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More Bioware For Linux?
GNious writes "Bioware has a thread about porting the upcoming game Dragon Age to Apple Mac OS X and/or Linux. Debate include such topics as porting houses, physics engines and the value of the market, with an enormous amount of requests for such games as Neverwinter Nights 2. With the potential for selling upwards of 1000 copies (counting individual requests) of a game at possibly $50 each, is the decision to exclude a platform and the associated revenue the correct one, or are the petitioners the ones that have gotten it wrong to think that their ca 1-5% marketshare matters?" I think the unfortunante reality is that in today's gaming market, you find that fewer people are willing to take a chance on the sales for these smaller markets -- too hard to predict revenue, and too hard to (some would say) to do the porting.
The problem with counting requests like that is that there is not a lot of follow through. I'd say that half or less of those people requesting will actually purchase the game. I myself bought a copy of Neverwinter Nights 1 as well as UT2004, Quake 3, Doom 3, Sim City 3000 and a few other games that work under Linux. Provided that I would have enough time(have a daughter now) I will buy a copy of NWN2 if they make a Linux client. But from what I've seen and heard from many people in the past, a lot of gamers talk talk talk and don't buy. Its easy to say "Me too", but most can't or don't pony up. Then again, there are probably a lot of people who don't say anything, but end up buying a copy to use for Linux. They need a better metric for counting the number of used Linux clients.
The exact same occurs whether you are talking about the PSP or the N-Gage or the Atari Lynx thing or any of thousands of systems given a chance of life.
The only redeeming feature Linux has than other systems is longevity, Linux will remain "current" for as long as people care.
liqbase
The potential to sell upwards of a thousand copies at 50 bucks a piece. Man, they could make, like, 50,000 dollars on that! I can't see why they wouldn't invest hundreds of thousands or possibly millions for a return like that!
porting? why not just *trying* to make it platform independent from the start?
...drops the first egg* ?
*a complete set of games. i don't count the
few ego-shooters of the last ten years as the
beginning.
That's how the market works. The fewer people willing to buy something, the less they'll be willing to invest in porting it. If you really want to help get these games ported, work to increase Linux's market share. The more people that use it, the more ports you'll see. That's just the way it is.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If the potential is only 1000 copies at 50 bucks, why would any company bother? 50,000 will pay one low level programmer with no testers, no marketing, not even budget for changing the system requirements graphics on the box. Porting to Linux is nice, and for the companies that do it god bless them, but to expect it is a bit outside reality. Like most Linux projects it has to be a labor of love since it has no room for being a labor of profit.
The only way I really see any growth in the Linux games market is either an exponential growth in Linux users or companies adopting an open source partnership to allow games to be ported by volunteers.
wow! a whole 1000 copies at $50! that will really cover the cost of porting the game. It might make sense to port only if they raised the retail price. Esp when you consider most linux users will probably not buy the game and download it instead. There is a reason why there is a lot of commercial software for the mac and barely any for linux even though they both have around the same market share. It has to do with the culture of the users. Linux users are used to getting thing for free and most of the software is. Then there is the whole "I dont want non free on my system" crowd who will demand the source code of your game...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Personally, I would indeed purchase a LInux version of NWN2, if they release the game for Linux. I am already expecting the Windows version over the upcoming holiday season and would have no problem with shelling out extra cash for a Linux version.
Lately, there has been very few games that have actually kept my interest as of late and NWN, the original, is one of the few that has kept my interest. The ability to craft modules, play modules crafted by others and see regular community based updates to the game provides so much staying power to the franchise that I could see myself dedicating my primary system to Linux.
These days, for me, Linux is my server OS of choice and the OS I have secondary on my Laptop, specifically for network troubleshooting and dinking around in ways that I am unable to do in Windows. Beyond that, most of the software I run is available only for Windows and thus I run Windows for the majority of my computing time.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Not talking about Bioware in particular here. How many copies have to be sold before it is interesting to develop a port of a game? There are a lot of linux users around, but since Loki Games no decent titles has been ported. Did Loki games crash so bad, that even considering the linux market is seen as stupid?
It would be nice to get - I bought NWN and both add-on extensions, and had a blast with it for over two years.
But reality today is that the battle lines is not Windows on one hand and Mac/Linux on the other, it's desktop computer versus console. And apart from a few niche genres, the consoles are winning big.
If I want to do gaming today I would not consider dual-booting, I would just get a console (a Wii and/or DS2 is on the horizon for me; perhaps after the holidays).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The cost of porting the exact same game to simply an other OS is not a lot. You don't have to recreate the game content, you only need to port part of the whole engine. Often a large chunk of the engine is OS independed. And with the Intel based Apple systems and the Mac OSX there can be a thin line between a Linux and Mac OSX port. The most important technical obstacle is 3rd middleware support.
So when is it profitable to port? That's a simple calculation (Cost to port) - (Estimated profit per SKU for the "normal" version) * (Number of people interested). And for popular games like NWN I'm sure it's profitable to create a port to other systems.
At All.
We've all seen this happen at least one time.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Where do they get figures like that from ?
I'm pretty sure a decent game for Linux could sell several tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies.
I bought the Linux version of Q3 when it was available. I was planning on buying a few more games from Loki, until they shut down.
With Linux desktop market share constantly increasing, it makes more and more economic sense to start creating cross-platform games.
I think the unfortunante reality is that in today's gaming market, you find that fewer people are willing to take a chance on the sales for these smaller markets -- too hard to predict revenue, and too hard to (some would say) to do the porting.
