http://saveie6.com/
But wait! There is almost no profit in the PC game market PERIOD. It's is very difficult to make a profit in this business. Game development is an expensive proposition - especially when it comes to the advanced graphics and gameplay that we all expect today.
Umm, where have you been? It seems the OGDC and the Game Developer magazine would have to disagree with you on this case. Quoted from Game Developer Magazine, August 2001 Issue: Games have become big business. Everyone wants games.
Now I wouldn't say that making games doesnt take alot of money, but to point out the fact that there is no profit in PC game development... your dead wrong.
-- M
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
And I never ended up installing it. Perhaps I can sell my copy on eBay for beaucoup bucks now? =)
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
This is really terrible, i don't know what else can be said.
Surly someone with deep pockets can save this company!
The way things have been going, it's not surprising. Linux gaming never seemed to really catch on. Retailers can't make a profit from them. 3-D is getting better but still sucks royally compared to Windows. Hurray for closed hardware specs...
The linux game market is simply not big enough to support a company like this and when you put in the fact that they don't get the same release dates as windows versions and the high warez rate of there games...I am surprised they lasted this long.
Loki made great ports.
Its sad to see them go out for doing such good work, damn this economic crunch!
I myself own 10 Loki games and I've enjoyed each one.
They said awhile ago that they had lots of capital secured for a situation like this, and they weren't going away soon
I just hope they stick around and pull out of this bankruptcy, I'm really looking forward to Deus Ex. I put off playing the Windows version with expectations of the Linux port.
I bought several Loki games, myself. It was always a pleasure gaming under a real operating system (real shell, could handle multiple CPUs, virtual desktop, great stability, etc.).
I suppose it's implied by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The universe moves to a state of greater entropy, and the computer universe moves to a state of sucking more.
San Diego Padres, 100 Park Blvd, San Diego CA 92101
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by
Why will answer the cry of the critic who will shout, look at what they have done to thier own kind, how can we depend on the linux community to provide qualtiy software.
Loki gave us what we wanted...and look what happened to them.
Guttermouth is a really good band.
This is absolutely terrible. What a great company Loki is/was. Looks like I can forget about a Max Payne port... Damn, I'm so pissed.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Frankly, most people would rather have stuff free than have to pay for it. This tendency is of course magnified on Slashdot, because of the Linux Community's ideals of free software. Now does it come as a surprise to any people that a company whose only busienss was selling games to a community that would rather pirate them, than have to go all the way out to the store to buy them, would quickly go out of business? It does not to me. As much was I would like to support a company like this, i would not spend the extra money to buy quake3 for linux when I already own the PC version.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
8.10.01 Great news! Today, we proudly present the playable demo of Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns! Expect Kohan to be available very soon from the Loki Store.
Perhaps I'm not the first to say it but didn't we all see this coming. Linux while tops in the server market is the clear minority in the Desktop market and hence also in the Games market. The volume just isn't there for a game company to support itself. I have to imagine that it was extremely hard to break even.
In all of Loki's games that I've played, people complained because they wanted to switch from the Windows version to the Linux one. They did not understand that Loki had to pay for rights to port the game, and actually do work to port it. Loki's only real target buyers were people who already used Linux as their primary OS. Most of these target people probably:
1. Were not used to shelling out money for games.
2. Did not play games as a primary occupation.
Before a company like Loki can succeed, I think that there needs to be:
1. A larger Linux userbase.
2. Simultaneous releases across platforms.
3. An easier way for Windows users to switch to the Linux version, than trying to return their Windows version of the game and get their money back.
Before a year or two ago *nix was the only systems doing high performence 3D and SGI still pretty much rules the roost in the 3D workstation market. All of this was done with X, so it really isn't the fact that X cannot support 3D it is the fact that XFree86 has had little to no support from the card manufactures themsleves. That is the ONLY reason that windows has such great device support. I think that we all have forgotten that linux and most of it's programs were done on a volunteer basis w/o the healp of any corperate entity, and while it is much more difficult I can say that I like the feeling that it is MY OS and I (people like me) can controll its direction. So please it is fine if you have a different philosophy than I, but that is not reason to bash the significant strides that the people have made.
I don't think the problem is that Linux users a cheap I think the problem is they are impatient. I mean cmon we have a community of people who foam at the mouth for the latest and greatest version of one of the most boring parts of the OS (the kernel). It's likely these people if they play games carry over the same tendency. I might be a win users because of games primarily but when I see something about Loki releasing a game all I ever think is "god that game is oldddddd". If it's worth my money guess what it's already sitting on my shelf and I played it tons when it came out for windows. Ontop of that I really feel most of the games Loki ports were only subpar in the first place. The fact of this buisness is that games don't make real money unless they hit that big top 10 list. Who else but Id and Blizzard are consistently finacially successfull? Don't go spouting off a designer of your favorite deer hunter clone either because they're prolly owned by someone like Interplay or Sierra and those companies arn't doing well either. Loki's current buisness model is doomed untill they start getting the big games like starcraft and diablo II that won't have hardware problems and will be easy to port. Loki's biggest obstacle is simple though. They have no way to show the potential in a linux market because gamers expect their sole copy to run on mac linux and windows all at the same time and they expect them to come OUT at the same time. Without large sales of boxes that say "linux only" on the front companies won't believe they can increase sales by including linux ports and ya know they might be right. Most people can hardly avoid getting a copy of windows in the first place so if they want to play games made for windows only they can. Its a sucky possibility but maybe we should just deal with it and try and find some solutions instead of crying foul for people wanting to put food on the table. Jartan
Someone calculate how long it would take for Loki to be ok if 1 in 20 slashdotters were to go to a Loki donation page and credit card them $20.
Wrong.
a REAL linux user is in it for the reason and the fact that we dont have a nice noose tied around our balls by billy.
we pay, and we pay happily for something we want.
you might be of the Warez d00d mindset but most of us are not.
I think you're misinterpreting them. Everyone WANTS games. But there is little profit in sophisticated games for non-console machines (read "Windows").
Ask a PC game developer how business is doing. Go ahead. Few and far between will say "good".
The software Loki chose to port was mainly determined by the license fees that Loki had to pay. Yes, they had to actually pay for porting a game! That is what many people don't realize. So there are naturally not so many top games affordable for a small company like Loki.
And concerning Blizzard... They have not been very positive towards Linux until now. But that might actually change, since Sam Lantiga -- former Lead Programmer of Loki and the inventor of SDL -- has switched sides and is now working for Blizzard. Maybe the guys at Blizzard will now develop their products also for Linux? Who knows? Time will tell.
Meanwhile go out and order your share of Loki games at tuxgames.com, suse.de or whatever reseller you like.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Loki isn't going anywhere for the time being. Buy more games if you like Loki so much!
Apparently, according to Briareos (#loki on IRC:OPN), there are only 3 employees left at Loki:
2 interns and a contract programmer.
Even though they only filed for bankruptcy protection, I can't see Loki Games coming back to life. Most of their skilled ex-programmers have moved on to other companies.
Loki has always been a great concept, but I feel they were doomed from the get-go.
Take the whole Quake III fiasco, for example. Quake III for Windoze appeared, and the Linux version didn't appear until later. This sort of set the stage for things to come...I know as a gamer that I was NOT willing to wait for the Linux port of anything.
Further, and this is partly ID Software's fault, most people bought the Windows CD and downloaded the Linux client. Absolutely no money from this goes towards the Linux port, at all. And yet, ID Software whined about how "bad" the linux sales were...well folks, if you had RELEASED the linux version in tandem with Windows, maybe you would have made some money.
And then there was Unreal Tournament...although GreenMarine did an admirable job attempting to port that monster to Linux, the final release was crummy and substandard compared to the Windows version. Loki had to pick this up and maintain it as the OpenUT project crumbled.
Finally, there are the technical reasons. OpenGL for Linux is NOT STABLE. The DRI-GLX stuff is terrible...have they even come up with a 1.0 release yet? On my G400, DRI-GLX leaks memory like a HOLE IN THE HEAD...after only 5 minutes of UT gameplay, my memory usage will skyrocket up to 300megs. It takes forever to shut it down because the hard drive is thrashing madly in swap! The only "stable" GLX for Linux is the old Utah-GLX for XFree 3.X...perhaps John Carmack's presence on that team helped, who knows.
I won't even get into the effort it takes just to get DRI-GLX up and running...most gamers aren't going to put up with that.
In short, I'm sad to see this happen to Lokisoft...but I'm not surprised at all. The cards were stacked against them from the start.
I kicked Loki's ass at his own quake 3 port at llarian's excessive server (now a counterstrike server). it was a shameful match, but he was cool.
This is not entirely true, especially with UT. Daniel did tons of work on the UT codebase, especially the renderer. Joe rewrote a new audio subsystem, etc. Daniel's renderer work percolated back into the Win32 realm, you'll remember. It was very good, and it's no surprise he works at Epic now.
I personally fixed a few bugs in the Quake3 code-base, and I know Bernd did much more.
m.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
I'm glad the article noted that Chapter 11 does not mean you are going out of business. This is often confused. This merely means you are seeking protection from creditors to buy yourself time to re-organize and create a plan to pay back your debt, and become profitable.
In todays market, it's very hard to find funding for a tech business. We can all thank Dotcoms for that with their VC Funded Businesses based on Phantom products.
I personally think Loki will be able to pull through this. I just recently downloaded a bundle of Loki demos for Linux, very impressive. They all worked rather well and with little effort, the installer was a shell script with I think binaries encoded, haven't looked but it loaded a GTK based installer that automatically asked which demos I wanted, and downloaded them accordingly. I was very impressed. I hope their upper management has as much talent as their programmers. They'll surely pull through if this is the case. I think what would be a potentially successful model would be to create a Linux gaming "environment". Basically an environment that superceeds your normal distributions environment. Libraries, Programs, what ever required, then build all the games accordingly. This would help with a lot of cross-distribution incompatibilties and help promote gaming in Linux. Unfortunately Linux was not designed for gaming, and Linux does not own a large share of the desktop market (the market that plays the most games), so they face a very large challenge..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
As I've seen other people point out, just under $500,000 isn't too bad. I am a proud owner of Quake 3 and Tribes 2, and for those who haven't tried them - they are VERY impressive. And they carry that famed Linux stability advantage over their Windows versions.
Loki has brought us SDL and OpenAL. They have brought us MANY improvements to XFree86 & video card drivers. And Loki is the fun face of Linux.
So what is everyone waiting for? It's quite obvious that no-one is going to bail Loki out except for US. So go and buy a game. Get your friends to buy a game.
Know anyone with a pirated Loki title? Do what I do (no, not dob them in). Pressure them. Pressure yourself. Pay for those games. Keep it going...
If Loki goes down, can you imagine people's reaction to any more Linux games? Yeah. Pretty likely, huh?
The Linux community prides itself on the COMMUNITY aspect, and that means helping out others; both for the sake of the other, and for the sake of the ALL.
Buy some games please.
Thankyou.
no, it's not, but it might explain why they are circling the drain...
Come on, SumDeusExMachina, surely an experienced troll such as yourself can come up with a better moderator-defense than the hackneyed "While some people may accuse me of being a troll" bullshit. Put some pride into your work, man!
Hey people, how about everyone who can and who has ever played a Loki game without paying for it, go and buy one off their website? That's what I am doing. I think it will be worth it. Maybe this Slashdot post can generate a couple of tens of thousands of dollars for them, and they'll stay alive or at least afloat for a couple of more titles. just my 2 cents
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
Yes, and his BIOS came pre-loaded on his motherboard. Linux zealots practice what they preach when it's convenient and glamorous to do so. But I'm sure there's one fool out there writing his own BIOS and blowing his own ROMs.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Hmm...perhaps clearing out the inventory here might help for all you cheapskates out there.
1) Go to the upper left search box and enter 'linux'.
2) Buy each of the Loki games. Myth 2, Heretic 2, Decent 3, Terminus, Sim City 3000, Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune, RailRoad Tycoon 2, Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, and Heroes of Might and Magic III for for a lousy $9.99 per game!
3) Now click on this link and be nice to the friend of the guy who told you how to get all these cheap games.
The libraries they wrote to port the games have been open source since day one. You know, little things like SDL and OpenAL. Yea, loki wrote them. And it'd be tough for them to release the source code to games when *they don't own the source.*
Does anyone on slashdot actually know what the hell is going on anymore?
Youre missing the point
The linux evangelists want everyone in the world to do what they want and support only them - they can't share and dont care what other people want, they talk about choice as long as its Linux you choose and heaven forbid you dont choose it then you must be a microsoft stooge or a sheep, therefore everyone needs to support their beliefs in what a system should be and if they dont they are wrong -- thats why companies are going broke as you can please all of the people some of the time but it seems you cant please any of the rabid linux people any of the time (what i call the lunatic fringe)
Anyway how can you write software and drivers when kernals and source code and everything else changes at the whim of other people
I don't know what you're talking about in respect to quake 3. I play quake 3 extensively (think 3 hours a day or more) and have 0 problems with it. I get a few less frames then Windows 9x players with the same hardware as me, but equal to Win 2000 players (p3 500, 256ram, geforce2 mx 64). And you can hardly blame quake3 being slow on loki since it was the video drivers sucking.
... the windows version has been patched to get speeds closer to linux in recent patches).
Simcity 3000 has been significantly less buggy for me then under windows. Course, I couldn't play it for more than an hour or so on windows before it crashed either. So YMMV.
Tribes 2 has been faster on Linux since day one (look back in just about any tribes forum
Descent 3 I played, but never got into so I couldn't speak for it. SOF was fantastic on Linux. HG2 sucked on every platform it was released. Myth2, HOMM3, and RR2 have all been a excellent.
You are right.
...
Windows is much better for playing games.
"Also, consider that our leader, CmdrTaco, "
I hope you are kidding here
I can't see that I blame IBM for being careful. Loki's situation certainly argues that Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows is far away.
On the other hand, Loki's situation might really have nothing to do with Linux as a desktop OS and more with bad management at Loki. Not to be too Darwinian, but it may be counterproductive to "support" Loki at this point. Sometimes it's more merciful to let a sick company die.
It doesn't look like they are publically traded, but at their point they could probably be had for next to nothing. Probably that $500,000 would to the trick. Of course, that could just be the tip of the iceberg of their outstanding obligations. So any /.ers who cashed in before the collapse, now it is time to give back to the community and buy that mother of a company!
But back to the facts...
$500,000!!! They are filing bankruptcy over chickenfeed!!!
the good stuff is at www.camilleart.com
evanchik.net
Does anyone actually know the way that Loki actually makes its money. I wonder why Loki owes money to Activision? I would have thought that the company with the game gets a company like Loki to create the port of there game, then gives a cut to Loki if a profit is made, or a cut per unit sold? Do they actually pay to purchase the rights to port the game? That seems very strange. Does anyone have any insight on this? This does truly suck.
I own Q3 Arena (the tin box) and Heroes of Might and Magic III. I played through Heroes of Might and Magic III, it played really well, installed first time no problems, and was entertaining. I never played it under windows, but the quality of it under Linux meant I had no need to get it under Windows. I hope they can pull out of this, and maybe come up with a better business model.
bbh
Sorry guys, my fault. Just after I set up my 486 Linux box as "loki", I heard about this company. Three days ago, I finally decommissioned loki, with blue, my new Athlon box, taking over.
Can you get voodoo doll PCs?
ac.uk
"I'd be willing to contribute to a severance fund for the employees." Riiiighhht! Why don't you put your fucking crack pipe down, and wake up and smell reality. I've known for years slashdot is chock-full of die-hard computer nerds and whatnot, but this, oh my, is just too extreme. If one of your fellow dirty gnu hippies hasn't got laid in two decades, are you going to suck his cock next? Eat shit, you loser.
Get a fucking clue, jackass.
I can't comment on that (NDA), except to say that I'm 99% confident that under better economic circumstances, we would have obliterated the competition.
Finding God in a Dog
Start attending anti-capitalist protests - these morons are gonna strip the planet and leave the rest of us to pick up the pcs.
Yup, I'm sure the anti-capitalist morons *are* going to do that.
Seriously -- do you have a better proposal for efficient resource allocation, or do you just prefer to bitch about whatever system is in place?
I mean that. If "brand management" isn't profitable in the long run (I'm ignoring IP -- it's a government construct, and so throws a monkey wrench into free-market ideals) then those companies which put too much stock in it will fail -- which is anything but the end of the world. If these companies are profitable, then that means they're producing a product which 3rd parties are willingly agreeing to trade for cash -- so "stuff" (or at least things that those doing the buying find to be of value) is still coming out.
God I wish there were similar laws protecting users of dual overclocked Celerons.
Creating a paypal donations system is just absurd. If I was a developer at Loki and read that suggestion I think my feelings would be hurt. I would be flat out pissed if you believed in me but would rather spend $5 donation than support my work. Especially since things like this have been done in the past as a joke, ie send Lars money for his songs you ripped off Napster.
