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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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
I'm sorry... but games is one area where you should not be extremist about free software.
Why?
1. Most has short development cycle and almost no benefit from long-term improvement. (There are exceptions, like multi-player-games that people play for a long time)
2. It is important to not release to much info, because too much information spoils the game for people. This goes against normal development-policies.
3. The developers mostly cannot have the same fun playing the game as others (again, as in 1. there are exceptions), this makes participating for "scratching an itch" impossible.
4. There are a huge amount of people involved that aren't normally in geek-communities; artists, story-developers, musicians, etc.
5. Because of graphical issues like speed, a lot of info is often in the client, that the gamer shouldn't know about, and an open-source version may more easily allow for cheating. It shouldn't be like this, but because of technical obstacles, it is.
This all means that you take away almost all the benefits of regular open-source software (more eyeballs, more developers) and add inn a few bad side effects (spoilers, cheating, sheer costs), and you still demand that all games should be free-as-in-speech?
It just isn't possible to make a living by creating most types of open-source-games. Some may be possible, but your narrow-minded view, would destroy the market for most types of games, if most people thought like you.
Think about the added benefits to the community by having a company like Loki porting even closed source games. They release all of their common libraries under free licenses, and they have helped the community in developing free gaming and multimedia APIs.
The point is, without Loki (a closed-source company), the free software community would be worse off.
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!
A lot of people on this board go on at length about how they won't use this app or that app because it isn't Free-as-in-whatever. There are people here who won't even *use* something released under the BSD license because of ideological reasons. It's not free enough, I guess.
I wonder what kind of percentage of the Linux market these people (zealots?) are? Maybe there just aren't enough Linux users willing to buy games, period, to support a company like this.
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