The really smart gaming houses that know their titles will be successful (look at Id and Blizzard) also know that coding their titles to be portable is the way to go, even if they don't want to target other platforms. It encourages good coding practices and makes a better program. Most of them rely heavily on OpenGL and do plan to port their games at least to the mac as part of their original strategy. If your game is almost finished and you're just now considering portability and other platforms, you screwed up. You might as well wait till it is out and see how popular it is before going after other platforms.
Some might say the Mac or Linux markets are insignificant, but the truth is a lot of companies make good money from the Mac market. Lets not forget to include consoles as well when considering portability. I've seen some companies cite the practices of MS owned gaming houses as reason not to make games portable, but that is pretty laughable when you consider it. Also, I've seen some people point to horribly botched porting projects as reason to avoid it. Instances where a Linux port came out a year and a half after the Windows version, was buggy, was a game that required a community, and where the port was more expensive than the Windows version and was more buggy than using the Windows version in WINE. That too is pretty sad.
Coding for portability and aiming at Windows, the mac, and one or more consoles can seriously increase the revenue from a game, but it has to be part of the original game plan and you have to code with that in mind. Porting after the fact can make money, and if you have a very successful title outsourcing the port can make some pretty safe money, but not nearly as much of it. I don't see a reason for any big publisher (not owned by MS) to not target multiple platforms from the outset. Anyone want to bet the MMORPG that topples WoW's supremacy is another simultaneous cross-platfomr release?
A game cannot be 'ported' to Linux; it has to have native support from teh beginning. Otherwise, you know what happens?
Loki happens.
"Hi, I'm looking for ShinyGame."
"Oh, here you are. That'll be $9.99."
"No, wait, I want the Linux version."
"Oh, I'm sorry. There you go. That'll be $49.95."
Any serious gamer already has a Windows partition/second drive/second box for gaming. Thus, the Loki concept is bitchslapped by logic: $49.95, for a possibly mediocre port, with untold problems*? Or $9.95, for the same version everyone else is using - with no weird problems?
(* Google. Loki's ports weren't always all they were cracked up to be.)
The choice is obvious for all but the foam-spewing zealot. Despite the best efforts of zealot OS loonies to tell us otherwise, the majority of Linux users aren't zealots, and are thus going to save themselves $40.
So, now we have a weird situation. Games like Quake 3 sold like mad. Hard to tell what OS they're being run on though, eh? Meanwhile, the idea of porting games.. "Hey, remember that one company? They did that, didn't they? Went bankrupt, didn't they?"
The fact of the matter is, yes, it is stupid to consider the Linux market. There is no Linux market - 1000 signatures on a petition isn't a market, it's a bunch of nuts who don't know the cost of developing software for multiple platforms. Unfortunately, that won't change anytime soon. When a game is released for both Linux and Windows, companies don't know what percentage is actually being run on Linux. And the porting idea has been dead for years, thanks in part to Loki. (Naturally, they aren't entirely at fault; after all, they were only porting the games of other companies - I'm sure their hands were tied in pricing.)
play Minions of Mirth while you wait for Bioware to get their Mac and Linux act together.
No data, no cry
Assuming $15 per sale makes it back to the studio and $5 goes direct to the programmer, $5000 is a decent chunk of cash in some parts of the world. The only game I bought for linux was D3, just to check out the state of the art at great expense in hardware. There's gotta be a huge gaming market out there given that linux and Mac users are geeks, it's just a market that may take a little more effort. Face it, Linux and Mac users are discerning whereas Windows users have already shown willingness to purchase any old shit.
What the now so-hard-we-wont-even-try technical stumbling block is these days. You have Wine - I'm sure if you throw money at Transgaming you can get a more friendly (well, for them) license. And you have Mono. Ditto for Novell.
So, what is the major technology that you can't fairly easily replace with some pseudo-OSS libraries?
And: hahaha. NWN2 banner add while posting this.
Even if there are enough NWN2 buyers to make a port feasible, I don't think any of the graphics drivers available for Linux could handle it properly.
It's interesting that a company might even sorta consider porting their games over to Linux. It seems to me like it's more out of the goodness or thier hearts than generating any actual revenue. It almost sort of warms my heart.
-How do you get DosBox to work on OSX?
Back in 1987, here in Spain, and specially in UK, there was a little machine called Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The developmen of games was painstaking (all written in assembler), each game barely lasted a couple of months, the distribution was expensive (audio tapes!) and the marked was smaller than that of Linux today. Yet each year there were dozens of games released.
Where are those people now? Doing tetris clones for mobile phones?
Most games these days have patches on a somewhat regular basis. Each additional platform you launch the game on requires that you include that platform in your ongoing development costs.
It's not as simple as "just recompile it for Linux, duh". Every time I see someone scream for some MMORPG to release 'the Linux client we know you have', they always forget to include the recurring dev cycle costs.
If the cost to make it + the cost to maintain it > the additional revenue it brings in... then it doesn't get made.
Only one reaction of this decision is
1) "they are so stupid!" fom business
2) "they are want money!" from OSy idiots
and of couse, Richard Stallman will say "They have to share source code for free"
Compare and contrast the number of NWN games sold to the number of NWN2 games sold, in the future. Should be a great way to see if cross-porting "pays off".
