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

Obvious question

[MooseMuffin]

What kind of question is this? Linux users aren't gamers because of the hassle of gaming on linux. Wine is great and all, and I"m constantly impressed that such an ambitious project works as well as it does, but even the games that it runs perfectly still require some futzing with. Directx 9 features are being implemented currently but come on - dx9 is 5+ years old now. Combining that with wine regressions, game patches that break wine compatibility and its just not worth the effort. I'll either boot into windows or go play a game console.

Re:Linux users are used to free software

[JasonWM]

I don't believe anyone ever said games for linux had to be open source, or free of charge. I'd gladly pay for games that ran on linux platforms. Many of us use linux because we choose to use it, and if we do have to spend money, we just don't want it to go to Microsoft.

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

[pushing-robot]

such as Halo II being able to be run only on Vista

Really?

PC gaming is dying

[sterno]

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:

1) a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console
2) you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems
3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state
4) the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation

There's just not a lot left that PC games can claim superiority on. Linux gaming is even more dead because it's a very small subset of PC gaming with a lot of complexities that make support very difficult. It costs more dollars per gamer to develop and support the platform, and on top of that, you've got an industry full of people that have a ton of DirectX experience which does no good on Linux (Wine aside).

Re:common

[xtracto]

Well, nothing stops them from using OpenGL instead. Last time I checked, OpenGL does run in Windows, even if it requires third-party drivers to do so.

Of course, I'm not a graphics developer, so there is probably more to this than simple vendor lock-in.

And that, people, is what makes DirectX shine against Linux. Every time I see a discussion concerning Direct X, people in /. keep comparing it to OpenGL. To port a Direct X game into a non Direct X technology you would need *a lot more* than Open GL, Open GL would only be good for he Direct 3D part of Direct X, you still have *a lot* of other things that are not related to graphics (like DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectMusic among others.

Sure, you could try to glue several open source technologies like SDL, Allegro, OpenMAX, OpenML, OpenGL, OpenAL, FMOD and others to accomplish almost everything that Direct X provides you, but it would be a very cumbersome work and, as other people said, not cost effective enough for the 10% of market share that could buy your game.

Whether people like it or not, Direct X is a beast of an API, if Microsoft made something right, it was Direct X , as everything is integrated in one specific package. Shure, the Open GL modelling paradigm is better than the Direct 3D one (or it was, about 4 years ago when I used to prorgram games using both of them), but the ability to have all those multimdedia features in one integrated API makes it worth it. And of course, you can also include the ability to use MS Visual Studio for the development.