Cedega and Linux Games

Linux.com's Stefan Vrabie has a look at the state of Transgaming's Cedega, which some claim to be the best current offering for running Windows games under Linux. While it may be better than nothing, the author still puts this solidly under the "plug and pray" column with the biggest drawback being the amount of fiddling required to make it work. From the article: "Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux." Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

No games?

[Short Circuit]

I bought Neverwinter Nights Saturday, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

With the Diamond Edition ($30 at Best Buy), you get both expansion packs, and you can follow some online directions to install to Linux without passing through Windows.

I also bought Return to Castle Wolfenstein a while back. That was good, too.

Oh, and there's DOOM, DOOM ][, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, several versions of Unreal...

If you'll go the Open Source route, there's DarkPlaces, Cube, Duke Nukem 3d (engine, anyway. You'll still need the gamedata.

Uhm...no games? How about, no hyperadvertised games?

Re:No games?

[JeffElkins]

==
In the holy wars of whether WINE benefits the Linux community or not, I think it hurts more than it harms. If you want to game with your PC, dual boot...you know, with that OS your machine came with.
==

I have to agree. As a former OS/2 user, in retrospect I think that having limited Windows compatibility hurt more than it helped.

Is there a market?

[WombatDeath]

Or rather, a viable one?

That's not a rhetorical question. I have no idea how easy it is to make a game compatible with both Windows and Linux but I assume that it's a bit more complicated than changing backslashes to forward slashes. I also don't know how big the market is for Linux games but I doubt it's huge. If it takes an extra, say, 20% longer to make a game Linux-compatible I'm not surprised that it doesn't happen more often.

On the other hand perhaps it's just lazy design. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who doesn't share my ignorance.

Re:Is there a market?

[StormReaver]

"Loki thougth[sic] there was a marked and ported some games over to Linux (I bought the SimCity version). They closed shop after three years."

Loki didn't close shop for lack of a sustainable market. Loki closed up shop because the company president and his wife were draining the company coffers for personal use.

Speaking as a Game Marketer and Linux User...

[weasello]

I find it extremely difficult to justify porting or designing a game for Mac - and definately not profitable. When it's done it's usually an investment; garnering support for future releases or 'making a name' in the Mac community. Considering Linux is even smaller... The numbers just don't add up yet. It isn't really about market penetration or percentages, it's about pure numbers. How many Linux machines are on the planet; of those how many are used in a home-use desktop fashion; of those how many are willing to spend $40-60 on a game; and of those who would be willing to buy this particular game.

Not practical or profitable to develop for Linux

[Runesabre]

Gaming companies don't develop for Linux because it's not pratical to support properly.

There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.

Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.

Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.

Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.

Combine the constant, frequent changes that aren't guaranteed to be backwards compatible like the Windows platform provides with the sheer number of distributions of Linux you would have to support to make it worthwhile, and then consider that all this effort just to support one platform might translate to an extra 5% sales and you have your reason why game companies don't develop for Linux.

Linux is a great platform to develop for; it's a terrible platform to support. This is what's holding Linux back from becoming truly mainstream. It has nothing to do with features or hardware support or useability. If a company can't reasonably develop and SUPPORT their applications for a platform and expect a reasonable amount of sales while doing so then it's not worth doing it when you can simply focus on another platform (Windows) that is much easier to support and maintain and hits 90% of your whole market in the first place.