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
There's been ports for various games from consoles to PC and PC to consoles. Yes it's different because of the different hardware instead of a different OS, however most ports these days that I have been playing (Splinter Cell: Double Agent) havn't been doing well at all.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
What I think would be best is to have a wine-linked release of the Game built on the same Win32 codebase. It would be even better if they could release the patches back into the Wine source tree so as to benefit all future development.
World of Warcraft runs beautifully on Cedega - I wonder how much effort is it really to release a Wine-linked app.
Gaming on Linux is crossing a line, but nobody is noticing it. Its not cutting edge gaming, but it falls under *good enough*. Projects like ioquake3 are moving the better quake3 mods to linux like "World of Padman";"Western Quake 3"; and the fantastic "Tremulous". Open source projects like "Cube 2"; "Battle of Wesnoth"; "Glest" get better every day. As well as Linux franchises really hitting there stride with "Frozen Bubble 2"; "Planet Penguin Racer"; "Eternal Lands" All this for Completely Free and good enough for the occasional game.
For commercial gaming *in my stocking this year" and at bargain prices...I know because I bought just them. Quake 3 Gold - £9.99 Doom 3 - £9.99 Quake 4 Special Edition - £9.99 Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil Expansion - £2.99 Return to Castle Wolfenstein - £8.45 Unreal Anthology £12.99 ...and I know that these have enough MODS and other Addons to keep me busy for years literally. I will not appear any statistic because I bought the windows version.
What is clear is that the Linux gaming for a part time gamer is very healthy, and Linux gaming is cheap.
My belief is that Linux gamers will not buy cutting edge games at premium prices, and definitely not buy last years games at them...but we will buy *good* games regardless of release date for a *good* price.
Why not ask for a minimal, say $10-$20 deposit? If the game is released, the deposit is counted towards the purchase. If the game is not released, the money is returned. That's how you separate someone with intent to buy/play from someone filling out a form online.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I always believed there was an easy solution to this problem make linux users put their money where their mouth is and anyone who REALLY wants a particular game should make a down payment 2/3 the cost fo the game that would be put in escrow and upon the completion of the port of game, abc gaming company would have access to the funds, if they do not complete the port they do not earn the money. I always read comments on slashdot saying I will purchase certain games if they are ported to linux but spectacular failures such as Loki have proven otherwise (yes I know I am simplifying their demise) I believe such a setup would prove beneficial to all party's involved while mitigating the risk for gaming companies.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Sorry, but the $50k in revenue you'd make from those 1000 copies don't even pay for the salary of the people porting the game. That being said, I'd think there's more than 1000 copies in it for any game company releasing a good AAA title for Linux, and that it might be worth it, if ports are something your company is willing to do. For it to be profitable, I'd say 5000 to 10000 units sell through would have to be the minimum - of course you've got to consider the value of the PR as well, considering that games for Linux is a market just at its beginning...
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I logged in close to 30 hours playing NWN on Linux. I think I paid around $50 for the game some months ago, downloaded the Linux client, then got everything updated. Easily the best $50 I've spent. If there's a pre-order list I'll put my money in.
Natively cross platform - write your game cross platform from the get go and there ARE no additional costs of porting - heck some of the better frameworks you write once and you're good for Windows, Linux, OS/X AND console targets!
Why is it so difficult these days for developers to wrap their brains around "Write once, compile for target" development?!
If game companies could just do a Linux build of their program and forget about it, they'd probably be willing to invest the money. But it isn't that simple. People aren't going to buy a $50 game and accept that it doesn't run properly on their variant of Linux. And SOMEONE is going to have to pay support staff to make sure that the game continues to run on people's machines.
This is a MUCH more expensive proposition in Linux than in Windows. The binaries that I built for my Windows 95 games almost 10 years ago still run unaltered on Windows XP. Linux? Hell, some of my projects from 2 years ago won't even **build** due to library changes, and you can simply forget about binary compatibility -- it doesn't exist.
There is a reason almost no game shop supports Linux, and the small market share of Linux isn't the whole story. Commercial games by their very nature are proprietary and closed source, which is antithetical to the entire structure of Linux. Linux is built from top to bottom with the tacit assumption that the source is available for everything. The system is put together by completely independent teams, and there is no governing body ensuring that everything is backwards compatible. If you are a heavy Linux user, then you know full well that the guys running different projects change things because they think it's the right thing to do, and do not care how much software out there they break when they change things. How many times has Apache's vhosts configuration changed in the past 5 years?
If you release a Linux game, think about all of the crap you have to support for this tiny marketshare. Your programmers have to understand the different Linux distributions. The differences between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or whatever other variant they're using. Are you going to leave it up to the user to make sure that their OpenGL is accelerated? If a user installs your game "out of the box", and the GL is running in software, do you just tell them too bad?
Most Windows games are written using DirectX. Migrating your application from a fully-functioning game programming suite over to the SDL, Allegro, or whatever in Linux is no small task. And if you hand this over to a third party developer, what then? Do you have a forked code base? Do you actually change the *Windows* version of your game to use SDL as well? Is the entire interface going to change? (I can tell you from experience in moving between APIs, things change. The different APIs have different quirks, and it affects everything from interface design to the file formats of your graphics).
The point I'm trying to make here is that while doing a quick-and-dirty port of a PC game to Linux may not be that incredibly difficult, doing it in a maintainable fashion, without forking your codebase, and without opening yourself up to an immense support headache, is a very difficult thing indeed.
Hey Linux users don't want them to port their stinking closed source games to Linux.
If they want people to play their games on Linux then they should Open Source them.