'Same speed C but faster'
Yes folks admit it .....Linux is dead. It was a original idea but the grave has been dug and the dirt is being filled....
There was the fun and games revolving around Civilization:Call To Power. Electronics Boutique would only stock 1 copy and when it sold, they'd have to order another at that point- no matter what the demand for it was. CompUSA and Best Buy were supposed to stock the SKU- guess what, it was a no-show.
The same story went for Quake 3- which sold some 2000 units officially (Any fool could buy the Windows SKU and "upgrade" it to the Windows one- a situation that explains the story with Doom III and official Linux versions...).
The resellers aren't going to stock things they don't see a demand for. Since they don't stock much of anything other than Windows versions, they don't see a demand for Linux titles, whether or not there is one, because they don't get people in asking for the stuff.
Since you've got this ugly vicious circle thing going on with titles versus the sales end of the channel, you're not going to get it in any other fasion other than secured downloads and mail/shipping.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
95%* of windows non-games are warez. The rest are budled with your compuer.
/do/ use linux
When was the last time you saw someone actualy buying a copy of office 2000 professional for home use?
So thats not it. I'm not going to spend my precious time rattleing off the usual reasons people
I want to play commercial games. I don hae windows. Hence I must buy loki games - simple as that.
There have been many new game ports for Mac in the last while. Sure, nowhere near as many as for the PC, but that's not entirely surprising given the relative sizes of the markets.
Also, remember that C code, while portable, will not magically always run on the Mac with SDL even if will run on PCs with SDL. Endian bugs abound, and while they are not difficult to fix, recompiling code on the Mac is (almost) never just a matter of running the compilation.
http://www.themeparks.ie
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
There are not enough users of non-Microsoft operating systems to make profitable a company dedicated only to porting high-profile games to them.
Uh, what about MacPlay? Or were you forgetting about non-Linux non-Microsoft OSs? I think the problem is the demographics of the user base, not the size.
It would be nice. 3d has come a long way. My q3 numbers are just slightly under the windows numbers. The problem is not that enough linux users are playing games, it's in the fact that most don't buy the linux version of the game. Stores don't like selling the linux version either. It takes up more space for the same game that can be bought as windows version and then just have the binaries downloaded.
I don't buy the linux version if I already have the windows.
I hope they finish deus ex. I have been waiting for that one.
Let's see. Everybody who feels guilty buys 3 games. That means Loki might make a little extra dough to stay around for a little longer. But what's the difference? As harsh as it may seem, Loki is a business and as such they have to make money. The chance of Joe grabbing a Linux copy of Quake 3 (except by mistake) is pretty slim. Some Quake nerds I know do like Linux but are far more proficient in tuning Windows to the way they like it.
So how long would Loki last anyway? They have proprietary code that they port with no chance of Open Sourcing. They have to make money or die. They have to make you and I WANT their products. Without demand any business fails. There are so many companies out there with completely awesome ideas and great products. Especially in the consumer market we see a lot more tension than ever before. Take netaddress.com for instance. For the longest time (YEARS!) they provided a free e-mail service to whomever wanted it. When they suddenly realise that they aren't making money they start to charge for it. What do people do? They sure as hell don't start coughing up dough for it. They run over to hotmail.com and get signed up with Microsoft. It makes me think of "bought" friends. As long as you have cash, people love you. When you're out, you're no longer any good to them. While the context is not applicable to the Loki situation, they do try to cater to a consumer market. And a very condensed one at that. There are tons of Linux users out there and most of them are using it because it is a cost effective alternative. These users live in countries where Cable Modems and Pentium 4's don't fall off of trees. Most of these people don't have the fattest 3D accellerators and CPUs available. I imagine that the average Linux box is a Pentium II something with a fairely limited amount of RAM. Not only does Loki cater to Linux geeks, but the ones with the neat Linux machines. I can't imagine that this market is that great.
I am not going to buy any copies of games that I'll never play. I have a pretty decent machine which could handle it all, but I have no interest to play games. Loki's cause is great, but if they can't make money, why should I feel bad?
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
But why would they want to? People with pockets deep enough to save this company almost certainly have indoor plumbing. And people with indoor plumbing already have a toilet they can stuff their money down if they want a similar investment value.
I was just kidding.
I have no reason to doubt your technicall skills.
- Jimbob
Sounds like a golden shower on a bungie cord.
Bungie wrote Myth 2. Loki ported Myth 2. See, it's on topic damn it.
Scott Draeker (President of Loki) sent a comment to linuxgames.com which said:
People should not confuse this with a Chapter 7 liquidation, where you close the doors and sell off the assets. That is not what we have done.
We filed a Chapter 11 reorganization. This will allows us to deal with our creditors fairly and equitably and at the same time continue to operate the company. We are still shipping products and porting new games and expect to be doing so for a long, long time.
Well I guess the Power and Light industry appreciated the one fool, Thomas Edison, for experimenting on making a better light bulb - blowing up bulbs and frying other components.
Thats called innovation, without it we as humans might as well crawl back into our caves and wither away.
t's a shame. I really appreciated Loki's efforts.
No, you did not. You are unfortunately one of the people who leech off the hard work of others, and expect everything for free.
If you truly appreciate Loki, and truly wish them to succeed in bringing gaming to Linux here and now, then you would have bought a game or two from them.
Leeches take and take, and give nothing back. Please, don't even talk with us about "Linux gaming", b/c you're not even a part of it.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
In the past I too have bought prebuilt systems and within 2 minutes of powering up began reinstalling the OS to my liking. But the majority of computer users in the world are not like us. The majority falls into two groups. One buys the more-awful-than-Dell $499 E-Machines at Best Buy and does nothing but install games, surf the internet and spend way too much time in the AOL dwarf tossing chat room. The other (usually made up of the same people) schlep their way to work everyday where they use a way-behind-the-bleeding-edge workstation covered in pictures of pets and spilt cola. These are the groups that Dell was after with their prebuilt Linux boxes that sold like Yugos.
What it all boils down to is support from us. When they finally replace your Commodore PC 10 (now there's a reference) at work, tell them to buy you a Linux workstation. And when you get it, load up Netscape 6.1, Star Office 5.2 and all the other good Linux apps, most of which you actually paid for. When the rest of the unenlightened masses see that Linux ain't so bad, point them to the nearest retailer and wave the green flag. Simply vote for choice and change with your wallet.
I'll be great if the community does manage to help Loki out!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Leftist? If slashdot is any indication, the open source community is as right-wing as they come.
Unfortunately, people had gotten so used to getting Linux ports of windows games for free, after all the Quakes, and UT, and very few people look to buy Linux versions first.
Idsoftware and Dave Taylor started, (if not gave a big boost to) commercial gaming in Linux, so this unfortunate, unintentional side-effect is just another kick in the crotch for everyone involved.
Having spent 3 enjoyable hours playing Loki's conversion of Heretic 2 last night, I'm hoping that the announce of Loki's demise is untrue and that they go from strength to strength. Linux being linux though, others will step in and the movement into the games industry simply won't stop. I'm confident of this. Linux has seen many false starts and stumbling blocks along its path to desktop acceptance and with the help of the linux community always find a way round each problem. I'll be playing Heretic2 again tonight, great conversion of a great game as far as I'm concerned and we'll look forward to playing more of the same!
I believe Loki has a policy of not porting to commercial O/Ses. So I doubt they would've. -NeoWolf
Plot: The heartwarming story small group of colorful, eccentric young programmers who take on a media sector dominated by a highy successful, overshadowing, looming, darkly controlling business conglomerate. They work hard and produce quality products but slowly go into bankruptcy due to the machinations of the competition and just as the owners are about to close up shop they're saved by a combination of a Deus Ex Machina software innovation, a sentimental old banker who grew up in the video arcades of yesteryear and hordes of loyal followers who come out of the woodwork and give them the best quarter of sales ever recorded. Walt may have liked it but I don't think CapCities/ABC/Disney would touch it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Of course, the pundits will say that there is no profit in the Linux game market, and therefore the Chapter 11.
But wait! There is almost no profit in the PC game market PERIOD. It's is very difficult to make a profit in this business. Game development is an expensive proposition - especially when it comes to the advanced graphics and gameplay that we all expect today.
Even high-quality Windoze-centric shops have gone away - just look at Looking Glass studios for one. Gone! And they didn't do ANY linux. And they had great games, and excellent sales. And they were liquidated just last year.
The fact is that computer games like "Who wants to be a millionaire" sell bigger than all the rest, and they're cheap-as-dirt to create. Why spend $5 million for game development, when for $200,000 you can create a cheesey game that has 10x the number of sales???
Strangely, these days, the home console market is the only place where sophisticated computer games have a fair chance of being profitable. The sales volumes are significantly greater than those sales for Linux... and Windows.
It's easy. The Linux community doesn't expect to pay for software. You can't build a profitable business on something you have to give away for free.
Focussing on the games market, there are some additional issues. There are fewer Linux users than Windows users by at least an order of magnitude, so the market is smaller. On average, Linux users are more technical than Windows users. Their idea of relaxing in front of the PC might be to *write* the game, not play it. Linux users have the ability to boot their PC into Windows if they want to play a game (not really any different from using a console). This is what I do, whatever else you say about Windows, the variety and quality of games is infinitely better than Linux.
All of the above makes the Linux games market miniscule which means that at the same unit price it's harder to cover your dev costs.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Loki Is A Just A Mirror... (Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14, @01:38AM EDT
Here's the question - Is Loki dying because NOBODY ACTUALLY USES LINUX? Lots of people are buying games - yeah, even you just bought a game - for windows, though, because you're too stupid to get it set up in Linux, which isn't hard if you can read... Which Operating System are YOU reading this with RIGHT NOW? Yeah, that's what I thought. You intellectual peasant. You're weak and stupid. You brain is starved for oxygen. You WANT to be smart enough to master Linux and become a strong, independent somebody, but you're not. You're a retard. But retarded people are smarter than you, and that's with their genetic defects holding them back. What's holding YOU back? Oh, I know! The fact that you're a COMPLETE LOSER is holding you back!
I guess it's human nature to tend towards stupidity.
This is the most valuable lesson Slashdot has taught me. That, and that Slashdot readers tend towards hypocrisy as well as stupidity. You talk about Linux constantly, you debate freedom issues, but in the end, you don't care if you're free or not. You HAVE the choice right now. And you're not smart enough to take the step into freedom. The half of you who are forced to use Windows for browsing due to their low IQ and complete lack of discipline (browsing is a pretty straightforward feat in Linux, by the way, idiot) are probably too dumb to even use BeOS.
What a bunch of lazy-assed pimple faced masturbation-addicted pr0n fiends. You all suck. Yes, that's you, windows boy. Today is the last day of the rest of your 'free' life. Get ready to enjoy the biggest sodomization treat Bill Gates ever planted in your ass, because you're bending over for him right now, you windows loving idiot, and you don't even know it.
Oh man, for an AC, you know what you're talking about. At least I'm using Opera, but yeah, it's still on Windows. I am too lazy to boot into RedHat, I am a hypocrite, and I am about to be sodomized again by Microsoft.
I'm making a New Year's Resolution right now.
It's about time to get serious and make some changes once and for all. You're completely right.
(But who the hell modded THAT to Funny? It's not very damn funny, it's sad because he's so right. It's not like using KDE, Konqueror, etc. is any harder than using Windows. We're just too used to Windows to change, even to something better.)
... Even high-quality Windoze-centric shops have gone away ...
However Windows has much more experimentation, the Linux/Mac ports are typically already proven winners. If anything will sell it will be such titles.
Loki isn't on fuckedcompany.com's front page yet. Let's slashdot their submission queue!
The shareholder is always right.
I hope a miracle happens and Loki is able to pull out of this one. I will make sure to purchase every Loki game I can see at Fry's later on this week.
Why not just go to http://www.lokigames.com and order from them directly? They will probably make more from an order from the website than they do going through a retailer. Demos or movies of the games are available if you want to try out a game first.
If you are a happy customer and want them to say in business, buy something from their website! I did.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Wow, that practically sums up all our points against RH, evil company behemoth. Let's rally against Loki. Kick them in the nads while they're lying down!
;*)
Since you're reading this, it means you're also having this opinion. Wether you like it or not!
(Frankly, I couldn't care less about either RH or Loki going down in flames or rising to the sky.)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Loki didn't port QIII if I remember correctly. ID did it themselves.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I have personally only bought 2 games from loki. I bought quake 3 and railroad tycoon2 (one of the very first they did). In that time, I have probably bought 10 times that number of windows games.
The catch 22 is that until all games come out for linux, and at the same time as windows, most people will keep dual booting. But until enough people run linux, (and buy games), but don't run windows, game companies won't have incentive to develop for linux, except as an afterthought.
Since I have a windows partition, I usually get games I see on the shelves that look cool, or ones I have heard about from a friend. When I see a /. story about loki, I go to their site, and usually see a new game they have done, but I already own it for windows.
I wish Loki the best. And I wish I could say something like " From now on, I am going to buy games from loki, if only to support gaming on Linux. " But in truth, I know that I will continue to buy the cool new games as soon as they come out, and unfortunately, that usually means I won't be buying from Loki.
Gaming on Linux has always suffered--much like gaming on Macs--from lack of support. Few companies--if any--support Linux out of the box; most big-title Linux games are ports from the Windows version that are contracted out to firms like Loki. As a result, these games come out days, weeks, or months after their Windows counterparts. In the mean time, the Windows version is establishing a huge user base, and by the time the Linux version is published, the numbers it pulls in are miniscule relative to the numbers pulled by the Windows version.
Linux users have always been presented with a choice: a) Keep a small partition with Windows installed just to run these games, or b) wait until the Linux version of the game is released, sometimes months afterward. If the game is in any way endorsed, published, or supported by Microsoft, however, you can forget ever seeing it on Linux (AoE, Motocross Madness, Asheron's Call, etc). Oh, and if it relies on Direct3D for its acceleration, count on it taking a LOT longer to port.
The reason Linux gaming will never break mainstream is the same reason the Mac has not been a viable game platform for years: Developers simply do not have the time / desire to build a game that must cater to an additional, less-prolific OS. They have enough to worry about, what with hardware compatibility issues and all without multiplying the complications by two, or three.
In truth, it is this principle that makes me worry for the future of the Windows PC; the X-Box really does stand poised to cause a mountain of problems for Windows-using PC gamers. Here is a $300 box that can run new games beautifully, has the potential to create a HUGE installed base literally overnight, and is very easy to develop for. No more worrying about hardware compatibility, renderer variants, etc. Just one big happy solid system to develop for, and that's it.
Regardless of speculations on a possible distant future (and that's all my X-Box fears are), Windows provides publishers with the largest installed base to cater toward; the general population uses Windows, and most games are geared toward the general population to begin with. When Joe Sixpack goes out to buy a computer game he is--more often than not--picking up software for his HP or Dell or Compaq or Gateway desktop; he probably doesn't even know that the software over in that "Linux" section won't run on his computer.
At this point in time, Windows gaming is the way to go. The games people want to play are only going to be available on Windows, with few exceptions. Loki made a valiant effort, but it will take a lot more than just one or twenty companies to make Linux gaming work. It will take the cooperation of the entire industry, and that's something we aren't likely to see until Linux has a 50% home-user market share.
[Disclaimer: I am slightly biased, since I'm a Windows user. I use Windows 2000 because it is (contrary to popular belief) stable, it runs 3DS Max 4, Photoshop (Free Dmitry, but let me do my job!), and all of other games and apps.]
~Forager.
student of animation and the fine arts
I read slashdot alot,,, Yet this is the first time that I have posted becasue this is the only time I have seem a subject that I have really cared about..
Loki are broke,, I have never heard of a company to pull themselves back from a CH11. You are deluded if you can think that you can save them by buying stock that has already taken its capital. In retail your remainders kill you
Gaming is dead, It was killed in a stampede of big business greed, endless benchmarks, generic gameplay and warez. Can anyone name a game better then doom | starcraft | civilization
However, the real reasion gaming is dead is because ten years ago two guys could write a simple game in a few months and hope to sell a few million copies. Now you need a whole team of people giving up years in development time too sell the same amount of units. With average budgets getting close to film it is clear that;Too much needs to be done for too few rewards
I will buy every loki game that I can get my hands on knowing full well that the company cannot be saved. After all loki provided hope that maybe, just maybe gaming could return to what it was.
After loki are gone, or brought out (same difference), I will simply stop buying games period, no fscking windows | xbox | ps2 | gamecube. Time to start collecting DVD's.
ps, Hope remaines in emulation and unoffical ports for games on linux, Ill give you that.
I discovered that after I grew up.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
No, iD ported Quake3 (watch the credits at the end where it credits Zoid with the port), but Loki distributed it, and (for a while) supported it. iD took over the maintenence again a few weeks ago.
HAHAHA! This has made my fucking day. Sweet!
Like I care. *roll eyes* Who has time to play games? Oh... don't answer.
I downloaded quake3 because it sucked so bad. the whole thing is nothing but a brightly colored funhouse. the weapons have no feel or response and no detail whatsoever. just compare a few screenshots from unreal tournament and you'll get the idea.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Because Linux is not up to the task of being a gaming OS.
