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A Loki Timeline
Al "Alkini" Koskelin writes: "Matt Matthews, with the help of the LinuxGames staff and some ex-employees of Loki, has put together a Loki timeline. The timeline is an attempt to document every major event in Loki's past, starting with the announcement of SDL and the Launch of the Loki Website through today, when Loki is officially ceasing operations." They're also looking for more information to make the timeline more complete.
The link to the actual timeline is here:
http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/lokitimeline/
liB
Would there actually be any intrest for a volunteer group of programmers to port games? I.E. A group of people doing what Loki was doing but in non-profit status?
I am picturing this: A group of coders being allowed by companies to port their code over to Linux. Companies takes a X% cut, programmers get paid so they can keep doing this, extra gets donated to FSF etc.
Does this sound insane?
Yes.
First paragraph has the words 'volunteer' and 'non-profit'. Second has talk about companies taking cuts of profits and paying programmers.
In two paragraphs, you've successfully said the exact opposite thing.
However, your idea does have merit. If you can get a group of volunteers to sign NDAs and port games, then let the publishers either sell it, or release it to the Linux community.
I don't know what game company that would have the gaul to do it, but maybe they'll let you port older games (a linux port of System Shock 2, for example, wouldn't be a bad thing!).
I'd even volunteer my programming services for such a project.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
*This just in*: Every link crashes Netscape 4.61 on RedHat 6.2.
It seems to me that Loki had the same business model as a lot of dot-coms, namely "Hey! Look! We can do this!", rather than "Hey! Look! We can do this and make a lot of money doing it."
I notice a lot of entries in the timeline that state, "Loki released xxx for LinuxPPC." Did Loki do any market research determining that LinuxPPC was a large market that could support them? I doubt it. Look, if Linux is 0.24% of the desktop market share (and it was probably less in 1998-1999), how much of that is LinuxPPC? 0.1% of 0.24%? How many of that handful of people are willing to buy games for $50 each?
Did Loki do any cost/benefit analysis? Probably not, because it was 1999 and hey, there were certainly dumber ideas than porting games. But the fact remains that Loki's business model wasn't sound, and that they could have possibly prevented bankruptcy had they done some simple market research (even a poll asking people which games they would most like to see on Linux.) The fact that they didn't do that says to me that they were more interested in proving they could do something than they were interested in making money by doing something. That's not a strategy with which to start a company, and Loki just found that out the hard way.
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...but they alienated their retailers.
I was involved with a videogame website (handeye.com - don't worry, not a plug... the company's gone...) in spring 1999 that was launching a major advertising campaign centering around the release of Loki's Linux port of Civilization: CTP. What this "timeline" fails to mention is the CONSTANT, REPEATED, and UNEXPLAINED delays for Civ:CTP's shipment. We lost a lot of customers because of pre-orders and repeated emails by us that we had to delay shipment because of "distributor's delays."
Loki was a fine experiment, but Linux games wasn't the problem. Some blame has to be left with management. It can't be good when a company's first release is delayed half a dozen times...
It is far easier to critcize what someone else is doing than to do it better oneself. I know that I could not have accomplished what Scott accomplished: the existence on Linux of games which I thought I would always have to boot in to Windows to play.
Scott Draker and Loki entertainment have made my life just a little bit better. I have only one computer right now; an older (circa 1999) ThinkPad which only runs Linux (the hard disk is too small to fit more than one OS), which I use for open-source development.
A good friend of mine and myself both enjoy playing Heroes of Might & Magic III together. Because of Scott Draker putting his neck on the line and making Loki games a reality, we are able to play this game together wherever I can put down my laptop (The game has a "hotseat" mode which allows multiple people to play the game on the same computer).
For this alone, I am glad that Scott had the courage to make a dream a reality.
I am saddened that it had to end so soon. I hope that, when the economy picks up again, we can make the dream a reality again.
There is one thing which I am certain of: Linux will survive these hard times that we are in right now. Its open source nature means that it can survive in a time which has killed BeOS. I will continue my own open-source development; it is only proprietary software that suffers in these tough times.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Tribes 2 was announced long before the Windows version was out. There was a slight delay shipping it, but if you bought the Windows version instead of the Linux one, it's your own fault.
The real people who should be complaining about Tribes 2 are those that had to spend an extra $100 on a video card to make it even run.
I'm not privy to information regarding the financial situation surrounding Unreal Tournament, but I believe Loki was paid by Epic for their involvement with the game. The real loss for Loki on UT was the time of support staff spent helping people get a charity product running.