Why Aren't More Linux Users Gamers?

tops writes "MadPenguin.org wonders why more Linux users aren't gamers and attempts to answer that question. The article suggests, 'As far as I'm concerned, it all comes down to a choice. Expect the gaming industry to follow the Linux doctrine or instead, build up a viable, cross platform gaming market that includes us, the Linux users.' The article urges publishers to consider Linux users as a viable market, and requests that game developers target Linux as a platform during the pre-production phase." What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?

Comments

I tried to get more people into it.

[suso]

I have some experience trying to round up Linux gamers over the past couple years and what I've found is that there are some out there, but a lot of the people in my local LUG just weren't interested in playing games. I've hosted many events to try sparking interest, I even supplied the computers, but only a few people came each time. Perhaps the most common type of people that use Linux are now the ones that don't play games much anymore. Or at least not FPS, etc. Plus I found a lot of people made the excuse that they didn't have decent hardware for 3d games. Ironically, we might have better luck with Linux games if we had what we have now back in the 90s.

Re:I tried to get more people into it.

[CastrTroy]

I use Linux and play plenty of games. I just don't play games on Linux, or on PC for that matter. I find it much more enjoyable to play games on a console than to play games on PC. I also like buying a game for the console, and knowing that it will just work, and I'll never have to wonder if my computer is good enough, or if there's going to be incompatibility problems.

Re:I tried to get more people into it.

[samkass]

Perhaps the most common type of people that use Linux are now the ones that don't play games much anymore.

I do think there's something to the argument that Linux users have already self-selected themselves into a group who don't prioritize games highly (or they probably would have stuck with Windows). It's harder to justify that as a group to spend a lot of time and money publishing games to.

I think there's also the perception that a lot of Linux users don't like to pay for things. That their reaction to something that's cool and innovative is to say "gosh, I hope someone creates a free version of that!" I know it's not completely true, but it's a perception that would have to be fought to get more titles on the platform.

And then there's the fact that Linux is in third place in desktop market share behind Win32 and MacOS X. If a gaming company is going to go risk the money, they'll probably go to the Mac first. By the time they get to Linux few will care.

Re:I tried to get more people into it.

[psychodelicacy]

I think you're right - perhaps we should also ask the reverse question: Why aren't more gamers using Linux?

Anyone who started out on Linux (and there are probably incredibly few of them) probably never became a gamer (at least, not using thir computer). Anyone who started out on Windows won't want the hassles of moving their gaming over to Linux. If gaming is something you do a lot, then you're going to use the most convenient platform for it.

Personally, I have a dual-boot. I play games and use photoshop on Windows, and I do most other things on Linux. The whole point of playing games is that it's relaxing; getting them to work on Linux kinda spoils that!

Re:I tried to get more people into it.

[moderatorrater]

Because nobody makes games for linux. There are a lot of reasons for that:

1. The linux user group is self-selecting to under represent gamers because of the dominance of windows. Since almost all games require windows, you either have to work with each game individually to get it working with WINE or dual boot windows; the extra work of Wine is a high hurdle with no guarantee of success, and dual booting eliminates disk space, ease, and makes it so you have to buy windows anyway. Emulation has almost all the same problems, it's just easier once it's running.

2. The group that uses linux has a large portion of people that are unwilling to use closed source software. Since games are a pure luxury item, most people don't want to make a high quality, open source one (working to make one defeats the purpose unless you get pleasure from coding the game itself). If the game's closed source, it's automatically going to lose a significant portion of an already small market.

3. Linux is a moving/amorphous target. Usually people get around this by using open source, since that means you can just compile against the new kernel and you're fine. But for a closed source, binary distribution this isn't as simple. The game manufacturers (who use a lot of tricks to make their games faster and better) would have to try to optimize for a platform that has multiple distributions and multiple hardware platforms (32 bit, 64 bit, solaris, mac) where there's no guarantee the kernel or the scheduler or the window manager will remain the same. In windows they can be sure that the movement's going to be steady and they'll have to release a compatibility patch infrequently.

4. The biggest one is market share. The market for linux is already small because you have to be technically skilled to even think about using it, and yet that's what's required to even get onto the computer. That's changing slowly, but if you take a number that's less than 10% of all computer users and then take away from it as above, you're looking at a pitifully small market that requires a lot of work to address.

As linux grows, so will demand, and these problems will get worked out. Until then, I'll just have to get used to the fact that I have a ten second window when my computer boots to decide whether I'm going to be playing games or if I'm going to be more productive.

Biggest obstacle

[Todd Knarr]

The biggest obstacle: DirectX. It's API is only available on Windows, no other platforms, and (especially with DirectX 10 and Vista) Windows seems to go out of it's way to make OpenGL unattractive or non-feasible. That makes it difficult for game companies to target both Windows and non-Windows systems from the same codebase.