There are very few high-performance video drivers for linux, and the ones that do exist (nVidia)
are terribly picky about configuration.
I'm not going to spend days working on getting 3D working under X,
when I can reboot into wintendo and be playing in 5 minutes.
X itself is a PITA, mostly because it's being pushed to to things (like high-speed graphics)
that it was just never intended to do.
Loki made great software, but unfortunately, the OS support just isn't there.
I bought a copy of Q3A/linux and was never able to get it working because the nVidia drivers were
(and prolly still are, but I gave up long ago) crap.
Luckily, I was able to use the Q3 data files under win tho, so I didn't waste any money -
however, I have not bought (or even considered buying) any linux games since.
It's just too much of a hassle to deal with X and nVidia and all the associated crap.
I'm not going to recompile, downgrade, or otherwise mangle my kernel and/or system just to play a goddamn game of Quake, when I have wintendo a re-boot away.
The problem does not lie in Loki's games, but in the platform they're designed to run on.
In short, linux sucks for gaming (or any high-speed 3D task).
C-X C-S
could you introduce me to some of those single mothers selling themselves on the street for food? All I seem to be able to find are nigger crack hos giving $5 blow jobs.
What is more viable than a simple operating system that is free, stable, fast, and competitive? I bet chickens to chicks that you are the reason why Microsoft Windows is Soooooo fast and Soooooo stable! The question is not what Windows can do, but what can Linux do for you. You have the chance of owning your own operating system and you'ld rather choose a buggy, virus-prone, unstable alternative. What does that say other than you have buttered toast for brains? IBM is supporting Linux and I think it would be an excellent step for IBM to bail-out Loki and make a stable move into being the distributer and developer of LINUX-based entertainment. They have nothing to lose. Loki is up for sale at CLEARANCE PRICE! WooHoo I'm interested in IBM now!
without prejudice
I think it is important to address the questions you ask in as honest a manner as possible.
... (pause) ... from time to time.
The linux community has rallied behind causes we felt were worth supporting in the past, however cannot remember any instance in which the community has rallied behind a commercial venture before.
Nor can I, and I think the reason is simple: the Linux community has not and probably will not rally behind commercial organizations. It's generally counter to the open-source, share-information culture inherent in the Linux community.
Anyone interested in setting up a Paypal account for the purpose of helping out Loki?
Maybe, but not me, and not a lot of Linux enthusiasts. I prefer to apply my time and financial resources toward a cause that better suits my needs in the end, and gaming is not it.
Today, my strongest Linux interests are: stronger office suite offerings, stronger video editing offerings and Sorenson codec cloning/grafting/hacking -- whatever to get the damn support working under Linux.
I believe such endeavours are more beneficial to the Linux community at large, and if I'm wrong, at least such endeavours better fulfill my needs of Linux, which is the whole point.
Contribute where it matters to you most, worry about your own self interests, others will do the same, and if we share our results, we all win in big ways.
Maybe games fill that role for more Linux enthusiasts than I think. I have been known to make mistakes
Would you be willing to donate a few bucks to help keep Loki afloat?
I think you may be largely underestimating the problems that Loki faces. Maybe some donations will pull them out of their current financial crisis, but there's no indication that they would come up with a long term strategy that works both for the Linux community and fiscally.
If a company cannot work at a financial level, the battle is already lost, it's just a matter of time. Nobody wants to sink money into a black hole, even if it feels like a good cause. If you don't think it will make a difference, then what's the point?
Anyone with me?
I'm sorry, but I think anyone who follows this proposition on its face is asking to waste money. I think it only wise to "chip into" projects that can demonstrate (or at least illustrate) an endgame that makes sense - namely: a company that can sustain itself and provide value to the Linux community.
I like Loki. I like its games. I like the quality of its work. I like its contributions to the open source community. It did everything right, and I haven't bought a game. I probably would never have. It's cold. It's hard. It's probably flamebait. It's the truth.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Maybe one day someone else will try to do the same thing but I honestly can't see what Loki could've done to prevent their fate. They had a strong team and did the best they could with the very heterogenous platform that Linux is. Is there really no future for Linux gaming?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Just a quick note: when a company files bankruptcy under Chapter 11, it does not mean, necessarily, that the company is dead. The bankruptcy laws create a structure that both protects ailing companies from their creditors and permits creditors to get something back on the debts that company owes them. The end result of a Chapter 11 proceeding is that all creditors claims are settled. Often companies will continue to exist in some form after Chapter 11 proceedings are concluded. Also, many companies continue to operate throughout the Chapter 11 proceedings, which can take years. While it's not good for Loki that they had to file Chapter 11, it does not necessarily mean that Loki is totally done.
Now this sounds like a really good idea!
So why is it only Caldera is participating? Why not RedHat and Mandrake?
Is it just RMS getting in the way of progress?
Wasn't the Windows version only $40?
Indeed.
Is it just me, or were the games back in the 80's so much cooler? Early NES and PC were the best. I remember playing Kings Quest, LSL, Shadowgate, etc. for hours upon hours. _Tons_ of great (sometimes cheesy.. which made them even better) games. Just seems things were way more exciting. Games like Half-life (with the interaction) would have been considered the norm. IMO, I liked Half-life, but the interaction is only slightly better than the adventure games of days past (and the story was definately nothing new). Maybe I'm just getting too old to appreciate games today (I believe Duke3D was the last game I truely enjoyed).
Dijkstra Considered Dead
You'll find that as you grow up, you will no longer believe that.
Let's just for a moment look at the costs for Joe Average when he's looking to buy a computer system for gaming. He'll have to be on perpetual upgrade if he wants to get the latest, greatest games. That is not an issue with the console market. Look at the PS1. It's been on the market for five years, and people are STILL making new games for it that do really well.
Since there is some orthodoxy within the PC gaming industry that you must require a PC no less than 12 months old or so, then you will have plenty of people not buying games since their computer does everything else fine. I mean, a K6 233 will still do close to anything except perhaps W2k (a feature, folks. a feature!) and - gaming.
So, until the gaming industry wises up and puts more focus on gameplay, we're not gonna see that much more profits.
Stop the brainwash
venture capatalists invest money in companies that will sell a product to make moeny - clearly Loki is not viable at this and the reason is that piracy is rife and there are so few people out there who will pay for games to play on linux (this being because the people who play games do it on their home machine and they want a simple setup) therefore the company has a non viable business plan
Can someone (who actually knows) comment on whether the Loki on-line store will continue to fulfill orders? Given that Kohan is supposed to become available for ordering on the 15th, it'd be a darn shame if they canned their ordering system before they were able to collect the fruits of this labor... or even worse, if they collected the $$ but never got around to shipping the product.
I'm not completely convinced that the 3D on Linux is lacklustre. My own machine is a passable duron 800 , bits n pieces and a geforce 2mx. To be honest, the linux mesa drivers rock hard. I've gotten much better performance out of Q3 on linux then on Windows. Other milage may vary. There *WAS* problems with the sound driver, so the point may not be moot.
Anyway.. In other news, as soon as the GLScene components for Delphi are finally finished on Kylix , windows dies. I'll unleash my half-arsedness on the linux world in completion.
Have fear... bad code worries are truly founded! Who needs BSP for 3D when Fast computers run my nutty little maze demo's on brute force alone.(erm).
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really when you think about it, 400k of debt isn't all that bad - in constrast to the millions of dollars that the .bombs incurred. Quite a few companies have filed for chapter 11 and got out of it just fine. Far too often we equate chapter 11 with the .bombs who went a-lookin for a buyer the moment that stuff started to go sour before the executive staff bailed. This is not how Loki operated - Loki wasn't public, and the business plan overall wasn't terrible. However chapter 11 does equate an admission that there was a fundamental flaw in your business plan. From there you can either fold, or fix. I think that Loki may look into the way that they sell and distribute their products. For instance, the retail market simply isn't ready for Linux based gaming at the moment. I don't mind it as a secondary outlet - however it probably should not have been the primary focus of the business model. (just for instance) If Loki was to take that all back in-house the profit margin would go up even if they would sell the games for less (less overhead). I do hope that Loki makes a press release, stating what the problems are and how they intend to correct them. If they do that, we as customers and open source / Linux enthusiasts need to overlook the technical details and assist them. Personally I own 11 games from Loki - and I love every last one of them. They do a great job.
Here's to hoping...
I believe one of the main problems where because of the difficulty in making a game work under Linux. I'm a big Linux user and had so much trouble getting DRI working properly. The reason I never bought a Loki game was because I didn't feel I could trust DRI. Don't get me wrong I really respect what they do and I'm sure it will be as robust as Windows one day but for now, it's simply to complicated to get it running.
We needed to have out of the box support. i.e. RedHat 7.1 with full OpenGL support no matter the card or at least an easy download for specific driver. And be able to play any of the Loki games withouth too much problems.
I'm not going to buy something just to encourage a company. I'm sorry. It's to bad they're in trouble, but I will only buy something if I really need it.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Why not start a campaign, launched here from Slashdot to help revive Loki.
If only a quarter of the members of slashdot each bought ONLY ONE product from Loki, it could pump much needed funds into their caufers, and at the same time we all get at least one cool game out of the deal (wether or not we actually play video games, I'm sure we can find something entertaining to do with it).
And what will it cost us? $30-$50 bucks a person? Big deal! So we'll spend a little bit of the money we all saved on not paying the Micro$haft tax. And in the long run we all save money, because Loki is a shining example in the Linux word of what a company can do.
Let's not let them go the way of Easil just because the Linux market is still too young to support them. It's companies like Loki that will make or break Linux when it comes of age on the desktop (not long now, we hope and pray).
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Damn, I suppose this means I have to get back to work now.
Does this mean no more 18 hour straight gaming periods? Large LAN fests at my place? And getting behind in other stuff cause i'm too busy playing the latest and greatest from loki.
I have a server named in honour of loki. I pray they last longer than it does.
Though i do hear they make games for windows too, though somehow solitaire and mine sweeper dont have the same appeal to me.
what you don't know is that there are only around ten people who ever post to slashdot; we switch ids frequently and draw straws for who has to go 'anonymous coward.'
I have it running better under Linux than I had under windows, just doing the above.
I never thought I'd reply to a AC or troll like this, but thanks for giving me a good kick in the nuts. I needed that. I mean, sure I used linux on my firewall box, but am I really USING it? when I realized that the very machine I was using IS on the same web browser as my grandma, it really hit home. I'm really going to take that extra duron machine I have and put it to good use. Thanks for the insight, whoever you are.
-Moose
This is the attitude in the Linux community that will never see it live up to its full potenetial. If you actually understood what is meant by free in this context, you'd realize that people still need to make money to survive, or they'll move on to doing something that pays them. Unfortunately, many people want the free-as-in-beer side of the community and don't care about the real idealogy behind this whole thing. I don't mind paying for software that I know I will use and appreciate. Not only does that money go to help out the wonderful software writer(s) that main this great app I can use, but it also lets the software to continue being written. This is especially true for games because, being strictly entertainment, there isn't a great *need* just to make your own in your spare time, as you might with some utility software that you use (which is how most of the Linux software gets written). Obviously it doesn't matter how many companies "fail" in Linux, because there is already this wonderful community that doesn't care what happens in the corporate world, and they'll continue using and developing Linux. But on the other hand, don't get upset that you'll be either 1) booting into another operating system to play that supercool game, or 2) waiting another 5-10 years for someone to make a decent clone of it in their spare time. Contrary to the popular belief in the "I'm in high school and won't pay for anything that's Linux because it's supposed to be free" crowd, the people writing that Linux app you love so much need to pay their bills too, and if you don't help them with your dollars, the software will never have the kind of quality-to-time ratio that it could.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
The only thing I really want is a free replacement for Maple and Mathematica. For now I can get them at student pricing which isn't too bad, but once I graduate I may not be able to afford Mathematica. I don't really need a math program yet, but I'm studying to be a mathematician so I will probably have to use one eventually.
Anyway, I try to support Linux companies when I can. I have limited resources so I can't support them all. However, the "success" of Linux does not matter to me. I don't care about taking over the world or anything like that. However, I still try to support companies that make, maintain, package, or whatever software that I like.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Do you honestly think they care about Linux. If they did they would have ported it themselves...
I've already bought 6 games for Linux, 5 of which are loki ports. More than that, I've bought every title I own through Microcenter. (My local Electronics Boutique doesn't carry linux games.) Microcenter annoys me by putting boxes and boxes of the latest Windows at one end of the 'Linux' aisle (no doubt a paid placement issue, trying to 'recapture' free-os users), however, the fact that they -have- a Linux aisle and that it contains more than just distributions (Corel Office, both windows emulators, the borland products, and of course the games. Also BeOS and BeOS apps, BSD stuff, etc, get put in that aisle) is good enough to keep me shopping there for my games.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
amen. I could really go for a Mathematica replacement. FYI, Octave, an OS clone of Matlab, is available, and apparently its pretty good. But its not mathematica. Also, R, a Free version is S-plus, is now probably more popular than its predecessor. It does a lot of math, but is really a statistics package. However, it has the lisp-like (functional/interpretive) environment that Mathematica has. The similarities are so great that it probably wouldn't be too difficult to write an Mathematica interpreter that translates into Splus/R.
But.... wasn't this topic about games?
Oh, you mean those places that would let you die unless you abandon your own beliefs for the sake of their god construct?
Mac users have been able to support a few different game porting companies. Loki should shift it's focus to Mac porting, with Linux porting as a secondary priority. Maybe this would keep them profitable enough to support Linux porting efforts... This is really sad, though. I bought several of their games from EB when the prices were lowered to $10, and found them all to be top notch ports.
Why in hell is everyone and every company against Microsoft?! Who cares if only MSN appears on the desktop? It's Microsoft's OS, so why should they have to include stuff from other companies? If AOL and friends want their junk on people's desktop, why don't they write their own OS?! Microsoft worked for a damn long time on their's, no shit little half-assed newcomers can't beat them!
That's odd, I played Quake and QuakeWorld for a long time under Linux and it worked just fine. Though, that was back before everyone had to have fancy 3D accelerator cards to play their games. Quake ran nice and smooth on my Linux box with a Matrox Millenium.
and they have an linux version in the works
That's the problem isnt it. Its always windows first. If the game is really popular and makes the publisher rich, they wont need to bother with that linux version at all.
Ive taken to shunning windows games completely. I dont want to run windows at home, so I dont look at windows games. I've still not seen Black & White, and I refuse to look at Max Payne. Id rather not be tempted.
When my windows friends are raving about their latest game, I say "Fancy a game of Urban Terror, or BZFlag ?" That seems to work.
Don't confuse growing pains with utter failure, people. Loki isn't down for the count just yet!
That's the other thing I've been trying to get people to understand; the fact that Loki has filed Chapter 11 doesn't mean Linux has failed, or even that Loki has failed.
It just means that Loki's management is realistic enough to know they've got a debt problem, and optimistic enough to think they can fix it with a little breathing room to get the creditors off their neck. Or, to be more in keeping with what an economist might say, it means they recognize that Loki Entertainment Software, Inc. is worth more as a company than as a collection of assets.
They were ahead of their time and I salute them.
Now if only most, erm, all distros made setting up geforce-ish cards a snap (and sound!) and game companies would give Loki a fair deal on doing the ports instead of fucking them over until the port isn't worth it, we, the users/players, would be sitting pretty.
But the world isn't fair to some, erm most. Full speed ahead! I wish you luck, Loki.
Say what? You mean I haven't seen these games appear in the past few months?
According to Apple's gaming site, these are games due to ship in the coming months:
Sure, Mac gaming isn't as lively as Windows gaming, but it's note the wasteland you made it out to be, either...
Jay (=
Yes! Yes! Please show support for this wonderful company!
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
In another time and place they would have made it.
If linux was a bit closer to critical mass
If tech investors were not brain damaged by the let's give stuff for free dotcommers
If people would pay for games instead of pirating them
If retailers stocked linux games
If penguins could fly...
Leftist idealists with no firm grounding in real-world economics have no legitimate reason to run a company... just look at VA!
Why even bother with a paypal account? Just go to their site and buy something! Businesses need increased sales, not charity. The only message that the Windows-only game developers understand is the number of boxes shipped. Have all their games? Fine. Buy a game or their book and then give it away to new users at installfests or LUG meetings.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
(And the only Windows release they did was a programmer's personal hobby, which was the new OpenGL renderer for UT, released as a Windows DLL and folded into the Linux UT release.)
First, large Linux distros, like SuSE, where including good demo versions of one of Loki's titles with each release. This is how I got acquainted with Civilization: Call to Power (CTP) and Railroad Tycoon II (RT2). For one thing, having the demo game pre-installed with the OS, made getting over that hump of just getting the thing out of the box and installing it that much easier, and the game much more accessible. Based on playing around with the demo CTP and RT2, I went out and found them on the shelf at my local retailer, and purchased them. Eventually, they ended up on my teen-age daughter's machine (I put together a dual-boot system for her, which she has had a lot of fun with), since I don't seem to have the time for much of any game-playing these days.
