Slashdot Mirror
Pushing Linux Adoption Through Gaming
An article on CNet questions the viability of using games as part of a strategy to increase Linux adoption. It points out a blog post by Andrew Min which suggests:
"... Linux companies also need to start paying attention to the open source gaming community. Why? It's lacking. However, gamers can get excited about free games. They just have to be up to par with commercial games. The problem is, commercial companies pay hundreds of employees to build a game for several years, while many competing gaming projects only last several years before the developer moves on. It's time for open source developers to start getting paid for their jobs. Who better to pay them than the companies that benefit most?"
you need to give a kickstart to the thing first.
Read radical news here
Require Open Source Artists. Art assets are very important to games and most programmer art just doesn't cut it.
That's the real challenge, because while many coders will happily knock up a game engine for their own amusement, handling stuff like artistic direction to get a consistent "look" and generating inane brick textures is not something that many people do for "amusement". Of course, that could change if people got passionate about it, but it's much easier to focus as an artist when working on something like a Source Engine mod, where a lot of the inane brick textures already exist and you can concentrate on building cool character models (etc).
As a game developer, I'm kind of annoyed how trivializing this is to the development process. A great game can take a team of 200 people 3-5 years to make. Most games are between 3 - 30 million dollars to make, and 80% of them don't make money. That means you need to spend between 15 and 150 million dollars to finally get a game that catches on.
It's not a trivially easy hook to sell systems.
The ______ Agenda
Another reason this won't work is that older games tend to be ported. Gamers want the newest out there in general. Also, Open Source just won't be able to keep up with the billions of dollars spent on this industry.
But we shouldn't have to. A lot of casual gaming is moving to flash. Linux can run flash. ALL the recent games I like are on flash (no, I have a Windows install too, it's not because it's the only game in town for me): for instance games like http://www.playauditorium.com/Play Auditorium and the http://rocksolidarcade.com/Rock Solid Arcade games in general.
In my experience, the easiest to convert were the casual computer users (99% browsing activity). It would seem to me, that the casual gamers, which the Wii tapped into completely, is a larger market and one easier to bring over. Flash already works! No work to be done!
Sticking money into this area, other than a common toolkit/API to run games would be folly. Trying to win hardcore gamers whose current platform gives them practically everything.
If Linux need to get popular as fast as possible, perfect Wine a lot. Have it run Direct X whatever out of the box as well as the top games and top windows apps. Before long, a self-feeding cycle will have started where requirements will start listing Windows XP, Vista, or Wine 1.x. Then companies too, eyeing the lower TCO, will start switching, and perhaps native apps start taking off.