"Games for Windows"

[Tavor]

Submitter:What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?

The "Games for Windows" campaign. I'm unsure on what the sticker requirements are for that MS programme, but I know this: I've not seen a single Games for Windows game that didn't require XP or Vista.
In my opinion, it's Microsoft exercising a monopoly position in the Gaming Industry, but try proving it.

Market Share

[CSMatt]

Making a game is expensive, so logically you want to release it to the biggest audience you can so that you can reap the most profit (or at the very least make enough to hit the break-even point). Windows, with 85% of the OS market, has the most promise of giving you the highest audience in PC gaming.

#1: Size of potential market.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Linux comprises about 1% of the desktop / notebook OS installed base. Even if ALL of that 1% were people that buy and play games regularly, it probably would only account for 10% that of the Windows game user base.

Given the ideology of a lot of Linux users, a lot of that 1% might never pay for a game or want to use commercial / closed source software.

Linux is the game

[avatar4d]

I am not intending to stereotype, although it will probably come across that way anyway. From my personal experience in working with *nix, hacking away to do various things, is the game. I spend the majority of my time trying new things and configurations instead of playing games. Although now my BSD-based laptop (OS X) allows me a wider selection of games to play compared to my FreeBSD workstation. Even when I ran Linux though it was the same; for me at least.

Because Linux IS our game?

[inflexion]

I could go home at night and play video games. Or I could go home and play with the alpha release of Ubuntu (insert your favorite distrib). Both things are fun. Both require creativity. Both satisfy my need to be playing with digital technology. Both teach me new things.

However... The world isn't all that much better if I've beaten a level at some game millions of people have already beaten. But if I've squashed a bug in Ubuntu? The world benefits quite a bit.

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[CSMatt]

What "death" of XP are you referring to? XP is still the preferred OS for gaming and will probably remain in that position for at least another year or two.

Self selecting population

[Basilius]

More Linux users aren't gamers because the gamers aren't (as an overreaching generalization) switching to Linux. People don't switch platforms if the things they do aren't easier on the target platform. Gamers are no different than AutoCAD geeks or Photoshop mavens.

The old cliche "build it and they will come" applies. But in today's "gotta make the next quarter's number" world, nobody's going to build it if the customers aren't already there.

Wall St. is the bane of capitalism's existence.

Re:Testing

[Todd Knarr]

I've found the best way to support Unix distributions is to not support them. Just support the software you need. If you need a particular version of a library, note that dependency. Keep your dependencies as general as you can, eg. never require version 1.4.5 of a library if you can work with any version 1 or 1.4. Config files have a standard location, usually /etc/softwarename and $HOME/.softwarename . Allow overriding this via command-line switches. At that point you won't need to worry much about variations between distributions, beyond "Distribution X only supports version 2 of package $XYZZY, we're coded to version 1 and v2 isn't backwards-compatible.".

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[CSMatt]

I don't follow the progress of the gaming industry, but I'm guessing that most developers will be either releasing DirectX 9/Windows XP ports of their games for quite some time or eventually abandoning the PC market and focusing exclusively on consoles to combat this problem. If Microsoft isn't willing to step up to the plate and fix these issues with Vista than the market will move on to something else.

As for Halo 2, I believe that a hack was released that allows for it to run in Windows XP.

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[ddillman]

Microsoft has stated they will cease selling Windows XP as of June 30, 2008. When you can't buy new copies anymore, it's essentially dead, even if those of us who have it still use it for a while yet. Kind of like a chicken after you cut its head off.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[MooseMuffin]

I agree with most of this except #3. Here in the age of internet enabled consoles, more and more console games are being released with bugs to be patched later.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[yoshi_mon]

The simple truth is that gaming on PC's, regardless of the operating system is dying a slow death. I'm a long time fan of PC gaming, but when given that:
Here we go again...

1) a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console
Not for what you get. A console does not provide any real functionality outside of being a DVD player. PCs offer a very high level of functionality outside of gaming.

2) you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems
I am never sure what prompts people to say this. I've not had any sort of driver and or compatibility problems for years now. Are there some people that are still running MS DOS and trying to game out there?

3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state
Ok, this is a fair point. But thanks to the fact that they are PC games vs console games they are typically patched up quickly if they are a game of any real note.

4) the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation
Huh? They always improve, when was the last time that consoles did not improve when they were bumped up a gen. Not even sure what your tying to say here. It's not like PCs hardware is standing still either.

Linux gaming has it's own whole host of issues but dredging up the ol' PC gaming is gunna die argument really fails imo.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[sterno]

Good point. However, the major difference is that, given a consistent hardware platform in consoles, the bugs that are found tend to effect everybody and thus there's more of a fire under developers to fix problems quickly or get them right on release. Basically within a couple weeks of launch a game will be broadly playable for most people with maybe a few glitches here and there.