Isn't that how RMS feels?
I for one would pay for a good game that runs under Linux but then I don't think that closed source is always evil.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Bioware has nothing to do with NWN2 other than hosting the forums. They don't control a linux port and since it was decided to use DirectX this time around, its not coming anytime soon.
As far as games in general being on Linux, well that depends on the game. If the developer can be sweet talked into openGL you have a much higher chance of seeing it. Perhaps the community should start wooing developers.
I, for one, welcome our new OpenGL-hating overlords.
.NET for the win!
.NET 2.18979837499 to the install CD's. How does this NOT help everybody?
DirectX and
OSX and Linux users get the shaft on games, developers have to be restrained and put in padded rooms (for thier own safety), and the publisher has to add several hundred megabytes of DirectX 9.2B and
...based on the most-vocal.
Consider; for each "vocal" gamer in the Linux-PC camp, there are at least three "silent" gamers that just toe the line with Win32 compatibility, or actually straddle the fence with dual-boot Win/Lin systems. (myself included in the latter)
The marketeers would do well to acknowledge this potential, and it would only take one major title to unleash the phenomenon.
Hey VaLVe! This is your chance! Port Steam® over and show us that any online-delivery paradigm can be cross-platform! Go! Go! Go!
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Given that I know QUITE a bit on the subject (Heh... I port games over to Linux and right now I'm off that for a little bit doing driver development consulting for one of the two aforementioned players in 3D...), I think I should comment.
Most of the extensions aren't ATI or NVidia specific that are usable. To be sure, they offer those, but most of the
extensions are ARB or EXT extensions- they're intended to be used by either player and are typically provided by
the same. The reality is that OpenGL 2.1 and DX9/10 are intrinsically identical except for programming style.
Besides, you should abstract out your engine components if you've any aspirations to target the next gen consoles-
DX10's NOT on PS3 or Wii, but OpenGL ES 2.0 IS and it's a clean, easy to use subset that ports back to MacOS and Linux.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The fact of the matter is that many of these games run atop a more generalized engine. The game itself is pretty much platform independent at this point. The traditional notion of "porting" a game doesn't apply. Rather, its whether or not one ought to port the underlying engine.
It depends on the engine, of course, but it's much more straight-forward than one would think in many cases (unless it's hopelessly wedded to DirectX without any abstraction at all). Thankfully, that's not too often the case any more. It's frequent that the same engine has been ported to multiple platforms and has all sorts of abstraction. Were this not the case, you wouldn't see the same game coming out for the Wii, PS3, and Windows at the same time, for example.
The economics here are much different. Porting the engine means that all games built atop that engine will be available for the target platform.
So, what they are basically saying here isn't really the issue of porting the game, it's getting retailers to take orders for it in boxed form. Porting would have a one-time cost that wouldn't be so much, but why bother if EB isn't going to stock it because they'll sell 1-2 copies per store? The boxes don't print themselves, and you don't want to stick every platform on the same CD or DVD...
They do it on a daily basis. They've got a good solid handle on it right now and it's
about to be improved even further in a couple of months as I finish the touches on a
possible new build environment for them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Bioware's NWN was excellent, but I'm not holding out much hope for Atari's NWN2.
:-)
I *am* holding out hope for id's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. id has a history or providing downloadable Linux versions once the retail PC version is out. Buy the box, download the Linux binaries and you're good to go.
Of course, I'll have to shell out another $400 or so to upgrade my system the play it right... Oh the sacrifices I'll make in the name of fragging alien scum.
Thanks id!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Someone should ask Blizzard how that cross-platform experiment with World of Warcraft is working for them.
I know most people think it is a crazy idea, but I think it is long past time for games to go open source. Really, the open source model lends itself almost ideally to gaming and there is a lot of money to be made by the early adopter.
Already some games are carried to success by the mod community. Really there are several components to a successful game. Artwork, story, and gameplay. Of those, only the gameplay is at risk of being copied by competitors if a game is open sourced. Gameplay relies upon the engine (which most companies license from someone anyway), the UI, and the scripting and glue. So most companies would benefit from having an open source engine to use as it would save them licensing fees and let them benefit from the work of other companies and the community. The UI is partially graphics (which need not be open). So really all they are opening up is some of the UI and the glue. The scripting is part of the story and can remain closed.
Here's what I envision. Build an open source virtual game console. Included in this are one or more game engines, some public domain graphics, some free development tools, a basic UI, and online component for discovery of new games. Build it to accept modules which can be open or closed. Build at least one free game module, including public domain graphics, but containing trademarked characters. Build your own closed source professional dev tools. Get this game/setup as widely distributed as possible. Make it free as in beer and get desktop Linux distros to include it. Get Dell to include it. Get Apple to include it.
So everyone has a free game and your brand is out there and you're out a lot of money. Where's the profit? The profit is in making additional games, which players of the first game see advertised for free when they start up the first game. The profit is in contract work to make other games and in licensing fees for the dev tools or contracts to work on the engine. Basically game manufacturers get greatly reduced development time, easy portability, and cheaper development. You get established as the primary experts on the new system, control of the initial distribution servers, and first mover advantage. Everyone in this picture wins, except those still using a closed system. Even open source zealots will not argue too hard about a closed game module that runs within an open source sandbox and is only a game (mostly data). And since you still have copyright on artwork and story and trademarks on names and branding, you don't have much to worry about copycats undercutting you.
