Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Keeping
- 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'm surprised usually the accountant is the last employee.
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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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
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'
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
But I think you miss the big point here. One of the reasons a lot of people dont ditch windows is because of lack of game support(myself included). If you want Linux to take over what's almost completely a windows market (gamers) then your gonna need a company that ports games.
-Bucky
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.
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.
Because Loki writes Linux software. The more professional Linux software that exists, the more valid an operating system it becomes. There are many people that boot into Windows just to play games. I'm not one of them (I only play Quake III Arena, and Loki did a hell of a job on that) - but I know a lot of people who are. If all games are available for Linux from the get-go, more people will make the full switch. When this happens, more people grow more knowledgeable about the inner workings of Linux. Then they put these newly found skills on their resume. Managers get the resume and go "you know, with all these people coming in with serious Linux experience, we can probably put Linux to work for us." Then Linux is a valid corporate operating system. Then it grows even more.
We need to support Linux companies because it's good for Linux and, therefore, good for its users. And if you really care about the Linux community, what better way to show support than buying products from Linux companies?
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
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
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'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.
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
Will they call their joint venture Noki or will they call it Lokia.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
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.
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'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
Frankly, I don't encounter this attitude in the OSS community near me. We buy linux distributions; we spend our spare time promoting products we like (and also fit our software philosophy); we buy endless numbers of books.
Most of the linux-oriented people I hang with bought one or two titles from Loki. I personally have two. I am not aware of a huge warez scene for Loki titles. It's just that there are so very few of us compared to Windows gamers. This will change eventually.
But I'm sick and tired of hearing that Open Source enthusiasts will just not pay for things. Sure, I won't pay for something when there's a better alternative available. But that's simply not the case with Loki's stuff. I think they earned every penny with their attention to detail in porting and packaging (not to mention the SDL library).