With PC games there's nearly infinite hardware combinations which means that inevitably no matter how much QA you do, there will be bugs at release and so I think there's more of a tendency to assume that there will be bugs and that it's okay. Some people will find themselves completely unable to play the game, ever, even after several patches. A good friend of mine recently had to threaten Valve through the BBB in order to get a refund on a game that never worked on his system in spite of numerous patches. That's not a likely scenario on a console.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[sterno]

The other factor there is that if you've got a Linux box and you're a gamer, I guarantee you dual boot to play most of your games. Given that, why would a developer go out of their way to make a game for linux when you can just dual boot to play. I mean I've picked up games for Linux before when they were available, but a game not being Linux compatible never stopped me from getting it.

Re:PC gaming is NOT dying

[moderatorrater]

It's not going to die at all. Computers are always going to be more ubiquitous than consoles and a great target for games because there are just so many of them already. The install base of computers is huge, and casual games are just beginning to tap a large portion of the potential. Whether these casual gamers will ever move beyond casual games is up for debate, but that doesn't mean that they're not games.

Consoles are gaining popularity, and that's good. But they'll never come equipped with a keyboard and mouse because people already have one of those (a pc). RTS games are better and many people prefer the PC FPS experience. Valve develops for PCs almost exclusively, with their console offerings being really bad. Coincidentally, they're also one of the most popular publishers in the industry right now. Civilization has yet to make a console release, and it'll probably be sub-par.

Finally, it's cheaper to develop a small game for a PC than a console, so independent companies release on the PC a lot. XBLA is changing that, but it's not going to change overnight and it's not going to completely dominate.

So, the importance and dominance of the PC as the gaming platform is being diminished and will continue down that road for a while, but it'll never die. The install base and the setup will keep it going for a long, long time.

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[CSMatt]

Cease selling != cease supporting. I remember games supporting Windows 98SE long after it ceased being sold because the market share was still so much larger during Windows XP's early years. I can envision a similar scenario with Windows Vista and Windows XP, especially since it seems that we've "peaked" in terms of general-use hardware performance this time around.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[sterno]

1) Here's the thing, if I buy a PC to play DVD's, browse the Internet, etc, I can get something for $400-600 that does the job adequately. However, that system will not play games. If I want to play games I'm looking at a $1000-1500 box at a minimum. That premium is entirely about playing games and that extra horsepower goes almost entirely unused when playing a movie, etc. Besides, if you are playing games you'll need to upgrade at least once every 3 years where as consoles have about a 5-6 year life cycle. So it's even worse.

2) Okay, well lucky you. I have. I know many friends that have. I know several gamers who will reinstall their operating from scratch routinely to keep kruft to a minimum and to keep the systems running smoothly. I've often had a game get installed, have glitches, require patches and driver updates, etc. On the other hand, every console game I've ever bought has worked out of the box.

3) Console games are generally patched more rapidly and effectively than PC games because the hardware platform is consistent thus making glitches consistent. Much easier to QA and to track down issues when they happen instead of having a bunch of obscure bugs that pop up on random hardware configurations.

4) What I'm saying is that when the PS2 came out, my PC was substantially faster than the PS2. When the PS3 came out, the overall performance was probably a little better in my PC, but not enough that I'd really notice with most games. That by and large, the hardware that's available for console gaming is no longer a limiting factor on the games. Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware.

Linux as a subset of PC gaming suffers from many of the same problems, hence my pointing it out. It has a host of issues all it's own, but the complexities of PC harware are pointing a giant bazooka at the foot of PC gaming.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[rucs_hack]

I spent the last year trying to drum up interest from developers for a linux only game. I've failed in this effort and gone back to the idea of releasing for windows only.

Why? Because no-one who was interested in joining the dev team believed for one moment that a closed source game could succeed on the linux platform. Open source sounds good, but won't pay the very immediate bills generated by running an online game world. The end result was that a Linux game was deemed to be an automatic fail (at least a linux version of my game), simply because there wasn't the user base to support such a move, and the API support for linux game related devices compared to windows is awful

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[Kev647]

Ok, lets repeat this one last time: Halo is for Vista Only. Just because you can crack it does not mean that it was meant for XP or anything else. Do people go around saying that Mac OS X is only for Mac computers: YES! Yes they do. And yet, we know of hacks that allow Mac OS X to run on Intel chips (and I don't mean "FlyAKite," I am talking about the actual Mac OS X. So, with that, just because you can crack something doesn't make it not only Vista. Taking that software (game) as it is, it was released for Vista only. Case closed.

And stoolpigeon, thanks, I appreciate it. I get carried away sometimes. I will keep your words in my mind when writing posts from now on. Thanks.

And yes, the link is working now, but it was down moments after the post, to all those that were concerned about this. Actually, their whole website was down. : (

Re:common

[91degrees]

What can you do in DX that you can't do in OpenGL?