This is, of course, not the solution to all problems, but it is a big step forward. A lot of the work is already done by open source gaming projects and most of them would welcome a commercial backer and the benefits a few good full-time coders can bring. If I had the time and was confident in my management abilities I'd be on the ground floor of this startup right now. I just hope someone does it so we can move gaming forward.
I can't afford to own two computers right now, and I chose to buy a Mac because I prefer it for my "work" duties. Having said that, one of the reasons I originally opted to get into World of Warcraft was that I was bored, I wanted a game to get into, and I didn't own a Windows box - which pre-empts me from owning the vast majority of top-tier PC titles. I recall hearing from a videogame podcast at some point where an expansion pack for The Sims for the Mac had momentarily broke into the top 10 selling games of the week for any platform. That may speak to something about the general interests of people who run OS X, that they're more interested in The Sims than Half-Life, but there's still something to be said about the number of people who want to play PC games and want to do it on OS X. While the market is smaller, so is the competition. I'd love to see some kind of survey as to how that plays into the sale of certain Mac titles, and especially when applied to Blizzard titles.
Of course, in the case of World of Warcraft, the time spent to port the game may be worth it on profit for the fact that the game continues to pay the company every month as opposed to just a "1000 copies for $50" equation. It's also worth noting that some companies hire out-of-house programmers to port their work to OS X, but end up with buggy or otherwise lesser quality products as a result (see: Civilization IV).
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I can see 1000 games as a target for Linux releases. Linux geeks are often (but certainly not always) gamers but people don't install linux to play games. If you want optimised video drivers and if you just want the damn game to 'just work' you keep a Windows machine or Windows Partition. Not to mention the lag in patches.. it's no fun bringing your linux rig to lan party only to find out that you can't join the game because the V. 1.1 patch is not available for you yet.
The 1000 number for OS X is a joke though. Seriously, Any decent game should sell more than 1000 copies on the Mac. There are far too many Macs in use in homes for a GOOD game to not sell reasonably well. The Mac has issues.. it's rare to see them with really good video systems. The recent Intel machines have solid offerings but they aren't fantastic ( Elder Scrolls would play like crap on a stock iMac with underclocked X1600 video). I have, however, played Battlefield 2 at native rez with decent settings on a 1st gen Intel 17" iMac and it ran great. It beat the hell out of my Athlon X2 3800 w/ AGP Nvidia 6600GT. The current iMacs are much nicer too.
The bigger problem, as I see it, is that the gaming industry is in a lull. I don't see any really compelling titles. I love WW2 era FPShooters but the Genre has been played out to death. The Battlefield series has been solid but every new version is just a new veneer on the same game. To me and my friends, EQ and WWC MassivelyMulitPlayer games are played out. The frustration of dumping time into them has long since outweighted the enjoyment (I never did try World of WarCraft.. I got burned out before that).
Really, I walk through the gaming isle at Frys and nothing excites me and I've been looking to have another lan party. There's literally dozens of FPS War games but none stand out and I'm not going to try them all so I can tell people to buy one just for a night at my house.
The other problem is crappy coding though this is more minor issue. If the developer houses wrote tighter code, there'd be a larger range of medoicre machines that could run that code. Remember when the big guns were Doom3 vs. HalfLife2.. HalfLife2, to me, looked every bit as good overall and it ran MUCH better on less than cutting edge hardware. Doom3 was the killer benchmark for a while and the lighting system does look nice but the HL2 engine looks great and I really enjoyed the game (more so than the 'turn the corner and shoot' story line of Doom3). IMHO, HL2 is a superior game because the sum of the whole package is superior [visuals, story, environment, gameplay..]. The impressive thing is, Valve pulled this off without forcing everyone to run out and drop $500 on upgrades. If Valve, for instance, started supporting OS X, I'm sure they'd be able to run on a pretty large Mac installed base. Everything over the Mini should run HL2 fantastically. [other noteable crap-tastic games I'd never buy for a Mac.. BF Vietnam.. which crippled my Radeon9800Pro back in 2003, EQ (HORRIBLE CODING) and even EQ2 which seemed un-reasonably slow on decent PC hardware)
If we had good, compelling games.. I'd guarantee that a port of a GOOD game to OS X would sell a hell of a lot more than 1000 copies with annual sales of Millions of computers and poor enterprise market penetration (most macs go home or at least into EDU markets).
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Unfortunately ATI has proven to be (to put it nicely) "slow" adopting OpenGL extensions (at least in their radeon series). While programming a particle system using point sprites I found that texture mapping was broken: the sprites simply dissapeared.
I'm no game developer but AFAIK using textured point sprites as particles is almost canonical for the advantages in speed and simplicity (and the possiblity to store them into display lists). I don't know how do game developers programming in OpenGL go around this problem (I'd love to know though, it still puzzles me), but It was a big surprise when the exactly same code running in a machine with a geforce 2 mx (several years older and much more crappy than the radeon 9800 I was first testing in, and yes I had the latest drivers installed) ran flawlessly.
Cheers.
I HAVEN'T OWNED A TELEVISION SINCE 1967 AND ONLY WATCH MOVIES ABOUT LEFT-HANDED ALEUT LESBIAN PIPEWELDERS! FUCK HOLLYWOO
What was wrong with the nwn1/quake4/ut2004 etc formula? You buy the windows box, if you are a linux user you download the official Linux Installer and install it onto your Linux PC. How hard is that? The only thing wrong with nwn2 is directx instead of opengl. The result is porting would be much more difficult (In addition to bad performance for the not so powerful graphics.).