At some point, though, these demo titles disappeared from the SuSE distros. I don't recall any explanation forthcoming from SuSE, but it probably had to do with deciding what was the best commercial titles to place on their ever-increasing media (7 CD or 1 DVD, and counting 8-), vs. whatever deal those various commercial outfits were willing to cut to let SuSE carry the title.
In any event, placing demo titles on Linux distro CD's doesn't really play to the key audience that Loki needs to break into: the impulse buyer that is roaming the aisles at CompUSA, bored with whatever current game they've been playing, and willing to grab something they've heard about or has an attractive box, to try to regain the thrill of the 'next best game'.
This is where the retail (and distribution) chains come in, and the story of shelf space.
If you look in some place like CompUSA, you will see tons of game titles dominating rows and rows of shelves. Stores don't do this out of the goodness of their heart. They devote this much shelf space to game titles because they 'move'. Any title that doesn't move (or a company that gets a reputation for stagnant sales) will lose their coveted shelf space. The truth of the matter is that about 10 times as many game titles are completed each year as there is shelf space to display them in the typical retail store. These titles simply never see the light of day.
Now, with that in mind, what chance did Loki have of getting any of that precious shelf space? Essentially next to none. However, they actually did have some space for a while, because I did march into my local CompUSA and also an Electronics Boutique (a 'mall creature') and buy several Loki titles over a period of time. I wasn't crazy about the positioning of the titles in the CompUSA store, though. They were thoroughly mixed in with the Windows versions, and for the most part, you had to pick up and inspect the bottom, side, or back of the box to see if it was the Linux version or not. At the time, I recall wishing that the store had set up an end-cap (very hallowed ground 8-) with just Linux game titles, to bring attention to the fact that there were even such items in the store.
When I went back a few months ago, to buy some new title that interested me, I was surprised to find that all the Linux games were gone. Talking to the store manager, he indicated that that local CompUSA had done OK with their Linux game sales, but that the corporate buyers had decided that they weren't doing well overall, and had pulled the whole lot, sending them back to the manufacturer. I registered my displeasure with the store manager, who promised to discuss it with the regional rep the next time they got together to discuss such things, and went to Electronics Boutique to search out my title(s).
When I got to EB, I found a similar scene, although EB had decided to dump their titles in the bargain bin, rather then sending them back. I picked out two, and left.
The sad reality of all this, is if Loki can't command the shelf space, and if retail sales of Linux titles never pick up, they are missing a giant distribution arm that will make or break the company. I know that a lot of folks here would just as happily buy online, but I also read comments from folks here that fit the original retail shopper profile that I initially outlined. At least, for now, that retail shopper rules. And if Loki can't reach those shoppers, they are doomed.
Tribes 2 is closed source software. Dynamix, its primary developer, is gone. Loki, its primary means of Linux support, is in danger. Now let's say that Loki completely folds next month. Considering Sierra's track record, do you honestly think they'll diligently support the Linux clients as well as Loki did? Do you think we'll still have same-day patches and updates?
The dedicated servers will undoubtedly be maintained, since they are so important to the Tribes 2 community, and so many of them are for Linux. But will the client itself keep pace with the Windows development? Sierra doesn't seem to care much about public opinion in their grand decisions, so can we expect them to continue with Linux development because it's the "right thing to do"?
It'll be an interesting situation to watch in the coming months. But given Sierra's track record for screwing over employees and customers alike, I don't hold high hopes.
Its the end....just admit it...and move on.... the .net is looking for some coders
So Microsoft wins. I would willingly donate to Loki and I don't generally play games :-)
However my guess is that the distribution model they use is wrong for the linux community(retail boxes).What is wrong with full download of product files (redistributable to save their bandwidth)and buying a licence key per pc locked to the hardware on the machine with a nominal extra fee to transfer the licience to another machine. Loki do this at a reasonable price and I promise to purchase your games or offer shares and I will invest :-)
Regards Michael New Zealand
Way back in around 1985-87 or so, Amiga went into Chapter 11, and eventually they came out of it!
So you should probably not plagiarize off him.
You compare Macs and Linux, and, as it has been said before, Macs are now even closer to Linux since OS X.
As a Mac-gamer, I was hoping for Loki to also port to OS X; once the Linux port was completed, I wouldn't think it to be that much more complicated to make the game run under BSD-based OS X. Although the Mac market is still pretty slim, it's doing better than the Linux game market; at least, Macsoft is still in business, as well as other Mac porting houses. Any one care to speculate why Loki didn't try to broaden their potential customer base by also porting to OS X?
--
$tar -xvf
Up here Business Depot carries Linux of various flavours.. maybe they could get in there.
No, I used to work at Staples (Buisness Depot) and they will not carry Linux games. I know, I spoke on the phone to the head software orderer in Toronto.
Staples/Business Depot has no plans to carry Linux games, in fact, you cannot even special order them. (This may have changed in the last year and a half since I worked at that god-awful place, but I doubt it.)
You know, I sat here on Slashdot and advocated buying Loki games - within sight of my desk are:
Quake 3 - Linux
Soldier of Fortune - Linux
Unreal Tournament (supported by Loki, but no direct box for this game)
Descent 3 - Linux
Heretic - Linux
I tried to pre-order the Quake 3 Linux versions, I was going to buy extra copies for my friends so that they had Q3 for Linux, and could perhaps switch to the windows binaries later. I had even planned to install Linux for them just for Quake 3.
I wrote "purchased for use with Linux" on each non-linux game I purchased.
It did not help. =(
How many of us Dual Boot (I do) for games?
Sigh, here comes the cries of "Had I known I would have bought a game..." Right.
[rant]
I know I can't write code worth crap, so I support the free software movement where I can (including buying closed-source games!).
I suppose the slashbot trolls are correct - too many people associate free as in beer.
I am afraid that this is a far bigger loss for us now. Sure, some slashbots will run out to EB world and buy a Linux game. Whoopie. Its too damn late.
Let this be a lesson to those of you out there in the software community. There are more ways to contribute than code - and those who do code need to get paid to eat. Not everything is free (as in beer) nor should it be.
[/rant]
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I think there needs to be a "Killer-game", something like Quake 4 or Starcraft 2, which is released ONLY for Linux, that would bring a lot of people over to the Linux community and would therefore (hopefully) increase the Linux user-base enough to support developing primarily for this OS. Remember when the CD-roms became popular? It was not before "Rebel Assault" hit the market that it became standard for all PCs. I remember walking into PC-stores at that time: "I'd like to have the mitsumi 2x-cd-rom and rebel assault to go with that please." was the most-heard sentence everywhere. The same effect is needed to make Linux more attractive to the standard Gamer. (Plus they could work a little on the comfort of X, especially when installing new software)
I think the console game developers have more of an imperative to get things right the first time vs. PC game developers. If a console game developer lets a bug slip by that must be patched in order for the game to function correctly... they get to ship a new physical unit (and eat the associated cost).
Most PC game companies are lazy pieces of shit that think they can ship a half-ass developed game and then patch it to a playable level months after the initial release.
Why do we put up with a PC game company's behavior when we wouldn't tolerate the same behavior in a console game company?
The ones I've dealt with are assholes. I've talked to Scott Draeker and other folks from Loki several times and they're good people who deserve to succeed.
But didn't. Too bad, so sad. Seeya. They've worked really hard, and they weren't one of the companies that pissed away VC money as fast as they could get it.
Which just goes to show that not pissing VC money away means jack shit.
These jokes are damn funny. Keep 'em coming.
The real reason Linux doesn't have a chance is that gamers love hardware. Hundreds of thousands of people didn't camp outside of Walmarts for days last October b/c they couldn't resist the whole new level of software (about 10 crappy release titles) available on the PS2. They couldn't have really cared about the games (considering how much better countless Dreamcast titles were, for example). They just wanted maximal numbers of polygons.
Gamers who are paying $400 for video cards which are 15% faster than $150 video cards aren't going to pay to play the same games on a different operating system with the performance of a $40 video card. People who buy $50 games tend to have modern video cards. If the operating system they are using supports that video card but an alternative operating system doesn't, then they sure as hell aren't going to buy games for the alternative operating system.
I've had a Radeon for a year now and there still isn't a single distro with out of the box support for it. I can't even play Tux Racer, let alone any Loki game. Anyone who wants good 2D quality and/or dual-display, and/or VIVO, etc. won't have an nvidia card, but all other cards have crap 3D in Linux.
A LOT of "normal" people are starting to use linux these days. A lot MORE would be using it if they could play 3D games with it, but they can't unless they have an outdated, slow, or nvidia card. Most people spending money on games, therefore, don't have decent 3D in Linux.
Linus is alright, but I wouldn't call it awesome. Its definately a work-in-progress. If a company released Linux as an OS, Slashdot would be filled with flames about what a crappy OS it was.
Its been done with a commercial company before. Slackware did it when they got the boot from walnut creek. The differance here is that slackware always made a profit and was looking for money to get them through the transistion. Let me repeat that: Slackware made profit.
Not revinu but profit. Not chapter 11 but homeless. There is a big differance here.
Some have called that differance a "sustainable buisness model."
Disclosure #1: The only "game" I have on my computer is banner.
Disclosure #2: That system run slackware.
Ascii artist &
Actuyally, though, a fiar number of companies do survive bankruptcy & prosper. Texaco, for example. For Loki (and RHAT, LNUX, or whoever is next), though, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Well, your sample obviously excludes the significant group of grade school-aged console users.
> 1. Most has short development cycle
2 years is NOT a short dev cycle. We game programmers play the SAME game for over a year. Never mind "crunch" mode aka "hell programming" that usually lasts a few months, working 16x 7 days a week!
> 3. The developers mostly cannot have the same fun playing the game as others
I disagree.
The anology is this: Can the musician who performs the music enjoy the music just as much as the audience?
Both enjoy the music / game, but at a different level. Programmers enjoy the challenge in bulding something. Gamers enjoy the challenge in "relaxing".
i.e. That was a slick algo/hack for X.
Rest of your points are valid.
2) As another poster pointed out, linux quake3 was chiefly an id port. Loki's primary responsibility was making sure I couldn't buy an in-store copy until three months after the christmas season apparently because they felt it had to ship in a tin box.
Your figures are very high, all around.
At the same time though, I'm sure they could have made it a little easier to actually buy the games...
How about downloading them online for example? I would have bought at least two from them if I could have downloaded them and played straight away!
[I dont buy games online to be posted to me - whats the point? I'd rather pay the petrol and start playing straight away!]
I hate to tell ya man but your entire universe sold you out in the DMCA votes. Unanimous votes of both sides. Logic will tel you that you aren't dealing with two entities but one.
There is no left or right anymore just a big blur of ill informed legislators, and their naive consitiuents who think thinks are being done for the benefit of "their side".
Some funding by, for example, SuSE or RedHat could
help them much, and in the long way would also help
Linux to spread more widely.
Distro maker X could fund Loki somehow, then get the
rights to put one Loki licensed game in their PRO
Linux distribution.
Ah, yes, what an amazing and convincing argument you have here. So, according to your logic:
Glad to see you find your world so easy to generalize.
Game Over
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I've always wanted to do something involving video games, and I've always had a knack for coding, so I've worked most of my 17 years to learn about that.
But now, with Dynamix, Loki, and God changing, closing, etc I wonder what I'm going to do.
All I can really say is for all Loki employees, I feel bad for you, and I hope for the best.
Loki had a great idea to offer commerical games at a great price for us linux users, but unfortunately it seems as though linux is a platform where only services seem to turn a profit. Games are cool but I really don't need them to run a server. For them I'll stick to a windows machine. -Ben
If they have filed, I hope that they're able to make a comeback somehow...
Not only do all of Loki's titles rock, they're a good bunch of people. I've talked to Scott Draeker and other folks from Loki several times and they're good people who deserve to succeed. They've worked really hard, and they weren't one of the companies that pissed away VC money as fast as they could get it.
News like this makes me want a drink -- and I don't even drink.
How can you compare a hardware/computer distributor to a software company? They're entirely different beasts. All of my personal dislike of Dell aside (<troll>they build shitty computers</troll>), a personal computer can easily be built for less than the average $1000 price tag Dell wants to extract from your wallets. Regardless, it's rare that any Linux install lasts very long at the receiving end of my keyboard. You think I'll trust someone else touching my machine??? <Insert control-freak explicative here>
Let's bring the conversation back to the real competition in question, software vendors. There is something to be said about supporting companies that not only support your favorite operating system, but provide positive influence to the design and gameplay of your favorite computer games.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Software benefits from the "many-eyes" approach to design. That's part of the reason why OSS projects are generally successful. Software company "A" hires software company "B" to port their code to another operating system. Not only does software company "B" act as a code auditor, it acts as positive and constructive feedback to the original game manufacturer. Software engineering improves, software designers skills improve, games improve, enjoyment improves.
Ah, but I've said this all before. I for one will support Loki when I can actually afford to buy another game. I've been eyeballing a few, but you know, life and its responsibilities get in the way of entertainment sometimes.
assert(expired(knowledge));
Another thought would be to release bare bones versions with a CD only and a PDF of the manual for a lower price.
They released Tribes2 with just the CD and the manual on PDF, only they offered it for 50 USD still. It sure didn't help them much.
Playstation 2 is doing very well and they support linux (at least in Japan). So if you love games and linux then you should consider a PS2
---
I see a lot of replies stating that the linux gaming market isn't big enough. Seems to me, if all linux gamelovers reading /. surf to http://www.lokigames.com now and order one of those games, troubles will be over very soon, at least on the short term. The question is: do we find it important enough for this company to survive? Seems to me that since we all cheered them on when they came into the market, stating that this was a very important develpoment for linux desktop market penetration, it is! Now is the time to show that these were not mere empty words, but that we really care for this company to exist and help them through a rough phase in their existence and with it, help linux desktop penetration along too! I myself have bought some games from them and I am really content about them. Personally I'd hate to see them go, so I think I'll hit the online-shop myself now...
TeX is free, and it's certainly very original
Or is it all clean room socialist implementations of commercial software that people spent many long hours working on, hoping to make a living? But they don't deserve to make a living, do they? Just stick a 'g' or a 'k' in front of it, duplicate as much functionality as you can, and hope they go out of business. Cool man. That's "freedom" as in "freedom from any encumbering licenses, patents, or jobs."
No offense, but do you plan on raising $200,000-300,000 every year to save Loki? That's fucked up.
Don't donate to a life-saving charity, donate to a money losing company. Loki is in it for the cash - just like all companies.
I suggest we encourage people to buy Loki games on the many forums we might be on, such as Mailing Lists and Message Boards.
I didn't even realize they exists till a couple of weeks ago when I happem to be in a software store.
I don't think this had much to do with the economic crunch.
I think it had more to do with the fact that they were trying to sell products to a market that couldn't support them.
Lemme see. They used to say that the overall cost of a worker in a software company was $100,000 / year. Dunno how many people loki have working there, but let's say 20. Now, on a $40 game, the developer will normally get about $10 (if they're lucky) if it's sold through retail channels.
So: cost to run Loki/year - $2,000,000
Number of units you need to sell just to break even: 200,000
That's a tall order, even for a Windows game. There's only a few titles a year that sell that many.
Okay, maybe your're getting paid to do the ports, but the advances you're going to get for Linux ports aren't going to be very great.
It's incredibly difficult to keep your head above water writing Windows games. It must be almost impossible for Linux.
If, (I hope not) Loki really does go out of business, are there going to be any provisions for another company to take over support? Things like loki_update and the other Open source tools that Loki has released, such as smpeg and SDL, is development going to continue? I can see that but what about game updates? Is an archive of patches going to be set up somewhere? Is enough information going to be released so that if neccesary, the linux community can handle problems themselves? Sorry if this has been asked somewhere else, but I am just thinking out loud.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Uh no. I think he means any charity that you believe does good work and you can stand behind. Last i knew the Cancer Society, United Way, and the vast majority of other charities have no affiliation at all to anything.
All the game has to do is link to libGL.so, so I fail to see the problem. I never did like quake much so I haven't played q3a, but I'm sure what it does is link to libGL.so like any sane opengl app should do. So.. nvidia's libGL.so or MESA's libGL.so or Big Mamma's libGL.so, it should work just fine.
PC game development is a marginally profitable endeavor anyway. For every iD, there are lots of losers. Aside from Wal-Mart specials like Deer Hunter and Millionaire, PC game development is a risky proposition at best. Retail software in general is an incredibly competitive business; the retail game software business is brutal.
Linux gamers, as a group, are willing to pay for games, but only for mega-elite titles. These are games that are already successful on Windows. In particular, multiplayer games are only successful with a large gamer population, most of which will be running Windows.
Console gaming is the only profitable market for most game companies. The margins are higher, the technology is simpler due to uniform hardware, losses to piracy are low, and there is significant revenue from rental outlets.