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[try_anything]

It's wishful thinking. The idea that "a lot of gamers" would be "looking to Linux" as an alternative to Vista is silly. Gamers are not going to flock to Linux and camp out there, without games, until the gaming industry comes to them. Gamers will go to a platform where they expect the next generation of games to be available. In other words, they'll end up on Vista. The only way gamers will switch to Linux on the desktop is if they switch to console gaming.

At the moment the only significant consumer movement towards Linux is by people who want to save money and/or use low-end hardware. It's a small phenomenon, and the gaming industry has no interest in those people anyway, regardless of what platform they use.

Re:No free acclerated drivers yet but don't give u

[try_anything]

It happens on both systems.

I've been left hunting for drivers several times on Windows, most recently for a USB-to-serial converter from a major manufacturer. I bought it new, plugged it in, and started using it. Windows seemed to detect it and handle it fine. After a few days I found out that when I unplugged the USB connection, half the time the driver would freeze Windows. I couldn't find the CD that came with the device, so I went to the manufacturer's web site. Even though I had the model name and product number of the device, I couldn't find the driver. I gave up looking several times, but the crashes kept sending me back. Eventually I sent an email to the manufacturer, and I got back a download link for a single file. What was I supposed to do with the file? I had no clue. I tried modifying the URL to the file to find another page, but no luck. I had to use Google to find install instructions. Then, after I installed the driver and rebooted, the behavior wasn't completely fixed. The crashes became less frequent, but they still happened often enough that I gave up on the device and bought another USB-to-serial converter, which turned out to have a similar problem.

I also have an old Dell that I couldn't install Windows XP Pro on because partway through the install process, the screen became garbled. It seemed like XP tried to load a better driver for the video card and ended up using one that was a little bit off. That was especially frustrating because the box came with Windows 2000 on it, and I had reinstalled Windows 2000 on it from scratch (using a retail copy of Windows 2000 Pro) in the past. I thought Windows XP's driver support was a superset of Windows 2000's, but maybe Microsoft stopped including a suitable driver for that model on its Windows install disks. I didn't bother hunting for a Windows driver; I just installed Linux.

Re:PC gaming is dying

[JSBiff]

I'm not a Mac user, but I'd like to throw in that once you've developed OpenGL support you get PS3, Linux (maybe BSD too?), *and* Mac support, without really developing 3 rendering paths. There might be a little bit of IO/networking stuff that you have to do seperately for each platform (I'm not sure, but I bet a lot of that stuff is abstracted away if you use a good, cross-platform engine anyhow; something along the lines of GarageGames' Torque engine, Epic's Unreal engine,or Id's Doom III/Quake 4 engine, Crystal Space, OGRE 3D, etc).

I don't see why more developers don't target OpenGL instead of DirectX. . .you get Windows support, plus a bunch of other platforms, if you want, too. Are there features in DirectX that are simply not possible in OpenGL currently?

FUD?

[WindowsTroll]

Driver Hunting? If you are referring to driver hunting for windows, I am sorry to inform you that this hasn't been an issue for YEARS. As for the effort for keeping up a Windows box - it takes almost zero effort.

Getting proper drivers USED to be a problem back in the days of DOS games when Windows 2.11, 3.0 and 3.1 were still started from the command prompt. By the time Windows 95 rolled around, *almost all* hardware vendors shipped Windows drivers with their hardware, and game programmers were moving aware from writing to the hardware interface and instead writing to low level Windows primitives. After Windows 95, the only games that had driver issues were the OEM versions of games that were packaged with hardware since they were written specifically for a certain video card. An example of this was the nVidia Edge 3D card that shipped with Panzer Dragoon and Descent. How do I know this? I worked on the port of Descent to nVidia's 1st generation chipset, the nV1. This version of Descent was a Windows 95 native application that would only run with an nVidia card.

Since about 2000, game developers have been writing to Direct X, and letting windows handle the details of the video card. Back in the Windows 95 days, Windows was pretty stupid regarding hardware recognition, and Linux was pretty smart about recognizing hardware. However, once it became established that the OS should detect the hardware and be able to find the drivers for it, Microsoft didn't take much time to figure out how to do this and provide a TON of drivers on the Windows installation diskettes/CDs. Any special hardware that you purchased came with Windows drivers. Drivers have not been an issue for years.

The market for linux games is non-existent. To produce a top notch game these days costs several million dollars (the average cost was around $2M when I left the gaming industry 7 years ago) and the common perception, whether correct or not, is that linux users won't pay for a game. There might be some inroads on the MMORPG side of gaming since they make their money by charging you a monthly fee, but the standard boxed software market will not make a game for linux until it is established that linux users will pay for software. Given the emotional/religious arguments over OSS/Free Software/commercial(closed source), companies aren't going to deal the the hassle.