Even if the game was ported voluntarily and distributed over the internet, the publisher would still have to provide some degree of tech support. This could easily burn through 10-20k the publisher would see, at which point shipping potentially costs them money (continuing to provide support) or reputation (dropping support for the platform).
In addition, this could count as a separate sku, meaning significant costs licensing third party libraries.
if more games were ported to linux the linux market could grow
alot of people only use windows cause windows is the only support platform for most of the games they play
this might explain why so few games want to port to linux (or why companies like blizzard make linux versions but never release them), if you keep that market weak and small you only have to support 1 platform..
They probably dont want to support linux because the code they wrote isn't written to be portable. If they migrate their code to be portable, then linux and macosx (as well as other unix's)should be no problem to use as a make target.
Why not stick to consoles for games, and keep the PC or Mac as a workstation? PC gaming is very expensive given the need to constantly upgrade the system. In some cases the upgrade will cost more than an actual console.
Added to the argument is the fact that consoles are now surpassing PCs for gaming in terms of graphics performance - or at least you will need a very expensive PC to compete.
So by keeping a console for games playing, you can happily run Linux, OS X, or whatever else you choose and still enjoy cutting edge games. To me it makes a lot more sense than lobbying games manufacturers to produce games for your particular OS.
It had everything to do with Dragon Age.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
http://www.transgaming.com/products_linux.php
Working with Cadega probably makes more sense for most game developers.
Yes you restrict your product to Cadega users, but most of the hassle is handled by Cadega.
---
I support spreading santorum
OK, I'm not going to pony up the cash, but I've found a pretty innovative solution to getting the funding for a future product: get people to tell you how much it's worth by bidding on it in advance. There is a program called "Logos" (thing Greek pronunciation, not like reflections and gradients and corporate images) that decides what to make based on a community. The call it...get ready for it...community pricing. And, in fact, it works quite well. You can check it out here -> http://www.logos.com/communitypricing. It really seems to be a good idea, and I'm a little curious why no one outside this one company (as far as I know) have adopted a "put your money where your mouth is" approach like this in order to get these niche products developed. If you don't think it can be done on something like this, take a look at how niche some of these products actually are and they're getting it done. It would take some tweaking, but it could be a good tool for showing the need, getting the capitol and getting this stuff to market. Plus it has the added bonus of being much cheaper for those on the ground floor. Could be a winner all around.
Jester
Warning: This sig may be legally binding in England.
I would have purchased Neverwinter Nights, but they didn't finish porting it. They only ported the game, they didn't bother with the tools. Then they tried to charge more for the partial port on Mac OS X than for the entire game on Windows. So I didn't buy.
The way I see it, it's Bioware who have a problem with following through.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Whant some cheese to go with your WhINE?
Last I checked, all games performed more poorly on Linux than Windows. I run both Linux and windows. If you made a Linux version of my favorite game run 5% better, I'll happily buy it. It's all about frame rates. Maybe the OpenGL people should look into performance optimizations or making their library more competitive with DirectX.
I bet if 1 out of 10 of the top PC games ran noticeably faster on Linux, we'd see a dramatic increase in desktop Linux usage for general and gaming use.
Game developers aren't missing out on much of a market share by not supporting Linux (or even the Mac). You might tell me that 2% of computer users own (and use) a Linux box, and that's great, but what percentage of that 2% also has a Windows box readily accessible in the same house? I'd be willing to be that's close to 90%, especially in the category of people that's likely to buy games. That leaves a whopping 0.2% of people who might want to buy a game that's ported to Linux and use it on their Linux box.
Some more dodgy maths here; the game sells 1 million units, and sales could have been increased 0.2% by porting to Linux, increasing sales by 2000 units. It's therefore not commercially viable to port a game to Linux based on the maths for a single game alone. You can perhaps make a good case for increasing income over a period of time, but not on the stats for one game alone.
If 1000 people say they'll buy the Linux version, whoopeee. How many of them will buy the windows version if there isn't a linux one?
How many won't buy the game when it does come out for whatever reason?
You're 1000 people might turn into 100 sales.
Can you offer any reasons why no platform functionally similar to DX has appeared for cross-platform use? Every game written in OpenGL and ported to multiple platforms must have much of the same base audio/networking/3d/etc.. functionality.
A DX replacement that's open source and works on many platforms seems like it would be a boon for game companies, yet there is not even any talk of such....
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
**** With the potential for selling upwards of 1000 copies (counting individual requests) of a game at possibly $50 each, is the decision to exclude a platform and the associated revenue the correct one, or are the petitioners the ones that have gotten it wrong to think that their ca 1-5% marketshare matters?" ****
1000 copies?
You're funny.
$50k income isn't even worth their time.
"Is the decision to exclude a platform and the associated revenue the correct one, or are the petitioners the ones that have gotten it wrong to think that their ca 1-5% marketshare matters?" If the revenue generated from sales to the customers of Mac OS and Linux versions at least equals the cost of porting the application and other overhead, then it is worth porting. The reason is that you have then invested in incubating a new market, creating more reason for new customers to purchase or use those platforms, and in turn, your software, game or otherwise. It is analagous to investing in a new machine that will manufacture a new product. If you can return the investment in the first year (and cover any interest payments or venture capital ROI obligations) and create a market for sales in subsequent years, then it is worth the investment. If you are only catering to one platform, and that platform market shrinks, then you have left money on the table.