To those of you unwilling to dual-boot to Windows, do what I did - buy a cheap second (3rd/4th/etc) machine and a KVM switch. Or get a game console and rent software. Don't let funky OS advocacy blind you to reasonable alternatives. Hey, I love my TiVo, but the fact it runs Linux means diddly to me.
BTW they are totally /.'ed now, so don't bother for a couple of hours...
Jan
It's imperative because to make the move to the desktop, linux needs a wide range of applications, not just for the office, but for entertainment. Currently Linux is sorely lacking in multimedia and entertainment in general.
Loki isn't a bad company. Just one that's ahead of it's time. In another year or two Linux will be making it's bid for the desktop, and it will need gamers to help build it's consumer base.
Also consider the idea of Linux based gaming consoles. Not so far fetched when you think about it.
Finally I really don't want to read another months worth of articles about how Linux companies are all going to die, and that OS is bad for business. (the reports of Nautalis's death, are greatly exaggerated)
For all these reasons and more we should through our support to Loki, or any other OS supporting business. Unless you want to be a Redmond love monkey for the rest of your life.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
If IBM were smart, they would swoop in and save this company. Games may not be Linux's short- or medium-term purpose, but in the long-run, games are useful because they tend to push systems to their limits and advance the state of the art. This is particularly important for Linux development on the desktop market.
There really is very little money involved here: $500,000 . This makes me wonder why they took such a drastic step. I mean, this is pretty much less than the mortgage on most houses in Silicon Valley. I wonder if there is more that Loki is not telling us.
evanchik.net
You know, I find that really offensive. There is no pirated software on any of my machines - none at all. I'm sure that's true of many other Linux users, probably most. There is proprietary commercial software on my machines, including Loki games; but it's all paid for.
Yes, I'm an open source person. Most of my own work is available under BSD license. I maintain three separate open source packages. I use, in my work, many other open source packages. And there are a huge range of packages I don't use because their licenses are not compatible with what I'm doing.
Open source people are not pirates. Most pirated software, lets face it, is Windows software. How many Windows machines do you know which have no pirate software at all? Closed source people are far more likely, in my experience, to be pirates than open source people.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That's not a troll, that's someone who tells the truth. What system ARE you using?
He pegged me and I bet he pegged you.
You need to check your definition of FREE with regards to Linux.
Compilation of drivers may be a pain for some, but those things are improving and getting easier all the time. I'm not going to get into a slagging match over Windows as, you know, its got its good points and its bad points just like Linux.
Hopefully once the installation and setup procedures for these kind of things are ironed out, we might see you back with a bright outlook :) (Outlook, remember, that things that spread virii like wildfire, DOH! I tried to hold back)
This is Chapter 11, not 7 bankruptcy.
Basically, they're telling the court that there's no way they can pay the interest on their existing debt and stay afloat - *but* the business itself is viable, and if they're allowed to write some of that off or at least delay payments they'll eventually be able to pay the rest.
Quake 3 is horrid, I mean truthfully, how long have we been stuck on 1.27g now? It's a great deal less stable than the latest win2k release, and only now just catching up in speed with xfree 4.1 (no thanks to loki). I had to wait 3 months after ordering Sim City to get my copy, and another two after that to get a patch that would make it actually run on my system. Even after all that, it still has a rather vicious memory leak that won't let me play for more than an hour straight (with 256 megs of ram even!). The video is also slower than the windows version. I don't have many complaints about descent actually, but it is still a bit slower than its windows counterpart.
Also, if you want to see companies that do a good job porting things, I suggest you look at the mac ports of these games (cept sim city, that was ass on mac too).
Loki is the only company out there that has attempted to port commercial windows games to linux. Now, I have no hope of playing all the windows games that I love on linux unless Transgaming can finally finish their DirectX port to wine. Really, this is a shame and it would be sad to see them go. I hope they can work things out. Come on people, buy some linux games!
Will it help Loki at all if I go and buy a game now? Or are they at the point already where selling more units simply means more loss?
Also, if I am to buy another game, which one is worthwhile? I already have RT2, CivCTP, Heroes 3 and Myth II. I rather like CivCTP and Heroes, RT2 didn't really click and I havn't played Myth a lot yet. I hear good things about Alpha Centauri and Mind Rover. Comments?
Perhaps it's about time shareware games gets a come-back. They're very rare these days, but are far easier to distribute, which makes it cheaper in the end. Maybe it's just me, but most of those expensive high quality games aren't that fun to play at all...
Take a look at SpaceTripper, for instance. Made by two British guys, nice graphics, simple gameplay = cool game! The full 11 MB version only costs 12$ to download, and they have an linux version in the works. Another such example is Wetrix, and I've stumbled over a few other such small, fun 'n cheap games during the last 3 years.
I think it would be easier for small companies to create games if they tried the old shareware method. I don't believe games that are expensive to develop are the only ones people today would like to play, it's just that mostly they don't have a choice.
What ended it for Loki Games? Well, I happen to know one company I can slap the blame on. nVidia.
Why nVidia? well, its simple. when the tnt2 debutes, nVidia releases a statement that they are the only 3d video chip maker that is fully supporting Linux with Open Source Drivers. They were to release register specifications, and release a working, open source driver developed by nVidia and helped upon by a bunch of other interesting people. What happened to this ideal? They took it back of course, just as soon as 3dfx died and opensourced all their IP. When nVidia saw the monopoly knocking at their front door, they immediately withdrew their plan (this one year later) and decided to go closed source. you couldnt even use a custom kernel with the nvidia driver because it was entirely closed source binary only.
Too bad for Loki, who just spent the last 6 months porting Quake3 to Linux, now they just found out that the only video card they can officially support with Xfree4 is the Voodoo3 and Matrox g400 (dog slow in linux).
Add this to the fact that Quake3 for Linux came out on the SHELVES about a month after the windows version, and then, more expensive (by then, the windows version had been reduced in price by retailers, and the linux version could be downloaded off the internet, there was so little market for the linux version, they had to sell them at full price)
Imagine that, Quake3 launch more costly to consumers, and later than everyone else, not to mention that the only video card that could run quake3 at the time was a tnt2 and Geforce1 at reasonable speeds, and didn't even have alpha quality Xfree4 or kernel drivers(required to use 3d direct rendering in Linux)
Of course, nVidia released their closed source with open source wrapper later on that year, by then, it was too late. EVERY gaming migrant from windows switched back to windows specifically because of their video card's support (NVidia).
If you want a finger to point, point it at nVidia. they should be brought up on charges of anti-trust IMO.
Fuck you nvidia, I have nothing else to say to you. bitch. You ruined the only gaming potential Linux has ever had. If it wasn't for your delayed closed shitty alpha quality driver, Loki would have made a killing on Linux quake3. insted, only the newbies who bought the voodoo3 could play quake3, and so, only 10% of the potential market actually bought it. You had the only card that could handle quake3, and you lied on your promise to be the "leading 3d video card maker on the Linux platform"
Have a nice day.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Ok, well at least I've ordered Rune now while it's still available. If Loki goes under it will get very hard to find - and playing new commercial games under linux will only be possible with WINE.
The simple fact of the matter is, that Linux is for 'rocket scientist' types, and geeks. The ordinary man in the street simply cannot get past the first hurdle of Linux usage.
The moment you try to explaing 'fdisk' and 'lilo' to a non-technical user they run screaming back to their cosy Microsoft world.
But I think that's a good thing. I've been using Linux for years and years now, I switched from NetBSD 0.8 (which gives you a clue how long). I do not like the idea that Linux is dumbing itself down to compete with Windows.
I like my unix to look like UNIX dammit. That means 9 xterms, and tvtwm. Nothing more.
However, perhaps there is a deeper lesson that can be learned here. Perhaps there really isn't money in open source and Linux. Just look at companies like Eazel and Stormix. And Ximian seems to be following the business model of "give as much away for free before the investors realize what's going on". Could it be that writing software for Linux just isn't profitable?
I mean, I always thought that Slashdot was of the opinion that you use the best tool for the job. Perl for short programs. C for serious jobs. Linux for servers. Wouldn't it follow, then, that people oughta just leave Windows on their computers if they want to play games? After all, Linux is more of a serious operating system, sporting a high powered TCP/IP stack and pitiful OpenGL support, not to mention lackluster drivers for leading video cards. While some people may accuse me of being a troll, I'd like to contend that maybe Linux isn't the best operating system for every job. Also, consider that our leader, CmdrTaco, keeps a Windows partition on his computer just for playing games.
To conclude, althought this is a tragic loss of a leading software developer, perhaps it would be a better choice to just go with the best tool for the job, instead of the best tool for your political views.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Huh? I went to the site to see when it was going to be released and it just said "soon". I wasn't particularly keen on preordering a game from a company filing Chapter 11 for obvious reasons, but once it is actually available I'm almost certainly going to buy it. Still, a few pity buys aren't going to save them if they are in the kind of trouble it looks like they are in.
I read the internet for the articles.
Making a game is a huge endeavor. These days you hire more artists than you do programmers. You need really deep pockets because most of them fail, but every once in a while you get that one home run that pays for everything else (Hmm, sounds like the music or movie industry...) While Loki is minimizing their exposure by doing ports of just the games that didn't suck, they are also minimizing their chances that they'll have a home run on their target platform either. If a home run is made on Windows, it'll be milked there and maybe Loki will get it a year or two later, long after everyone has moved on.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate their games, and I own a few of them myself, but I'm part of a rare lunatic fringe that refuses to have a Microsoft product on his system at all. Dual booting over to Windows is just too simple a solution for most people, and that's what they're doing.
I'll pop over to Loki's site once it recovers from its slashdotting and pick up a couple more games but I wouldn't be surprised if they were completely orphaned within a year.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You must realize the majority of start-up businesses fail. Statistics were against them, and it sure doesn't help that they are entering a market which no one is in. If you take into account that even game producers _barely_ make money (something like 1 in a number of thousand games actually sell? not to mention competition from console gaming) and Loki was choosing games which were not "hits" (very few people knew about their latest game.. Kohan or whatever) it would easily equate to bankruptcy. And on top of that many of the games were easily playable by getting the cheaper Windows CD and downloading a free Linux binary.
I do believe they had a better business plan than Eazel.. I don't have the slightest clue what those fools were thinking (and Ximian.. if they didn't have funding they would be in the toilet too, IMO.. but I don't know their business plan so only time will tell).
Dijkstra Considered Dead
another one, that was close, was one called 'NVDA'.
It is much better for Loki if you buy one of their games than donate money. In order for Loki to get contracts to port the best games they need to be able to show good sales figures on what they already have ported. So even if more of the money go to production costs if you buy a game than donate money, it will proabably be much better for Loki long term.
This is actually not all that uncommon. For example, there exists a steel company by the name of Algoma which filed for the equivalent of Chapter 11 here in Canada, not once, but twice. Back in the '80s it operated for years under creditor protection. They emerged in the mid-90s, and then spent hundreds of millions upgrading their operations. Now, with the recent downturn, they've been driven to bankruptcy, and so they're under creditor protection, again.
The bottom line is that creditor protection (chapter 11) is not always the end of a company. What it does is stop creditors from forcing a company into complete bankruptcy (aka out of business) just to pay the bills. There is also a pecking order for bills to be paid; employees first, then places like banks and other lenders, and other things after that.
While Loki has a very different business than Algoma, it is not the end for them -- yet.
The bottom line is, buy loki games (or if you're in Canada, click on the Canux link below.)
Somehow, I think the main reason that Loki didn't do as well as they should have was the way their products were marketed. For example: Tribes 2 for windows can be found at any decent computer store, and at CompUSA and Fry's, it has been on sale almost constantly for $19.99. Tribes 2 for linux, on the other hand, can be found in no retail store that I've been to. The only option I have is to buy it online, for around $50 (plus S&H). Now which version would most people go for? The only reason that I didn't spend $20 on the windows version is because I don't run windows on any of my machines, but most people aren't in that situation. I think if it was possible to get some more games into stores (at more competitive prices!), they could have done much better. The one or two copies of quake III that each store has don't count ($50 apiece).
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
BUY something??? For Linux??? How incredibly naive.
Seriously though, don't you understand that one of the key reasons for the popularity of Linux is that every necessary and desirable piece of software for it can be freely downloaded and copied?
Buying software for Linux is like paying $40 for a web browser. No one is going to do it because everyone expects it to be free.
It's hard enough to make money on PC games anyway, especially at the moment, with the new consoles arriving. Making money on PC games on a 'fringe' desktop OS like Linux must be even harder.
I'm not really suprised.
Ok, the site wasn't slashdotted too badly.  I just ordered Rune and the "Programming Linux Games" book.  Halls of Valhalla wasn't available for order yet.  For less than $150, I've got Kohan, Rune and a cool book on the way to my door in a few days...
It's really easy to sit behind a screen and type messages like, "Let's rally to save Loki." "Someone set up an account and I for one will donate." Then no one does. If you want to help Loki, go buy a game NOW. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. Don't sit around talking about how people should have done this and that, and ho-hum where can I get Max Payne for free... Just go to Loki's site and buy a game.
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Their games are just the sort of apps Linux is lacking in: professional, slick, and run easily out of the box. They are advancing the state of multimedia with projects like SMPEG, OpenAL, and their contributions to SDL.
I hope they stay in business and continue to produce their games, but this is a rather bad example for the future of Linux businesses. They did everything right, and even so they are in financial straights already.
1) Most linux users in my opinion are too cheap.
...
.. cause they don't gotta pay for it.
... yeah that's what users and everyone emphasizes in their commentary about Linux on slashdot and other fora and in industry journals, at trade shows, etc. The kernel developpers too probably ... they all say: "We don't care how shitty Linux or distro such and such is ... the most important thing is that it costs nothing ...". Yeah that sounds familiar.
... mmm hhmmmm
... So now your challenge is to dig into your small pea-like brain and enlighten us: what pray tell is the connection between Windows warez and pirates and Linux users?
Loki is not a Linux software maker - they are a software maker - developping mostly for the Windows platform - that supports their products on Linux by porting games or writing portably designed games (and things like the SDL library etc.). Since their primary market is Windows, your reasoning is falacious
2) The bulk of game players don't use linux
Right. So in other words attributing the failure of a Windows game development company to uhh Linux, as you do, is not only erroneous and wrong, it is also totally illogical.
3) Again why do linux users use linux
<sarcasm>
Uhuh
And of course ALL users of MS-Windows pay for every copy of everything they use
</sarcasm>
The most likely problem with sales lay in the Windows market and in warez of Windows versions of Loki games
Oh yeah you spelled "your" incorrectly: it's "you're".
The newer titles come in DVD style packaging.
Hopefully, this will be enough incentive to people to buy more Loki games. Electronic Boutique (http://www.ebworld.com) is selling most of their Loki games stock for $9.99 including Quake 3 Arena, SimCity 3000, and Descent 3. This may be the perfect time to support Loki (and the price is right).
Well when you've got games like these it's no wonder, now is it?
You bought your hardware, didn't you?
DESIRED QUALITIES FOR GAMING
1. Games need to be written to open APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenPlay, and so on. Games that are written to open APIs are more portable to different operating systems which supports consumer choice and are more accessible to open source development.
2. UNIX gaming. I love UNIX because it's elegant, powerful, widely implemented, open, and standards-based. I want to game on UNIX, I don't want to dual boot.
3. Wide availability of games.
HOW MAC OS X SUPPORTS THESE
1. Apple isn't pushing a lot of proprietary APIs needlessly. Sure, there are some, but in general, games on the Mac using 3D graphics use OpenGL, games that use 3D sound frequently use OpenAL, Apple is pushing for an open API for networking called OpenPlay, and because it's UNIX, POSIX and standardized UNIX APIs are bound to be widely used for threading, sockets, filesystem I/O, and so on.
2. OS X is UNIX. Huge chunks of it are even open source. (Not as open source as Linux of course, but a lot better than nothing.)
3. The Mac has a wide variety of games available to it. The following is a small sampling (this list also includes games scheduled to come out for the Mac):
FPS
Doom 1-3
Quake 1-4 and Quake: Team Arena
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Rune and Rune: Halls of Valhalla
Alice
Oni
Halo (widely believed to be coming)
Deus Ex
Descent 3
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Tomb Raider series including Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Max Payne (coming sometime)
RPG
Diablo 1-2 and D2X
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Icewind Dale
Baldur's Gate II (coming in a few weeks)
Neverwinter Knights
MMORPG
Shadowbane (widely considered to be the most promising MMORPG)
World War III Online
RTS
Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War
Warcraft 1-3 (including WC2: Beyond the Dark Portal)
Age of Empires 1 (and 2 coming this fall)
Total Annihilation
Summoner
Black and White (coming later this year most likely)
Myth 1-3
Tropico
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Sacrifice
Earth 2140
Majesty
TBS
Heroes of Might and Magic III (and the two expansion packs)
Civilization 2-3
Civilization: Call to Power
Alpha Centauri
Masters of Orion 2-3
ADVENTURE
Escape from Monkey Island III
Myst 1-3
Realmyst (coming sometime this year)
Vampire: The Masquerade>br> Star Wars games (Pod Racer, etc.)
