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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.
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]
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
I'd like to mention Freeciv as an example of an open source game which in my opinion was good already in 1996 and even better and more enjoyable today. Others? Nethack comes to my mind, although I must admit the proprietary Adom is better (just my view).
But then, people generally regard me as a weirdo - and that seems to be true even for my taste of games :-)
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.
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.
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.
Your rebuttal is not a rebuttal. I agree with you -- if there is a free product that works, the Open Source community will use it. I completely concede that point, but I never objected to that point in the first place. The generalization that I objected to was that the Open Source community is full of software pirates who trade in warez. I do not believe that, even if you post a million rebutalls telling me how wrong I am. Again, I agree that this community uses free software, but I do not agree that this community freely steals software. I'm partly here because I don't want to steal -- I don't want to steal PhotoShop, so I use the GIMP. I don't want to steal MS Office, so I use Star Office. That is not unethical. It is legal to create a free software product and use it. It is not legal to take a commerical product and pirate it. I don't advocate that, and I don't agree that it is an accurate generalization of the community.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The newer titles come in DVD style packaging.
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
No matter how much you think every Linux user would love to have a mass of proprietary games, you're wrong. At least not before Linux has some more of the market. And even then many of us will stick to quality open source software - yes, it's quality software, and I claim it's possible to make commercial quality open sourcegames. In case you wonder why you haven't seen any, I can tell: Many of us developers like to write something that gets actually used. Games market is simply not a good frontier to fight proprietary software - yet.
I for one run Debian mainly for the reason that it makes me clear what is free and what is proprietary so I can avoid installing non-free software. Though it's a very good distribution in many other ways.
Sure, I feel bad for Loki - the Linux commercial quality games pioneer, it's fair to say. Still, I wouldn't buy (or pirate for that matter) any of their games. I wouldn't install them even if they were free-as-in-beer, unless they're also free-as-in-speech.
Think I'm trolling? Ok, that's your view. Mind you, there are still a lot of even more fanatic open source advocates.
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.
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.
3D does NOT "suck compared to Windows". I have SOF, Q3A, Tribes2, and Heretic2, all from Loki and they totally ROCK. Loki has provided auto-update utils and install/uninstall utils that make things SOOOO simple. Outside of Loki, I am running Counter-Strike through WINE. With all of these games, my frame rate using the same settings as in Windows is at least 20% higher. Stop spouting drivel about which you know nothing!