As a developer who ports products to Macintosh - http://www.polyex.com/ I can tell you that porting a commercial product can sometimes be more difficult than what appears on the surface. Even if you take out obvious problems like the game is using Microsoft specific technologies like Direct X, etc. Some developers use huge in house libraries that will also need to be ported (or at least some of the functionality replicated) as well as 3rd party libs that may not even have the source available. With the Mac especially, endian issues crop up and have the potential to complicate things as they tend to only show up at runtime which requires a full QA cycle that goes perhaps deeper than originally thought. You even have to be aware of incompatibilities between VC++ and gcc, where VC++ some times lets people get away with murder. Ideally ,you also want the game to take advantage of unique ways the Mac/Linux might do things from a users perspective compared to Windows, which may do something completely different, such as where resources for the game are stored etc. Another potential issue that people rarely think of us is performance. I had ported code over what was fairly straightforward to the Mac (OpenGL) and I immediately ran into a performance hit that was noticeable. I ended up having to optimize the code just to compete with the Windows version. The developer that does porting also has to become very familiar with completely new source code quickly and often in order to port as many products as possible (think about how long does it take a new developer working in your company to become familiar enough with the code before you let him muck with it?). An intimate understanding of technologies on ALL platforms is usually required for this sort of work. Another thing I have run into is that many Macs out there are laptops and a game that uses the mouse heavily may have to have some redesign work to work with the Mac laptop pad. These issues are not always the case and each one is unique from game to game of course, but are always potential issues. Not of this is insurmountable, but you always have to be prepared!
Just look at this Bioware poll. The question is "What platform(s) below do you both own and play games on?", and 54% of responses are Linux. http://www.bioware.com/_poll/view_poll.html?pollID =136
Life is offtopic.
If you'd read the thread and the similarity to Sage_Svartalf (Bioware's forum software borked up the original handle I had for some bizarre reason and rather than bothering them with it, I modified the original and it stuck the second time...) and this handle, you might realize that I was one of the participants thereof and, to quote myself...
Which was in response to someone bringing up the thread in the context of probable demand for DA, based on the Atari NWN2 thread.
And to quote myself again later in the thread...
To which the guy that I was replying to responded when more posts came in that he "sat corrected on that score".
No real discussion of NWN2 being ported- just that there was a probable real demand based on the NWN2 discussion thread and that while it was there, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Bioware was going to look at any of the figures they're seeing for Linux on their own- just the IDC type figures, etc. This is not to say they're disregarding the Linux/MacOS communities- it's just there's nothing but silence on their parts and now they closed the thread at 10 pages, no further discussion allowed on the subject ever. The tag from Slashdot didn't imply anything else, mind.
It didn't have anything to do with NWN2 getting ported or anything like that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The comments here on slashdot not in the thread. There may not have been discussion that thread about NWN2, but there was discussion here.
There is no game market for linux ... Linux users buy GAMES.
There is no contradiction there, Linux users buy and run Win32 games and that undermines the need for native Linux ports. The Linux Market is *not* the number of Linux users that would buy a native Linux port, it is only those who would never buy a Win32 version and emulate or dual boot. The Win32 buyers are already customers of the developers, there is no new money by transferring a person from the Win32 sale column to the Linux sale column. It is cannibalization of the existing market. The only new money that would support Linux development and *more importantly* QA and Support comes from those who only run native Linux ports and never dual boot or emulate Win32 games.
The real reason we have this problem can be summed up in two words : DirectX.
Not really, several Mac developers have successfully translated DirectDraw, DirectSound, and Direct3D calls to Mac sound and graphics calls. The one area where you are correct is with respect to networking, DirectPlay. One Mac dev got DirectPlay calls translated but IIRC it was a hurculean effort. It any case many Win32 devs shun DirectPlay for various reasons.
if these companies practiced good software design patterns and started from the beginning to make things potentially portable, there would be a very low "cost of porting".
isn't portable == bad software design. period.
the software developer didn't modularize enough of the sub components into sections that can be separated and reused for different platforms.
I'd have to say that I'm not the target audience that game companies are looking for. I never bought Neverwinter Nights for Windows or Linux. I love D&D. However, for $50, I want a game, not a client. Maybe I missed something there. I just never understood paying $50 for a game that requires a monthly paid subscription.
I did buy SimCity 3000 and Myth II for Linux. They were great games. However, they stopped working after I upgraded to Linux 2.6. Now the disks just sit in a drawer.
What I'm looking for are some fun games that are not overly expensive and will be playable for longer than a couple of years. Linux offers a lot of simple, fun games. However, none of the games from commercial vendors offer what I'm looking for.
It's great that Bioware is interested in the Linux market. But please, support your product by keeping it updated and don't charge outrageous amounts for the client if you are also going to charge for required services.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
UT2004 for Linux sold _way_ more than 1000 units. So did the Mac OS X version.
The UT2004 Linux/Mac/Win64 guy,
--ryan.
Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
I've been thinking along those lines for a while, and take my hat off to you.
Just buy them. And then there will be more.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
NWN was never ported to linux it was codeveloped on Linux. Bioware delivers patches for Linux at the same time they release them for Windows every time. If there is an example of how to do a LINUX game and Windows game, NWN is it. Most people I know use LINUX for the server as well, ease of remote support helps with that versus windows.
The only thing they missed the mark on was a sql interface for the database, but a good memory hook was developed and its really a nice program.
www.nsrealm.com Is a great example of what can be done with NWNs.