Star Trek games (like DS9: The Fallen)
Rogue Spear/Rainbox Six
Dragon's Lair 3D
OTHER
The Sims (and most of the other Sim-series like City/Theme Park/Tower/Ant/...)
Railroad Tycoon II
Soldier of Fortune
Tony Hawk
Driver
4x4 EVO
a ton card/boardgames (like Monopoly, Monopoly Casino, etc.)
a ton of arcade games (Centipede 3D, Atari 2600 action pack, and other arcade remakes of classics)
and a ton of educational games and kids games which I don't really get into and don't know the names for
Anyway, the only game I seriously miss on the OS X is Everquest and it looks like Shadowbane should satisfy that (and Neverwinter Knights).
The Mac also gets a lot of games simultaneously (Blizzard in particular has gotten progressively better and better about this and is 100% simultaneous now).
A NOTE ON HARDWARE
The Macs have both the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live and the Nvidia Geforce 3 cards available to them which are more or less the state of the art in PC gaming.
SUMMARY
Again, what's really important is that games get written to open APIs. Supporting both Linux and Mac gaming both accomplish this.
I bought my first ever Mac 5 months ago (because of OS X) and haven't looked back since. It's worked out a lot better than I thought and I've since become quite the Apple fan surprisingly enough. I've also found that I really enjoy the Apple community (read a couple of issues of http://www.appleturns.com for an example).
The Mac isn't perfect, but I've been really happy with it.
I also want to say that I think that the whole WINE approach to gaming is horribly flawed in my opinion. We need games written to open APIs!
I'm not advocating that people ditch Linux for the Mac, but I do think that people who genuinely care about open APIs should at least CONSIDER the Mac if they're currently playing their games under Windows.
wow, that took me completely off guard! what a performance!
You know, you've got some rather old or inaccurate info there- might want to get caught up with the times here...
.so files. It's a design mis-feature of the dynamic shared object system in use on Linux- the KDE team had to do handstands while juggling clay pots with their feet to hide this issue. It takes forever to do the fixups, etc. with C++ classes, esp. if you've got a lot of pure virtual classes (Something that happens in Windows games a LOT...). Once up, the game runs well on most setups.
Myth2 shipped with the only stable 3D accel support at the time- Glide. Accelerated Mesa support at that time was rather hit or miss at best. Right now, if you buy the copy off the shelf and run Loki Update (or manually obtain the update) against it, you'd find that it works with pretty much anything 3D accelerated. I know, I was one of the people they specifically asked to beta test the patch for GLX support.
As for the minimal machine story, letsee...
I wouldn't think that a P133 would handle Myth2 nicely or even passably well- in fact, I remember trying the Windows demo on a 233MMX machine and being rather disappointed with it's overall performance with the software rendering. If you don't have a supported 3D accelerator, the minimum system config is never going to work well for you on any game that works "better" with one- ever.
The delay from the menu selection to game start...
The delay on the click is a delay of load-up due to the numbers of C++ derived
Believe what you want- but you're going to look stupid and ignorant going on like you are right now.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That y'all might find this interesting:
:-)
[snip]
>Puleeeze tell me you aren't really going out of business? Hopefully all the
>people from Slashdot who bought games over the last hours will make some
>sort of difference?
[snip]
Thank you for your interest!
Please don't confuse this with a Chapter 7 liquidation, where you
close the doors and sell off the assets. That is not what we have done.
We filed a Chapter 11 reorganization. This will allows us to deal with
our creditors fairly and equitably and at the same time continue to
operate the company. We are still shipping products and porting new games
and expect to be doing so for a long time.
Last night was certainly our best night for web orders,
and that is very motivating.
Sincerely,
--
Kayt Sorhaindo
Loki Software, Inc.
Other ways you can help are to link from your webpages to Loki or to Tux Games. This will help spread the word, because a surprisingly large number of people DO NOT KNOW about Linux gaming. (Linking via the Tux Games affiliate program can also make you some money).
Whichever you do, do something. Loki has provided us with great games over the last few years, and now its time for us all to pay them back.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
Well now that every freakin Windoze game is DirectX, DirectSound, DirectBlueScreenOfDeath, I bet it takes that much longer to port all that closed undocumented non-Windows compatible crap. Well I guess gaming on Linux means that we have Linux servers hosting game for a bunch of Windoze clients.
Most of the people I know who own consoles are far more likely to own a computer, to have upgraded if not installed the OS, and in at least a few cases run linux. In my sample, there is an association between technical sophistication (or at least interest) and game console ownership.
I think that game consoles are popular for other reasons. Intense advertising (more commercials on TV for game consoles and game console games than software games), the "hey another gadget to own" factor, and probably other things.
I think that the number of sales of game consoles due to technophobia and uncertainty of software is very low. In fact, a complicated interface might actually INCREASE sales among a certain segment.
I have bought numerous Loki products because I run Linux. However the equivalent game for Windows in the UK costs 5 quid less (that's $7.50 for you yanks). This is really significant when you consider that most gameplayers in the Windoze world are teenagers without deep pockets. Until this discrepancy is reduced I'll find it difficult converting youngsters to Linux as their only platform. I'll do my bit buying more Loki games though....
Sadly, this observation flies true to its target sometimes. Other times, you get observant people who realize that proprietary != bad. Remember, proprietary != closed-source in all cases. There seems to be a general agreement that the technical definition of Open Source does not choose sides as to whether a software product is proprietary or not. On a similar thread, Loki has demonstrated that a software company CAN work on proprietary software while contributing to GNU or the Public Domain, take SDL for example.
When finances permit, I have and will continue to support Loki Software by purchasing the fruits of their labor. Even if it is for a money-sucking Microsoft-loving company like Sierra. At least they figured out that there WAS a market in the Linux crowd. Don't confuse growing pains with utter failure, people. Loki isn't down for the count just yet!
assert(expired(knowledge));
I bought almost every game loki made. They all install easily through a simply gui option. Work on a hacked version of slackware, upgraded kernel and X of course. And never once did they ask for the CD to be in the freakin drive to run the game. That, for me, is worth more than the cost of a full priced game. But loki also sells their games often below retail prices and ships within a week, usually. I will continue to support them until the end. But if you lazy stupid RedHat users would get off your ass and grab a few games NOW the end won't come and linux will not only continue to be a viable gaming platform, but also a stable one.
*flame bait* Heh heh, we all know RedHat users couldn't find / -name vmlinu\* -exec rm {}\; if their life depended on it. And most would probably execute that command to find out.
and they have to pay for the hosting and bandwith of the filez.
Stop /.-ing the site for people who are there to buy them!
*rant over*
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
It is stupid to think that even the entire slashdot community could save a company by buying a few games. Remember Indrema? For some reason they ended up $10mil short. Even if every major development house in the world paid Sony's price for an SDK, and all of the open source developers bought an sdk for $800, they still wouldn't have near enough. It takes a lot more money than we would like to think to run a company, although it helps if you don't try to buy your own manufacturing plant, and instead try to outsource to someone like Phillips or something...
Wouldn't it be more logical to put your donation into one of the open source game projects? I mean, that way even if the whole effort goes to the waste bin, at least you still get the source code...
Come on people. If we want Linux to truly dethrone M$, we're going to actually have to spend some money! Why is Dell halting Linux installs on their consumer desktops? Because no one bought them. What's the point of forking out $1700 for a computer from Dell with RH7 preinstallted when you can rebuild that 2 year old one and throw your downloaded copy on it? Face it, Dell can't continue throwing money, people and time into products that no one is buying. That's Business Management 101, braniac. Why is Loki going under? Same reason. They invest resources into products that only a few buy and the masses copy!
So get off your penny pinching asses, take some of that cash you saved by using a "free" OS and support the revolution by actually buying Linux-based apps.
This is really too bad - I don't mind paying cash for games - in fact, it made up the largest portion of my personal software expenses during the last 12 months - and I liked the idea of voting with my pocketbook by purchasing T2 for Linux. Guess it's just an example of a good idea coming out a little too early - sad.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
You are absolutely right. I'd be surprised to see any new game companies come out and successfully develop and sell games on any platform, let alone linux. What we need is this: more people using Linux. Once we have that, then we need the game shops that are already established (read: iD Software) to have a completely separate group of engineers that write the game parallel to the windows engineers so that both versions of the game are ready for release when they are done. Then let the user decide which one to buy. Think of this: one company now gets more profit than if they only sold windbloze-centric games as well. Seems like a good idea to me. iD are you listening?
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Firstly, I waited over 8 months for SMAC before cancelling, playing the demo got really boring after a while. The delay was not something I understood, because the game was finished, it was just waiting for them to get the packaging right, aparently.
Secondly, the majority of their games were things the windows platform was supplying better. The games were out on windows sooner, with better hardware support. First person shooters may be some people's idea of the entire gaming industry these days, but not mine. Over half of Loki's lineup is composed of these titles, titles which sell like mad when first released but then drop off sharply when the next FPS comes out. With little staying power, how could they be expected to last long enough to be in strong demand once Loki got around to releasing them?
I really think they would have done better offering the games as downloads, without packaging.
Of the the two games I approached from loki, CivCTP was a disappointing sequel to CivII, and SMAC I got tired of waiting for. On the other hand, outside of Loki, I bought Creatures 3 because of linux support, and I'm going to buy NWN because of linux support as well.
All I Can Say is, "Duh!". What did you expect from a "market" that wants everything "free"? That's why it's doomed to fail -- eventually. You can't make money in Linux/GPL and that is, dear children, what makes the world keep going 'round.
After spending $150,000 writing free software, the thought has occurred to me to file chapter 11. Let's face it. Who cares it the software is open source. Just make sure you don't have to pay for it.
I've personally bought Quake III even though I haven't the hardware to run it: Soldier of Fortune, Myth II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and Heretic II.
All to support the company, if nothing else. Will buy the remaining titles soon...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Great, soon you'll be one of those losers who have a college degree but also are $50k in debt and file for bankruptcy 2 years out of college.
Window rules the desktop, it's hegemony will not be destroyed. Linux is becoming the premier unix workstation/server. It was never wise to try to compete with Windows on the desktop. The desktop is like the appliance market and the gap is just way to wide.
That's a price just about anyone can afford.
Don't donate to a life-saving charity, donate to a money losing company. Loki is in it for the cash - just like all companies.
[Devil's advocate] Why do I care if the charity saves lives? If the life-saving charity isn't doing anything to improve *my* quality of life, and the money-losing company is, why shouldn't I put my money there? [/Devil's advocate]
I know someone will think this is a troll, but I think you should ask yourself - why are you doing this Linux thing? Is it just to be totally contrarian to everything? You might stop to think about it, before it's all gone, and decide if you can $upport these companies. If you don't care, you don't care, but a lot of people seem to here.
My copy of Descent III is ordered... Let's give their shipping and handling department a rough week and place some orders ;-)
On a serious note, I don't really ever buy games (don't play them much), but we can't let Loki go. They contribute SO MUCH to the community! A great deal of the code they write gets put under GPL or LGPL and is of high standard.
here's some asterix and hash for ya: Y**O##U**S##U**C##K**A##M**U##S**T##Y**L##E**T##C* *H##W##A**Y##S**A##S**S##H**O##L**E##
mmm.... asterix....
Sorry, but Loki's ports of UT and Quake 3 arena suck ass, almost as if it were a botched implementation. On my Mandrake 7.2 system, UT can't run despite the presence of Glide_v3 and my Voodoo Banshee. Even in software mode, UT segfaults for some unknown reason. Last time I checked, there were some 4000 posts in the loki newsgroups with all sorts of weird problems with UT.
I checked out their support pages, and they're sparse at best. I then find out that I have to manually recompile and install Mesa --with-DRI-support. Okay, it's off to DRI.sourceforge.net I go. I am totally lost here.
All I have to do in Windows is double-click on the "Unreal" icon and I'm up and running. No bullshit about Mesa, X, libVoodooMesaGL.so lib_pakistani_calender.so.1. Frankly, getting Loki's ports of Q3A and UT to work in Linux is more trouble than it's worth, and goes to show that, for me, Linux just isn't a viable gaming platform.
Since I got into Linux four years ago, the amount of time I have spent/wasted playing games has dropped dramatically. Before I was introduced to Linux, I played games in Windows because I had nothing better to do. Once hooked on Linux, suddenly new learning opportunities became available and so I started to use my time more profitably, playing less games and doing more coding and system tweaking. My point is that, for many people, Linux has made using a computer fun and interesting... so suddenly that large heap of games (both windows and Linux based) becomes redundant. With this in mind, does a company (that makes its money porting games to Linux) have a sound business model? The unfortunate predicament of Loki suggests not. Visit http://www.kernelhacking.org to learn how to hack the Linux kernel.
Their debts are USD 430,000. The prices of their games range from USD 20 to 50. So if 10,000 slashdotters buy 1 or 2 games they have enough cash to pay the debt. Ten thousand, that is not a ridiculously big number.
(I have no idea how much of the price is production cost; to solve the problem completely they probably need something like 100,000 purchases, amounting to a fourth of all slashdotters ever registered buying a game, which is getting less probable).
If you want to personally port a game to Linux, write me a letter (remove the _nospamplease), and I'll try to hook you up with the game author and source code. The catches are: a. I need a resume and convincing that you're not a flake, and b. you'll probably have to release it in binary form only.
This is how Linux game ports work- one by one.
Frankly, most people would rather have stuff free than have to pay for it.
Try to sell a new/used computer to a regular windows user with the licensed MS software on it (and the appropriate charges.)
Guess what! The consumer wants the SW for free! OR, in the case of used systems, the entire thing for 50% less than a sample clock-speed cheap-o-shit-e-machines system with a lamer monitor and win-crap hardware AFTER all the ISP 3 year prison term leases! It doesn't matter IF they drive lexus, they want to pay NOTHING for a 'lexus' quality system! GUESS WHY Software doesn't make a difference in the sales pitch to the consumer! PYRATE!!! Yes indeed!!!
THE ONLY people who buy licensed MS SW is the businesses and those buying NEW system from BIG-named vendors!
Ok, so you guys pay $70, but we pay $50? Does that mean things are cheaper in Canada?
Sure buying games is great, but even if everyone who posted saying "Oh this is terrible", bought a game, it would only be a small blip for the year and nowhere near the amount of capital needed to turn a company around.
With that said, is there anything we can do to help Loki? Anything to help possible investors get interested in the company? Anything to help those working at Loki who may be out of a job soon?
I may not have the $$ to bring the company back to life. But if it was to go under, I'd be willing to contribute to a severance fund for the employees. Would anyone else show their support in this way? Any other ideas?
And this is how it should be.
Free operating system, free games. If we had settled for less before, we would all be using Windows.
amen, every now and then someone on slashdot actually makes a good post with real logic and the right kind of attitude. Thank you for actually being sensible and reasonable, and for understanding the real reason why linux is falling.
Show them what? That Linux games don't sell?
That was the only game I purchased after 1996. I've been meaning to buy several more but damn the time it slips away. I think I'll buy several more and help them out.
I guess someone has to say it... "All your Loki are belong to us..."
I ran for the bus
To see, BUS NOT IN SERVICE
Dr. Fazulli
If they can hold on for another year or so, things may start looking up. Linux 3D support is getting better, and with MacOS X, game developers may start thinking more about non-Windows platforms anyway.
I remember hearing about apple filing chapter 11, maybe loki can get Steve Jobs to bring them back, heh.
Both of you sound like faggots. I am issuing a cease and desist to your nancy-boy ravings.
Well Loki - I hope you pull through this. Whether you do or do not come out in one piece all the excellent work you've done will just seed the next phase in Linux gaming, I hope. Including SDL and the installer/updater package, which I think Sam did, no?
:-)
'Till then, I have Kohan and Tribes2 (and a few others) to keep me busy. I'll be fine (more than fine) until neverwinter nights comes out
Thanks for all the great games! - JB
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
The linux community has rallied behind causes we felt were worth supporting in the past, however I cannot remember any instance in which the community has rallied behind a commercial venture before. Anyone interested in setting up a Paypal account for the purpose of helping out Loki? How much are linux games worth to you? Would you be willing to donate a few bucks to help keep Loki afloat? Consider what message this would send to Windows-only game developers...the linux community is not only wanting for games, but willing to support companies that will provide for them.
Anyone with me?
--- "...And everybody died!!! Except for me, of course...you know why? Because I had my tray table up...and my seat ba
No, what will save Loki is if you go to their site and order a game or two or three rather than lamenting the fact that they are having financial difficulties.  I ordered Kohan last night directly from Loki and will be ordering Rune and the expansion pack tonight after the site is no longer slashdotted.  The surest way to help Loki is to give them a reason to move some product!
I'm stunned at the news. I thought that Loki was one of the few companies in the Linux world that was making money. I know that I have bought a few games from them, and have been looking forward to buying more. It looks like I'll need to buy sooner, rather than later.
Loki is one of the cornerstones of the Linux community. Without high-quality, professional games available for Linux, there is no realistic way to convince home users to make the switch, regardless of how good Linux gets otherwise. Loki has a good business plan -- porting the most popular computer games to the Linux platform. They're the only company doing this, and if they go under, the chance that *any* company will *ever* consider it again becomes negligible.
While this is just a Chapter 11 bankruptcy (rather than the fatal Chapter 7), it indicates that Loki is in big trouble, and they very much need our help. If you have any interest in Linux games, if you have any interest in seeing Linux on the desktop, go to lokigames.com, and place an order.
Otherwise, this whole grand experiment becomes much, much harder to pull off.
Well, if they would sell warez-like release of their games, just downloadable files and pdf manuals or even without manuals or with just a stripped version, they could charge half the cost since all the money would go to the company and wouldn't be lost in the supply chain. And it would be very good solution for these types who say that the cost is "just too high" so they better download it from warez. I guess this could be good marketing move, no?
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I've been putting off buying games for a while, but now it looks like the time, before Loki goes under.
If enough of us buy their games now they will stay afloat and port more games
SIR!!!!! You are the winner of the coveted
FUCKWAD OF THE DAY AWARD!!!!
You will be the envy of all your fellow linux-lovin' fuckwads!!!!
!!!!!!!!!EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Loki has produced quality products that deserve the support of gamers. Come on, Slashdot! Show you really give a damn about Linux and BUY something, for chrissakes!
All about me
another linux victory!
http://linuxmonkey.freeservers.com
i've had win2k up for a lot longer than I have ever had a linux workstation up... but maybe that is saying something else!
The company does not need one person with deep pockets to save the company. They need lots of people with average pockets to buy their products.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
It's not over until the fat lady sings, of course, but I think I hear her sucking air into her lungs and clearing her throat. That fat lady is going to sing soon and when she does she's going to blow some eardrums. There are very few companies that survive the chapter 11 stage. Stop deluding yourselves guys.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Don't forget that a console is designed from the ground up to make sense in a living room. A computer doesn't, for most people.
You know, I remember back in the days of the Commodore 64, companies didn't need million dollar budgets, just fresh ideas and talented programmers. The Amiga was the same way. You didn't need an absolutely huge game base (and hell, if you owned an Amiga, chances are 90% of your games were pirated, anyway), and yet many game shops still did brisk business (I'm not justifying piracy, but it was the truth.)
While I applaud Loki and others for doing good "ports" work, where are the Linux originals? No, I don't mean mahjong (although that's a ton of fun). I mean, where's the Team 17's and the Bitmap Brothers? Where are the old demo-coders turned game writers? Is Linux just not an attractive enough platform for these guys?
I guess what I'm getting at is that great games don't necessarily mean great, cutting edge graphics. My favorite Role Playing Game on the Playstation is Tales of Destiny, a 2D sprite based game originally written for the Super Nintendo(Famicom). It's been stated before, but it seems everyone wants gee-whiz bang graphics (don't get me wrong, what the Bitmap Bros. and Team 17 was just short of phenomenal for it's time and I *still* like the look) and the game gets left behind.
Game Fans shout "We gotta have the latest quake/unreal engine to make a good game" and the companies follow, and no one buys it because it comes out on Windows first. What's the problem here? Maybe it's because we're focusing on the wrong way to get people to buy the games! You win when you have gamers switching to *linux* to play that uber-cool game. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I guess the point is, fuck the ports. They're nice, if you have the cash to port them, but maybe game makers should quit having the same, stupid "me too" attitude and start writing "original" games, for linux.
What happened to the deal with Nokia to bring Linuxgames for their linux-based Media Terminal?
If that deal comes reality that could bring Loki many bucks and maybe save them...
Any ideas about that?
Scott Draeker always dodged sales figure questions, and we all *knew* that they were abysmally low. Shareware-level low. Then I saw their actually figures through one of those sales tracking services and there were in that range. A couple of guys taking four months to port a game that sells 500 copies? That's not a business, sadly.
Wel..it was a matter of time...Linux was a marginal market, too small to base a decent strategy for a company.
Only problem with that theory is that being free is the only reason that most people even use Linux. Of course, they have no idea what TCO is, but we won't get into that. Linux's initial zero cost is just about the only mitigating feature going up against all that Win2K/XP has to offer (better performance, better hardware, better business apps, better games, better tools, economy of scale, etc.). You start expecting people to pay for Linux stuff instead of getting it for free, and that single advantage goes away, and Linux will soon get its nuts stomped off.
Jesus, I didn't know you could get that sort of performance with wine!
Well, do you know that game you have being thinking about buying?
Don't think!
Go buy it!
Guys, you can't have it both ways:
If proprietary software is evil, then Loki was evil.
If Loki was good, then proprietary software is good.
Pick a moral stance and stay with it. To paraphrase J. C. Watts, integrity is doing the right thing, even when it's inconvenient.
Linux doesn't have many games for it, so if you like to play computer games, you've already got another computer that runs Windows for them, or you dual boot your Linux computer. And if there's a game that you really wanted, you've already bought the Windows version -- months before the Linux port comes out. When the Linux port does finally come out, you may have moved on to the next game, or you may just not feel like paying for the game *again*.
Had Loki been able to release Linux ports of games at the same time as the Windows versions, things may have been very different. I'd certainly have bought some of the games if I didn't have to wait.
Also note that Mac ports for games are similar, but they have one big difference -- a Mac cannot run modern PC games (PC emulators aren't quite good enough) but a Linux PC could always be dual booted into Windows. So a Linux user with a PC could always install Windows on another partition if he *really* needed it.
Because of this, the market for Mac games, even Mac ports of games that have been out for months on Windows boxes, is a good deal larger than the market for Linux ports of old Windows games.
I put my guess on Ximian. Sun (a major money provider) can't get their installed base to upgrade from older versions of solaris, never mind accept Gnome as a desktop. Sorry, not happening any time soon.
The problem is, most games appeared on Linux after I have bought them for Windows.
If the game will appear simultaneously on Windows and Linux or at least at Windows version launch the Linux version would be announced, I will definitely get the Linux version.
I will go and purchase one-two games to show my support for the efforts they made: persuading comercial companies to release games for Linux and developing and contributing the SDL.
Loki might go under, or somebody will buy it but Linux is a viable desktop and gaming platform. We have to show this to the game companies.
I don't think Loki died because people bought windows versions of games but rather people didn't buy enough Linux versions. In the end Loki had a poor business model with a market that was too small too support it. Many ideas get abandoned becasue they just can't make money. Hence the concept of a capitalist society. While the ideas of Loki was great the substance behind just wasn't there.
I'd give 'em $50-$100. It's a helluvalot less than the Microsoft task I'd pay, plus the inconvenience of having to boot out of my 100+ uptime in exchange for (tears stream) windows.
Who knows an online place like Amazon's "honor system" (or however) that gives closer to 100% to the company? (Amazon takes 15%).
I'd certainly pay, and I think many other slashdotters would too.
(Of course, conveniently, we wait until they have bankrupt status and all their big evil creditors are screwed out of their investments and 18% APR).
The situation here is a conundrum, a no-win situation, a bootstrapping problem, but that's not what Catch-22 was. In the book, Catch-22 means:
I know, that's pretty nitpicky, but the concept is so interesting that I like talking about it (even when no one's reading). Unfortunately, there's no simple way to explain it that makes it clearly distinct from the no-win situation. It's related, but not the same. Catch-22 is a paradox... that's what made Joseph Heller so cool; coming up with stuff like that.
So, just to plead for mercy from the -1 Offtopic mod, I tried to think of an equivalent Catch-22 for the situation the poster mentioned.... No luck so far. Somehow it'd have to involve like, "you can only make a Linux port of a game if the Windows version flops, but if the Windows version flops the game maker goes bankrupt and can't make a Linux port...." Something like that.
Ah, why bother? I need coffee....
N
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
Game-Freaks Hitlist of Lokigames:
1. Tribes 2 - Top of the pops intelligent Multiplayer Aktion. The last word in multiplayer gaming.
Play a whole bunch of different Team and FFA Modes in a mixed indoor/outdoor enviroment. A massive arsenal of different special purpose weapons. Be a heavy mortar carrier and have the forward observers on your team mark the distant targets for you so you can >ouch!Or hopp into a freshly produced vehicle such as a flyer. Alone our as team with different tasks such as: Pilot, Rear Gunner, Bombdropper or turret gunopperator.
Get this kick-ass game right now and enjoy intelligent gameplay across the globe via WAN or at home at your next LAN Session with up to 50(!!) players per match. Set up your own deticated server and have your locals join in. This sucker just plain rox!
2. Descent 3 - Don't get sick, sissyboy!
360 by 360 gutwrenching action. The third version of the classic 3D Shooter comes with tons of special effects, an intelligent plotlined singleplayer mission-serial and the brand new fusion engine that gives you fluent and seamless indoors and outdoor gameplay.
Match witts with 'bots that sneak up on you whilst avoiding your line of sight, retreat when damaged to get help, hide and lay await for you and work in teams! D3 offeres the most sopisticated 3D Flightshooter AI available!
Play LAN or WAN based multiplayersessions. Set up your own deticated server and rock the block.
Come and pick up your major asskick with this alltime-allstar 1st rank Actionsmacker in a box.
3. Sid Meiser's Alpha Centauri + Crossfire Extension - The numder one "brains on" Simulation and Startegy Adventure. :-) ). Get your special offer bundle of Sid Meier's Award-winning Alpha Centauri plus Crossfire Extension Pack now.
Your are not the Fragger-Fraggle type? Very well. Dive into deepest gameplay with this Sci-Fi Space-Epic. Enjoy hours and hours of exploration and build-up startegy gameplay of the finest. Play epic scale multiplayer sessions via LAN our WAN (Flatrate recommended
On a more personal note of a gamer: I just ditched Mickeysoft for good the other day and I can't live without games. UT and D3 probably will get boring some day. That's the right time to get myself T2, , Rune & Mindrover. If every Linuxfreak does that within the next few days they're gonna be outa dept in no time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Thanks to Loki's instructions on how to use the Windows Quake3 CD under linux, I bought the cheaper Windows version instead of Loki's linux version. I guess their helpful instructions were in the spirit of linux, but they didn't serve to make them any money in this case.
It's a shame. I really appreciated Loki's efforts.
Well, I guess there's always Tuxracer, but pretty soon you'll have to pay for that...
Definitely. Many users out there still use old 133-333 mHz systems. With that they couldn't run a game like Tribes 2, say. A PS2 on the other hand guarantees that a person could play the game bug-free and such. Having a console also allows matches against friends without buying several copies of the same game as well as having to own several really advanced systems that can be hooked up to a LAN. (unless you want to steal CD keys for Internet matches) Consoles offer a quick and simple method of instant fun at extremely cheaper prices.
did you ever get the feeling that you're being followed?
...
,6. 6!!!! check
are you not familiar with the book of revelations?
he forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand and on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name and the number is 6, 6, 6.
What can such a specific prophecy mean?
What is the mark?
Well, the mark is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode...
Every barcode is divided into two parts by three markers and those three markers are always represented by the numbers; 6, 6
So what does it say? Nobody will be able to buy or sell without that mark?
It looks like the Loki order page is swamped right now (comming back with mysql too many connections messages), so maybe the community is doing it's bit.
So.. if you like games, or like companys that work hard to make GNU/Linux more popular follow me over to Loki with a credit card.
No, Loki did port QIII. ID ported Quake 1 & 2, and those ports sucked. The Linux port of Quake 1 sucked so badly, the quakeforge project is working on fixing it up and making it work right (and they've done an excellent job so far!!)
No joke, I was downloading Loki Demos about 2 hours ago and I said to myself "Hmm, I wonder how Loki is doing.." and in the middle of the download, throughput drops by a factor of 10.
I check slashdot, and right at the top is "LOKI FILES FOR CHAPTER 11". SUCK.
That really is a shame. Loki has a pretty good business model. If there's a company that doesn't deserve to go out of business, it's them.
NOTE: This does NOT MEAN Linux gaming is dead or unprofitable. In these situations, game distributors made money because (IIRC), Loki ported the game for free and simply collected the profits on sales, giving a cut to the publisher/developer.
Before Loki, individuals would basically approach companies (or later be sought out by companies) and asked to do the ports. Greg Alexander, for example, used to leaked quake source to do an svgalib port. It was sent to Carmack, who not only didn't call the FBI, but used it as the base for the official port. That fellow as later contacted by Raven to port Heretic 2, and he eventually turned down the offer to port Soldier of Fortune.
I don't see Linux dying. I think Loki was just unlucky. We'll see.
Hm. I hate to say it, but there's a BIG difference between Mac and Linux. Mac is mainstream, and there's a LOT of them out there. I wish the guys at Loki the best, but they're doing good work for insufficient rewards. As stated above, there's too much piracy. Anyone out there who has warezed a Loki game should feel VERY bad right now.
Aren't Loki in bed with nokia? Aren't they developing the Nokia Media Terminal together? Isn't it Linux-based? Huh? Huh?
There is nothing strange about it. From the consumer's POV, console gaming has none of the hassles of PC gaming: no need to learn a complex interface just to get the game installed and running; no hardware hassles - no incompatibilies, constant upgrades, or significant initial investment; and no needing to patch the software you just paid USD$50 just to make it playable.
It isn't strange, it's common sense.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I know what you mean. I just played through the demo of Kohan and was going to check out Loki's site for more information on it. So I pulled up Mozilla and my homepage (Slashdot) loads and what do I see: Loki is dying! Gah! I really hate dual booting to play games, and the Kohan demo ran great on my (fairly meager by todays standards) system.
Now it seems like the only thing that will save Loki is either a killer title or just a sudden surge in Linux gaming popularity. I'm not enthusiastic about the second possiblity, but the first has happened before (although as a game porting company Loki is not going to have an easy time making any sort of killer app).
By the way, for those of you who don't know, Loki's demo system is pretty cool, it keeps a list of all of the available demos in a central app and lets you automaticaly download, install, play, and uninstall them. It's really quite nice.
I read the internet for the articles.
The success of the Quake series, Black and White, and other substanceless eye-candy should be a fairly obvious indication that the average gamer doesn't give a shit about gameplay.
- Give away all your possesions except a tie-die t-shirt, some flip-flops, and a pair of moth-eaten bicycle shorts;
- Grow a beard -- yes, even the ladies;
- Live under the couch in the student lounge of your choice, eating only LSD and Cheetos;
- Sneak into library computer labs at night, install GNU/Linux on all computers, and program freeware for all of your hippy friends;
- And finally, decry all who oppose you as "bourgeois, capitalist pigs."
This is the true path to Freedom. It worked for RMS, and it worked for Charlie Manson, at least until he killed all those people. So don't buy Loki games, kids -- Loki deserves to burn, for the crime of accepting money for software!--
I like to watch.
Loki has filed chapter 11. This doesn't mean they are dead, but that they are in debt and need a way out. This move will allow them to reorganize, but without our support, they may soon disappear. If you want to save Loki, the best thing you can do is go buy some of their games. So get in there and spend some money. It's the only way to save them.
Also, keep in mind that loosing Loki is especially bad for Linux since there is nobody else to take their place.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
I don't honestly see Linux game porting companies as being successful anytime in the near future. This is for several reasons. The easiest way to explain this is to draw a parallel between Loki and another company, say, Wildcard Design (dead link, I know; it went out of business a couple of months ago, but you can find some info on it via a Google search).
Wildcard Design was a company that was founded to port games to BeOS. Despite the high licensing fees and restrictive NDAs the founder had to surmount to obtain the source code to the games he wanted to port, he decided to give it a go. Needless to say, he failed, the main reason for which is this:
There are not enough users of non-Microsoft operating systems to make profitable a company dedicated only to porting high-profile games to them. The cost is simply too high for the authors to recoup. A few games might turn a profit, but eventually, after even one poorly-received game, perhaps, the company will find itself deep in the red. It cannot sell games to nearly the scope of audience that Windows ports sell to because the gaming types generally are not comfortable enough to migrate away from the operating systems they are used to, which in most cases means Windows. Hence, sales of ported games will barely be a dent in the overall sales of said games.
That's so right. Usually by the time Loki releases the game it's in the bargain bin at the local big-box store. Very unfortunate for them, because ordering online for full price and waiting for delivery is much less attractive than picking it up for $15 on the way home and rebooting to play it.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
It'll have two effects - first it'll provide evidence that Linux does have support for games. 2nd - it'll guarentee Loki sales.
Its too bad that Loki is having so much trouble. There are a few possibilities, however.
More bundling might be a good idea. I noticed the Civilization Call To Power that was available in one of the Linux distributions. Perhaps similar deals could be made with Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. More demos of the games would be cool too.
Anything that can reduce the cost to port the games would help a lot as well. Adding the cost of licensing, porting, packaging and distribution, its got to be close to developing the game themselves.
Just a few thoughts.
We're watching bits and pieces of it go now. Sega went under and for all you Microsoft haters out there you will be happy to know that the X-Box will follow suit. Looking at the trends, I don't see anything surviving, not Nintendo, not Sony, and none but a few PC developers.
Of course, while I believe X-box is doomed, I don't think the rest of this trend is irreversible. However, I think one thing is fundamentally clear... the future of gaming on Linux is emulation.
Of course, I'm far more worried about the idea of a semi-permanent economic recession. (After all, if I get another job I can spend my money hunting down classic games I missed... but if I remain unemployed I don't want to fill up the spare room in my parents house with a lot of games....)
but sending money to a company in the midst of chapter11 seems well FOOLISH. I wish them the best but they will have to prove they are valid
company with a decent market and share to survive.
No one can prop them up.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Amen. I worked at a company that had a reasonably sucessful game division, in that it almost broke even (at least until they shut it down).
Over the past 2 years, just about every game company has been bought, gone under, or had massive layoffs (often on the order of 1/2-2/3 the workforce). Good games are extremely expensive to make, hardcore games have very high standards, and there is so much competition that games don't stay on the shelves long.
The simple fact of the matter is, that Linux is for 'rocket scientist' types, and geeks. The ordinary man in the street simply cannot get past the first hurdle of Linux usage.
The moment you try to explaing 'fdisk' and 'lilo' to a non-technical user they run screaming back to their cosy Microsoft world.
But I think that's a good thing. I've been using Linux for years and years now, I switched from NetBSD 0.8 (which gives you a clue how long). I do not like the idea that Linux is dumbing itself down to compete with Windows.
I disagree.
GUIs and systems that are easy to start using are not inherently evil. I despise this attitude that because "I know something very well because I have been there from the start and learned as I went along, all others who follow must suffer as I did." or "If you're stupid, please go away and use your stupid-person OS."
That's a great way to make sure that your little secret discovery will never be embraced by anyone outside of a tiny proportion of the population. If you think, as I do, that almost everyone would be better off if they used an OS other than MS or Mac or even Solaris (which I'm using right now), then you ought to be trying to make things easier for people to get started.
Not everyone needs to compile their own kernel and truthfully I have only looked at the kernel code once, and I never bothered trying to compile or configure it. Why? I just don't care. It works, and it lets me do what I want. I can write programs and documents and do all the things I love to do, and I get to do it in a cheap UNIX where noone is going to come and break down my door to let me participate in a "special license validation service offer", or get sent to jail.
When I installed it, I just plopped in the disk and the CD and it basically did everything for me. I think having used various types of UNIX over the years made it easier, but it was still easy.
Truthfully, the Linux GUIs look a lot like Windows. Sure the buttons look different and the colors are different, but a great deal of it is very similar. There's nothing wrong with this because you shouldn't look at it as "You're trying to look like Windows", but "You're trying to make your GUI look like the standards that have evolved over the past 15 years". There's nothing wrong with taking what other people have done in terms of making GUIs easier to use and trying to implement those ideas.
The key here is that Linux must be made in such a way that the casual user can get far enough into it to get hooked, without making them stray too far from the familiar. Then, they will be able to use their standard tools (email/browser/word processing/spreadsheet/etc...) in a familiar environment that will crash on them a lot less than their old one did. There is nothing wrong with using Linux like this.
There will be those who get interested and want to go deeper into the system and start trying other things. Most geeks who would go this far have already heard of Linux and are using it. That means there have to be ways for the casual user to start to poke around at some of the more obscure things after he/she is comfortable with the basics of getting work done. But, the process should not be set up so that they have to learn everything all at once and have to feel stupid because everyone else using Linux knows everything already. That's the mark of arrogance and/or poor design, and it will be doing the work of Microsoft for them.
So, "making it easier to start" is not the same as "dumbing down". There will always be terminals and source code and compilers if people want to use them, but you shouldn't force people to use them just because you happen to know how to use it, or because you had to learn the hard way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to use Linux, and you shouldn't attack people who choose to do things differently than you do, or who aren't interested in the things you're interested in. Linux can be much more than a hobbyist toy, but people need to stop acting so high and mighty and figure out ways to let the rest of the world join in.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
And now Quake-fucking-four is coming out. Gee, what a fun FRAG FEST we'll have playing the same game again, but this time you can see actual internal organs coming out their asses and there will be 2 new artifacts:
- Buy-upgrade-pack and
- read-month-long-jokes-on-uf-about-how-cool-q4-is
The last good game I played on the PC was DeusEx. We need more games with substance and the developers need to spend less time on meaningless eye-candy. In my good-old-days of rec.games.nintendo posting, this would always happen with new consoles, there would be many games that took advantage of the new superior graphics but had mind-numbingly boring game-play. Then, with time, the new graphics would wear off and fun games would start to appear as developers got used to the system.The PC, however, is constantly in that new hardware void. There are always new toys and the software developers keep churning out the same crap over and over but with updated goodies for the graphics; "Now Supports T&L! Woo-Hoo!" Nevermind gameplay.. Then Loki ports them over to Linux, charges twice as much and wonders why they don't sell any copies. I have purchased no less than 5 titles from Loki (Myth 2, RRT2, Q3, s3k, and SOF) and the only one that was any fun was s3k which was so buggy that I had to shut it down every few hours (but the Windows version suffers from the same problem). They ported all that garbage but then failed to port Halflife, StarCraft, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Diablo 2 and DeusEx -- the very best games over the last few years.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Something is wrong is this world. Loki is a very good company, with very good people.
A couple years ago Microsoft was buying up PC game companies left and right, where is the IBM promise of "billions of $$ on Linux" pledge now?
Maybe someone should set up a pledgeboard, something like "I promise to buy $XXX of Loki Games or the SDL book" within two weeks".
IF the SDL book comes out, I pledge to buy both it and the Tribes 2 for Linux, even though Dynamix is dead.
It's not just Linux that's dying, it's not just the dot-coms, look at Japan, the lowest stock indexes in 17 years. The world economy is collapsing.
Goddamn government, while they've dragged out the Microsoft trial for 15 years, they should have been doing the same thing with software that the post office does with their vehicle fleets..splitting up the dollars spent between vendors. The monopoly desktop would not even be an issue now.
Linux is ready for the desktop. When people use it work, they will start using it at home, and more games will sell. RedHat, IBM and Apple (for example) would get a broader base of enhancement requests and the state of Linux/BSD/Apple would increase rapidly.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I personaly would love to mess with a 2d scroller, like Super Metroid quality.
games are belong to chaper 11?
They may not be dead yet, but (IMHO) Loki should die. I don't mean to be mean spirited about it. I love the idea of Loki, but it just doesn't seem practical to me anymore.
I virtually stopped buying games for my PC back when I upgraded from Sega Genesis to Sony Playstation. For me, gaming has moved into the appliance faze.
A Linux PC is (and should be) the farthest thing from an appliance. Of course the technologies in it can be used to build appliances, but this Linux PC on my desktop isn't an appliance, and I don't want it to be.
For gaming, I want an appliance. Sure, the console market isn't perfect, but it's good enough and it is getting better.
(In point of fact, I do use my PC for gaming. I play Same GNOME whenever I need a little mind-numbing escape from the grind. I definately use my PC a lot to support my non-computer-RPG habit. But for the serious shell-out-sixty-bucks gaming, it's PS2 all the way. Oh, wait -- I do use my PC to look up tips and cheat codes on the web...)
From Loki's front page...
Will that date slip?  I've no idea nor am I worried.  This is the first time ordering direct from Loki as all my other game purchases (Civ:CTP, Q3, SOF, D3, SMAC, MindRover, Myth II, HG2, Tribes 2 and Terminus) have either been through Tux Games or my local Frys.  I just got confirmation about Rune and "Programming Linux Games" shipping and expect to hear back on my Kohan order as well in the next day or two.  Not that I have any time to play the games before December, but so life goes. :-)
There are many Linux companies out there that are not doing very well right now. What is it that makes Loki sooooo much more important? The impact that games can have on a desktop OS is potentially large, but still, this is just one company out of many Linux companies that is having a hard time.
I've read the Linux Review posting and the comments that followed it, and I have to agree with the bulk of the comments that state that Linux users still think that things like games should be free. Pull your heads out, folks. This is what happens when you adopt that mentality.
Loki had a shaky business model to begin with (a game company with no IP? Good friggin' luck), and that alone should have indicated that the people who give a damn about gaming on Linux (unlike me; I couldn't care less) should put out extra effort to support them financially. If anyone failed Loki, it's Linux gamers and Loki's feeble business management folks. You need IP (that's "intellectual property", for those who don't understand the acronym) and paying customers to survive, and as far as I can tell Loki didn't have much of either. It's sad, but it's a fact of business that the ones that have a compelling model, wide spread appeal, and PAYING CUSTOMERS will probably survive.
Loki probably assumed that the Linux gaming crowd mirrored the Windows gaming crowd. I will go out on a limb and guess that Windows gamers include more financially stable adults than the Linux gaming crowd. Just a guess.
Bankrupt or not, buy more shit from Loki! It's not untill you realise how fucked Linux Gaming would be without Loki - that it hits you!
When you file for chapter 11, you are seeking protection from your creditors, largely so you can have enough money left over to pay off the employees. Companies are obligated to pay off their employees before creditors, so chapter 11 is a mechanism for them to reserve the cash to do this.
There are a few isoloated cases of filing for chapter 11 pushing a company back to profitability, but these are an infitesimal fraction. Once you are bankrupt, you are persona non grata to lenders - you have in fact sought legal protection to become a deadbeat loan - and its nearly impossible to run a business without lines of credit.
Rest assured no one files for chapter 11 unless its pretty much game over.
Ah, yes, what an amazing and convincing argument you have here. So, according to your logic:
* If my dog bites people and is mean, all dogs bite people and are mean.
* If a black man robs you, all black men are robbers.
Glad to see you find your world so easy to generalize.
Bullshit. The stances being taken on Slashdot are more like:
The concept of "dog" is immoral, so only own cats.
Except my dog Loki, he's OK.
Peddle your straw man somewhere else. Slashdotters have been claiming left and right that the very CONCEPT of proprietary software is theft, but now everybody's in a tizzy over poor Loki.
I didn't make the argument black and white; I'm one of the ones claiming that it *ISN'T* black and white. Proprietary software is OK. Loki is good. Microsoft is good too. Windows sucks, so I don't use it; but it doesn't mean Microsoft can't make something good I will use, such as my Intellimouse.
I use Linux because it's better, not because Microsoft is evil. If Microsoft makes a great program for Linux, I might very well use it.
It is a wild ride in the market these days, and the outlook of low profits coupled with fierce competition means a few companies who are willing (and able) to bend laterally will. Loki doesn't have much room to move. They provide one product (in a target market sense) on one platform - games on Linux. Sure, Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 rock under Linux, especially Quake 3. But if they have no angle to stimulate interest, they will, unfortunately, be tacked up with the statistics from this recession.
Was under chapter eleven throughout the 1980s... but you still have planes flying there now. Sometimes they even stay in the air better than aeroflot ones do! (They need to, since they hang around airports waiting to land so long)
Check this out: US admits losing nuke off the coast of Georgia.
If we slashdot readers can only find that nuke and recover it, we could use it to bail out Loki!
Imagine the possible schemes:
Open up a PayPal account for the benefit of Loki, and threaten to nuke Microsoft unless they contribute $1,000,000.
Threaten the United States Government that the Linux community will nuke a random city if they don't pass a law making Windows games illegal, and forgive Loki of all their tax obligations.
Nuke ESR, to make him shut him up finally. (That will improved the public's perception of the Linux community so much that Loki will have no problem selling as many games as they need to stay in business.)
If we play our cards right, we can do all three! What a glorious day that would be for Open Software!!! Does anyone have access to some boats and diving equipment we could use? Let's get started!!!
It's simply these game authors who charge exorbitant rates to allow Loki to port their games. The reason they're charging so much is that they're assuming the games are worth that much because of how much they make on Windoze.
Linux users should rally behind Loki and petition game software authoring companies to charge a fee that's according to the Linux market. They have nothing to lose and much to gain if the Linux gaming industry grows.
They never charged that much 5 to 7 years ago when the Windows market wasn't as big as it is today
For Hell's sake. Chapter 11 is not going out of business, that is what Chapter 7 is. They may yet go out of business if they don't handle the restructuring of debt, etc, properly but right now they are NOT going out of frickin' business. Got it?
Next. There are some problems with the Loki game model. I own 3 of their games and about to purchase a 4th so I am supporting them and I actually really wanted the games too. The problem, however, is that the games they port do come out so much later than the Windoze release. This wouldn't be so bad, in that I am not terribly impatient, if I knew ahead of time that they were going to port something. I bought Alpha Centauri for doze and then well after the fact find that Loki was going to port it.
If I had known, I wouldn't have bought the doze version.
It would be nice if Loki, whenever possible, give early and immediate announcements that they will be porting this or that game to linux - as early as possible, like right after getting the go ahead from the originating game company. Then, if I knew that in a few months or even half a year (or so) that a linux version for Halo was going to become available, I would wait without complaint. I have a stack of games I have yet to play so I can wait for the port on lots of games (except "Doom III" and "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" - but fortunately, id software is good about releasing officially non-supported linux binaries to work with their games).
Loki should try to jump on the train for a likely game as soon as it is announced (Halo should have been such a one but there is NO WAY there will EVER be a linux port of that game since M$ owns Bungie - Macs will get it only because M$ has to toss the usual bone out to try to avoid monopoly talk). Get the OK and immediately announce the agreement. Then, the more adult-like of us will be patient enough to wait for the linux port. The silly children will be incapable of waiting for more than a day or so and will just have to buy the doze version because we all know that a game magically sucks if it is more than a week past the release date and you buy it.
Loki also should also try to get agreements from game makers to let them work with them to produce a linux binary that can be burned into the same CD that the doze version is - and agree to handle the support issues for it. Then, we could just buy the CD and install our doze version, or Mac version, or loki-supplied linux version without having to wait for a fully and independently packaged linux version to appear. For a small percentage of each sale loki provides the linux binary and support for it.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Let's see. Everybody who feels guilty buys 3 games. That means Loki might make a little extra dough to stay around for a little longer. But what's the difference? As harsh as it may seem, Loki is a business and as such they have to make money. [more arguments deleted...]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't your argument basically assume that the market for Linux games is never going to get better? Yes, if Loki is losing money now, and things never get better, then saving them once by buying a lot of games won't help much. But if they manage to stick around a bit longer, and the market improves, then they might just make money and not die.
Unless you're capable of predicting how the Linux game market will change, you can't assume that Loki won't start making money tomorrow (or in six months, etc). The economy is getting worse, but high-end hardware (especially memory) is getting cheaper too. So who knows, really?
I think the last win~0 game I got was Serious Sam, and that was a long time ago. Nowadays I boot Hurd a lot more often than I boot win~0.
I'm considering phasing out my micros~1 compatibility completely other than making a small FreeDOS boot partition and using the Wine emulator to play Half Life. ( It actually works in OpenGL mode, but the menus are kinda weird ).
Clickety Click
MindRover is for the logical thinking type- and is excellent (Don't forget that it NEEDS 3D accel...) It's not your normal strategy/action fare, but it's awesome just the same. Check the minimums and give the demo a whirl- most will be pleasantly surprised.
Alpha Centauri's just good- it's from Sid Meyer and could technically be called Civ3 (Not to knock Civ:CTP, an awesome game in and of itself...)
You have Myth2- it's challenging; you should be playing it.
If you're into 3rd person RPG/Action games Rune will fit the bill, being visually impressive and fairly immersive at the same time. Be warned, it's got steep machine requirements and you're better off on the high-horsepower end of the spectrum for this one.
Team play works well on Tribes 2, but you're going to need the most muscular of machines (you need that even under Windows!) for this one. With an NVidia GeForce 2 card and a PIII-750 or better, you'll be treated to a visual feast and rather good multiplayer game play.
Kohan looks to be yet another one- unique real-time-strategy (Myth2 is a sort of RTS- but it's different than Kohan...) and nice visuals.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Ideally, all software should be open, yes.
The world is not an ideal place.
Some things either can't be or really shouldn't be open sourced- at least not at this point in the development of our "civilization", if you can call it that.
I've never once said that all proprietary software is theft- nor has many others. Get off your own high horse there, sir- you're making yourself the fool just as the "open source advocates" that spout off about what you're accusing all of us of.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The market for Linux computer games is far smaller than that of Windows. Therfore, not as many computer games can be commercially successful in Linux as in Windows (even considering the far lower cost of porting vs. development). Because of this Loki must only port games that have a strong appeal with a large portion of gaming subset of the linux crowd. It is usually very difficult to determine which games will be successful with the afore said group. Therfore, Loki must wait until it sees which games are popular with that group and port only those games.
I'll look to like if looking liking move...
Simple, they run too slowly on X-Windows. Plain and simple. X-Windows needs an overhaul.
Flamebait? Just another example that the moderation system is to be ignored.