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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 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?
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.
In the long run I imagine that this will not be an issue ...
In 10 years computers will be (about) 100 times as powerful as they are today and it will be too expensive to create games which really push these systems to their limits. When that happens I expect most game engines will move to be programmed in Java (or another interpreted language) in order to improve the portability between Handhelds, Consoles and the PC; once a game is developed in Java (or another interpreted language) it should be reasonably easy to port it to Linux/Mac.
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.)
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.
And on what are you basing your 10,000 - 100,000 figure? The fact that you bought a game?
The "Linux Game Market" for any given game is the set of people who are all of the following:
How many people is that really?
The Linux market may be the same size as the Mac market, but the vast majority of Macs are desktop machines owned by individuals. I would bet that the vast majority of Linux systems are not - many of them probably don't even have a GUI running or a monitor or mouse attached.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Umh, sure. I bet lots of people said the same 10 years ago, and they were right, you can play the java version of Mario everywhere! But games are known for pushing the edge, there will be an increase in middleware. It used to be that almost everybody coded a game from scratch, down to the metal, now no one does that any more (save those who write retro games). Now at the very least one uses a 3D API, sound API, etc, if not outright engines (like the Doom 3 engine, etc).
Middleware is a lot better than a bytecode language. In fact calling java portable is like saying x86 is portable (sure, you can code an x86 VM, same deal as java). And rather pointless, rapid development is a waste of time, if you can simply reuse code instead. You say java can be used to develop a physics engine in half the time? Well, why would I *want* to code a physics engine myself to begin with? Also, if the middleware was ported, you can be crossplatform, for example developing for SDL+OpenGL covers linux, ms windows and mac osx and probably a couple of consoles.
You completely ignore the biggest costs of adding platforms -- testing and support. That is, of course, assuming the code is already multi-platform capable (and others on this thread have talked at length about the issues involved in that non-trivial exercise). Remember that support includes both end-user support as well as maintenance. This means developing (or at least configuring) and managing a patch distribution infrastructure for each platform. Plus there are the difficulties of handling platform-specific bug fixes -- do you update the shared source code thereby incurring at least some regression testing on every platform, or do you branch for each platform? Neither is pleasant and both have associated costs that grow exponentially with the number of platforms supported. It simply makes no sense to port a product from a platform with >90% marketshare, to attempt to get the remaining 10%. Those costs can and should be applied to simply getting more of the 90% chunk.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
In most cases your interpreted code (from C# or Java) will run between 50%-75% of the speed of hand optimized Assembly or C/C++ code. The real problems (currently) with interpreted languages is they do not provide a standard interface for graphics cards (which prevents taking advantage of the GPU to produce your graphics) and garbage collection is awful at handling memory management; if there was a standard Graphics inteface in Java which allowed you to program in OpenGL, and Java allowed for "hints" to tell it when to free memory you could (probably) produce a game that looked like Half-Life 2 on a pretty average PC.
Now, games have been known to push hardware but at one point in time an office suite was also know for pushing the limits of hardware. If you look at what it costs to produce a XBox 360/PS3/PC game currently, developers can not afford to continue to push the hardware; consider that since the NES there has been a standard 4 times increase in development cost for each generation, games went from costing $5 Million (on average) on the XBox/PS2/Gamecube to $20 Million on the PS3/XBox 360/PC, how many games can cost $80 Million and still turn a profit?
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.).
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