I was unhappy NWN2 wasn't also released as a linux client at the same time, perhaps they will do this at some point, but I dont see it. Perhaps they will work with the wine folks to make it install nicely and play in wine. That would remove the need for co-development on linux if they dont have the cash.
If Bioware say's they will release a LINUX client/game for Dragon age, I'd expect it to be the same quality of service they did for NWN. Which in my opinion was the best for a game to date, covering 3 major expansions, and several online ones. I'd really like to see something like the mumble client/speex integrated into dragon age if they are making an online/multiplayer version, or at least some good testing. Also they could improve thier updating process for LINUX which was really rough to startwith, perhaps enlist some of us linux folks to write a good install script in the beta. NWN is not exactly simple for the novice linux user.
I currently run NWN SDL with alsa, aramok and mumble all working and playing flawlessly on fedora 5. I've bought all expansions, and actually 2 copies of the game, all running on linux. Game on Bioware!
Personally, I thought that Quake 4 was rather good and had a better story than Doom 3, but it's all subjective.
There really is not a reason why Linux machines can't run Windows game code. Well, there is the usual semi-religious reason, but please. You just have to not judge the task to be impossible too quickly. It boils down to the game having a tangle of things it needs to work, and you need to connect those things to something on the Linux side. I know this because I have done a very similar thing.
You can do it with less quick hardware and go straight to the metal; I taught the Mac OS to come up on Atari ST hardware that way. At 8 Mhz there were not many cycles to waste. Some of the software I had to run was an utter nightmare because it caused bus errors in the 68000 on the Atari side, but not on the Mac side because of a fluke, so I had to teach the 68000 to ignore bus errors.
But as VMware and others have shown, Windows stuff will coexist with Linux, and they've worked out the six -billion- little details of getting the hardware to task-switch (and I bet it wasn't at all fun). One of the funniest things I've seen was getting my resume bounced from them. Heh!
Just looking here in my Xandros 3.0 manual, I also see:
Code Weaver's CrossOver, which runs Microsoft Office. That is extremely difficult and really well done because it handles really *fun* stuff like out-of-bounds memory access and nil pointer access that happens in Office (I had to fight with it too).
Win4Lin "runs Windows operating systems and applications in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run." Eval copy available. I have not tried it personally.
VMWare "runs multiple operating systems and applications, not just Windows, in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run."
There are also Terminal Server Client and Citrix Linux ICA Client, which run Windows apps on another machine and give you a window into them.
Now, if it were me, and I wanted to be able to have a pretty good chance of popping in a generic Windows game disk and running it with Linux, I would use one of the above, but I would also go hunting ready for bear: some sort of in-circuit emulator ready to trap absurd stuff, and work around it. I can sure tell you that a hardware ICE would have made my task far easier and enabled me to catch bugs in the Mac OS that were not findable otherwise.
This is all doable. It's just selecting the method of doing it. Other people have already done parts of it. Running Quake 4 under VMWare, then the others, would be a very interesting test indeed.
Thanks,
David Small
davetracer@aol.com
Really... Gods... Besides, even with the "gorgeous" effects, etc., from what I've been hearing from
people about NWN2 it's not all that hot and is more of a train wreck because of the framerates and a
few other things (Even Illiad was making jokes about the game in recent times on UserFriendly...).
Sorry for the misunderstanding on that all...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I've been enjoying it thus far. I've got a beast of a machine to play it on though, Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 2 GB of RAM and a 512 MB 7900GTX, but I do play it all on high with a 1920x1200 resolution inside and out without a single frame rate issue at all.
I used to be a Mac gamer, until I realized that was an oxymoron and so I went out and bought myself a Windows box to play all the games I had been dreaming of playing only to find... they sucked. Just because a platform has 10x the number of games doesn't mean there are 10x the number of games I want to play. In fact, after a few years of it, I realized I'd really only been missing 1 or 2 quality games each year by being a Mac gamer.
However, due to the vastly increased number of mods & add-ons available only for Windows for the games I like to play, I still keep a Windows gaming rig, even though I do everything else on my Mac. But, I still only buy games that are released for Mac, for two reasons: 1) the last vestiges of my Mac zealotry 2) the games which are popular enough to justify a Mac port typically mean they're better. I mean, you can read all the reviews you want, but a developer knows if they have a quality game which is going to sell enough to make it worthwhile, and that's generally good enough for me.
So, while my purchase of a game might ring up under their Windows flavor, the only reason they got any revenue from me is because of their porting effort. But I doubt that shows in the numbers.
Oh, and don't flame me because I'm not supporting non-Windows gaming, my gaming box is very impractical for general use, and my Mac doesn't even have a real graphics card (it's an iBook). If you missed my explanation of the irony of my situation, read my post again.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Heh... But that's what the jokes are on about. You have to have a machine in the Ubercomputer class of machines and GPUs to have usable framerates with it. Try it with the suggested minimums, you'll be pulling your hair out in some of the scenes as the framerate plummets to below 20fps at 800x600 or 1024x768. Kill the CD copy protection, gain 10fps back. I just wish they'd stuck with making the game first and then striving for an X-Box port AFTERWARDS- the engine only needed a few bits and bobs added to it to accomplish what they were reaching for and OpenGL was completely capable of it without major framerate loss like they have with the DX9 version. They literally ripped out the OpenGL rendering engine and re-did it, as rumor has it, ostensibly for an X-Box version they tried to go for and ran out of funds for...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas