Slashdot Mirror
Why Game Developers Should Support OS X and Linux
kevind23 writes "Although Mac OS X and Linux have a small (but growing) market share, Jeff from Wolfire Games argues that supporting non-Windows platforms can lead to a huge increase in game sales. Using their popular game Lugaru as an example, he shows how less-popular platforms, or more specifically, their userbase can be a powerful advertising force. This can lead to a dramatic increase in popularity and exposure, which usually means a large boost in overall sales. The short article is an interesting read, especially for those working in game development and sales."
I remember it being drilled into my head over and over... develop for new hardware instead of old hardware, do everything for the expensive crowd because people who don't spend money on their hardware are less likely to spend money on software. This might be an outdated school of thought, but I'd say it goes double for Mac users. They're really expensive, and especially nowadays they're taking on this image as a trendy status symbol instead of a tool to do work with. Another things Mac devs have going for them, there is a lot less competition. If you would say that Macs don't have enough games out for them, then that translates into a niche to fill for aspiring businessmen.
It seems that the poor blog has been Slashdotted, so here's the Google cache entry for it complete with graphics.
Targeting a larger audience results in more sales. Who'd have guessed? :p
Targeting a 5 .. 10% larger audience lead to ~122% more sales.
Now, I would still have guessed (including the leverage) it but that does not go for everybody.
'Because I said so and I know I'm right. If you don't agree with me you're an idiot for caring more about the 89% of PC users who aren't using a Mac or Linux.'
Why, this is the perfect place to advertise the Linux Installers for Blizzard Products Petition! I believe that if Blizzard supported Linux for its upcoming titles, it would change Linux gaming forever.
A game with an anthropomorphic bunny in the lead sells extremely well on Linux..
I feel strangely offended
I find this ironically on-topic...
I RTFA, and I got a feeling of deja vu after point #1.
This is obviously true. World of Padman and Wesnoth get articles on Linux sites all the time. Even though these titles are available on Windows, no Windows sites cover them. The reason? There's probably way too much Windows game competition at that quality level.
I don't see how this is actually any different than point #1. I'm certainly happy for his fortune in getting on Digg FP three times for the same game. If he had made a single-platform game, though, he wouldn't have gotten that exposure due to the #1 effect.
Again, I see this as an extension of point #1. He got mentioned on Slashdot because of the Linux build, and got Windows and Mac traffic from Slashdot. If there had been a lot of commercial Linux games, though, he wouldn't have gotten the mention on Slashdot because of ... Point #1.
OK, I'll give this one to him as not related to #1. He believes that Mac-heads are cultists, and I'm not arguing. j/k ;)
Put identity in the browser.
I think it's pretty simple.
Developers like DirectX.
Developers who develop DirectX Products don't always feel the desire to maintain a DirectX and OGL render pipeline.
Apple 3D Card selection have been historically pretty worthless. Linux is infamous for its 3D Card support.
So not only do developers need an openGL renderer but they also have to develop for a less refined driver base.
Because being crossplatform'd with consoles just isn't enough!
The alternative of simply programming over a common standard environment is still there.
Part of all that power currently spent on better and better graphics could be spent on passing through a common interface.
As an extra bonus, it would allow the creation of computer-like machines that would only run that standard gaming environment, without all the other functions of a computer.
Unless someone translated the rest of the usual computer functions to that common gaming environent.
But I thought that article trivialised the whole affair and offered very little evidence for the point, bar a spectacularly presented pie chart. One publisher made money from a game. Not quite the smoking gun.
One thing that is true is that there is a lot of respect and word of mouth thrown the way of a good game with native linux client. That would of course diminish if there weren't so few quality games supporting it, of course.
I also find myself wondering whether this game Lugaru is an opengl game, keeping migration costs down.
I record my sleeptalking
You mean B=D?
technically...I think it's more like FreeB=D, just replace the "=" with a "S".
Or replace with a "A"
(perhaps even "ASTAR")
Anyways....dunno about this one.
One of the issues is that gaming (graphics, sound, etc.) API's aren't as well developed on non-Windows platforms and the user base is smaller.
Sure, there's OpenGL but.....OGL...well..it's not really "optimized" for games (this may be the fault of video card manufacturers who can't write good drivers that implement the necessary OGL functions as well as game developers who...well...don't know how to code, period)
And there are hardware limitations to think about as well on other platforms.
Getting the latest and greatest video card on a Mac for one is not always possible (nvidia drivers for mac isn't on nvidias site...at least not for the 2x0 series or the 9 series).
And Linux drivers are fairly new.
Come to think of it..."=" should really be "A"
Copies of NWN1 I paid for: 4. One for me, one for friends. I use the Linux version, some of the friends use Windows ones. But I woudln't have bought even one if it didn't work for me.
Copies of NWN2 I paid for: 0. No Linux support, didn't even look at it.
Copies of Lugaru I paid for: 1 so far, plus plugged it at every appropiate opportinity. Would have been 0 without Linux support. The next version looks good enough that I'll probably end up paying for more than one.
And Linux users want to get everything free. So it must be a game that is free to install but requires a subscription for online gaming...
[Lightweight Linux]
One of the main reasons things like WoW work in WINE is because Blizzard actually makes a decent effort to have their games run properly in OpenGL. You can run a WoW client in Windows in OpenGL as well, which in some cases actually solves some DirectX problems on some cards/computers.
Another example is CCP, the producers of Eve Online. They have a MAC and Linux client, respectively on Cedega on the MAC (IIRC) and a specific Wine on Linux, and that seems to work quite well from what I've heard.
If software companies would work closer with the people that write these sort of 'emulators' (they're not really emulators in most cases, except for some specific routines), I think that would start to make a serious difference.
The other option is to go the Quake route, and just write your engine in such a way that it can run natively on other platforms, but that requires development effort from the start, something that up until recently wasn't exactly worth it for most companies.
We'll see what happens in the near future, but I'm afraid that the Winblows/DirectSux combination will be prevalent for a while longer yet.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
As a user, that is one thing I really hate about the Mac. It's not that I don't believe in paying for software, just that I don't think every little file management tool or MP3 player needs to ask $20. Put up a donation page and be grateful someone hasn't replaced you already.
As a user, that's one thing I hate about other computer users - they expect people to do lots of work for them for free, and feel entitled to it somehow. You should be grateful many people are producing software for you, not coming out with bullshit like 'and be grateful someone hasn't replaced you already'.
Your attitude leads directly to plentiful releases of low-quality, just-good-enough software, many with bundled advertising and malware, much like the Windows software scene in fact. TINSTAAFL.
There is plenty of free open-source software on OS X if that's what you're looking for, it isn't magically turned into shareware - there's tons of Unix software available for free via macports for example, there's also GUI apps like Cyberduck, Audacity, Handbreak, GIMP, etc etc. Then OS X itself bundles tons of open-source software (apache, gcc, etc).
There is also some quality software (like TextMate, or BBEdit) which should continue to charge for development, because development takes time, effort and money.
strange question, shouldnt I know the answer myself since I've been using all three OSen for ages myself? (Typing this on an Ubuntu desktop)
But it's been quite some years now that I last mastered a win/mac CD (it still had OS9) and I never did one for Linux before.
On the other hand my own computer usage has so much shifted to a net focus that I hardly ever install and run a CD myself anymore. And if I do this at all, it's always on win.
So, win is easy, there will be an autorun.inf with a link to an icon and a link to some autorun.exe or whatever.
On Mac, I'd expect the CD to appear with a large friendly icon, a window opening on double click with more large friendly icons that make it very clear what to do (i.e. drag the application onto the application folder alias). No autorun here.
On Linux? I have no idea. From my own usage pattern I don't expect the stuff to be on a CDrom in the first place, it's either in the repositories of my distribution or in a .deb/.rpm dnl'ed from some url or I got a tarball and have to do the ./configure / make / make install - dance. I don't think I ever opened a "commercial" CD intended to be used from Linux (with the exception of install discs). Autorun? - Gott bewahre! Rather a README, may be an install.pl ...
Now there should be sites discussing that question, design guides, style guides, best practices. No way that I'm the first one pondering about how to make a CD look just right on all three OSen - but google drowns me in a bazillion of unrelated pages. Which is why I turn up here with my question, hoping that some of you keep a link or two in their bookmarks to help me find my way.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
OK, so you don't want to pay for TextMate...
How about just using XCode, Textwrangler, jEdit, Eclipse or Smultron?
Or how about using ANY FUCKING UNIX/LINUX EDITOR EVER WRITTEN IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, either straight in an X11 window, or via the special OS X build that is available for most?
The game and modern versions of SDL don't like each other.
As with many great Linux ports, icculus maintains the Linux version.
Older bug report
New bug report
Seriously Apple doesn't do as much to support game developers as Microsoft does.
The Microsoft DirectX SDK has demo applications, a bunch of sounds, models and textures that can be used for non-commercial purposes etc.
Apple has no specific game development library and they don't do anything to support the open source game libraries that fill that void - SDL for example.
The most they have is a small area on their developers website that has a handful of tutorials. It just doesn't cut it compared to what Microsoft does to encourage all types of game developers.
Every game platform i know of has a game development toolkit that helps programmers out. From all the consoles through to the various versions of Windows. Apple has yet to release anything of the sort.
This is THE year of the Linux desktop... because I finally switched over to it.
I stopped reading when the article said that Linux sales were growing. No, Mac market share is increasing. Linux desktop market share is not moving and has remained stagnant for years now. I guess 2009 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just as 08 was, 07 was, 06, 05, 04, 03 etc etc etc all were.
Seriously - who would want to develop for Linux? There is a heap of extra dev to do which could instead be spent on building the next big thing. Linux zealots should get over themselves, they are but a blip on the radar.
This article actually makes the opposite point. The authors had all the numbers from an actual commercial cross-platform game at their disposal, and because their game got picked up by Mac writers but not Windows writers, they had the perfect opportunity to present best-case numbers to make this point. But all they could muster was a pie chart that should be in textbooks on how to present non-information, and a few ridiculously weak arguments. I would kill to see decent games for Linux, but I can't imagine how this article is going to help any. Did anyone's belief in the value of supporting Linux and/or OSX actually go up after reading it?
Flame protection: I've used Linux since the SuSE 6.1 days, have contributed to F/OSS etc. However, DirectX is technically superior to OpenGL for game purposes ... that's just a statement of fact. Not only is Direct3D superior to OpenGL, but DirectX is a whole standardised API stack (DirectSound, DirectPlay etc) instead of just graphics. The latest OGL standard was supposed to bring it up to par, but instead focused almost entirely on CAD / render workstation stuff. You can't blame game companies, DirectX is just the logical choice these days unless you REALLY care about native portability.
They have an installer that works just like the windows one. Better, because you can install it system wide (/usr/local/games) as root/admin or just for yourself (~/game) and when so installed, it's in one place so you can back it up.
And, as XP only just got around to doing properly (though often unused) all save games are in your home directory, meaning your save games survive an OS reinstall.
It's called Cider on Mac and it's actually Cedega on Linux. But it doesn't really work quite well. I tried it a few months back and the pygtk-based Cedega installer didn't work at all under e17. So I used twm to install it. But then Cedega wouldn't even open a window. So I installed wine and it worked.
The moral of the story is: There is no alternative to cross-platform code.
Instead of blowing their money on something as useless as Cedega, CCP should have instead hired a dedicated Linux/Mac Coder.
There are many more reasons, in fact. The most important one is that cross-platform development usually results in higher-quality products.
The most obvious reason is that bugs tend to show up faster if you test on more than one platform. Developers hate that, it appears to make development more difficult, but the truth is that it simply exposes the lousy work that most developers deliver.
The other reason is that you can take advantage of - or start thinking about - the platform features. For example, the old Loki port of Civ3 had additional features that the windos version didn't have, simply because the platform required them. One example: On the windos platform, there was automatically one profile for all users, because the game saved everything in the game directory. On Linux, due to stricter permissions, that was simply not possible, so the game saved everything it had to save into the user directory and every user had his own profile. You can do that in windos, too, but a lot of windos developers never think about it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Subject says all ...
Big blocker to Linux game development was a lack of audio driver from Creative for Linux. This isn't the case now (the code is available and building it is simple) and more importantly, they work. The only reason I've not moved to Linux is the lack of AAA game support, hopefully this will change.
Shit, are you serious? How long has B equaled D?
Well, this just changes everything. Dack to the brawing doarb for me!
This is THE year of the Linux desktop... because I finally switched over to it.
Cheers!
Where is my Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux that was suppose to come out when the game was released?
I bought UT3 because in the past Epic had supported Linux (even if limited; eg. no editor tools)... but now that UT3 box has been collecting dust for well over a year and there is no sign of the Linux client on the horizon. They have made no statements of any value about what the deal is. They ban people that even ask about it in the Epic forums then they cover everything up by deleting all the posts. Bunch of assholes.
I wouldn't go that far. In fact, I bought the Lugaru game mentioned in the summary. I'm sure other Linux users have too. Actually, I'd buy a lot of games if they ran on my Ubuntu system without messing around with WINE. Personally, there's no way I'm going to buy a subscription for something.
One thing that would be nice is if we could do an apt-get (or yum or whatever) install via Canonical's or somebody else's non-free repository, and have the opportunity to buy/register it while installing it.
Get out XCode and write your own. Problem solved.
I hear this all the time but it is at best rude. It takes a lot of work to write a good text editor, file management tool, or mp3 player. Some people want to do it for free and put it out under GPL. That is great. I have released GPL code myself. Some people want to get paid for their hard work. I am also all for that. If you like their product pay for it.
If you don't like their product enough to pay them what they ask then DON"T USE IT AND DON"T COMPLAIN.
There is a lot of Free as in beer and Free as in speech software for the Mac. The reason that you probably see more shareware for the Mac may be that Mac users are more willing to support those that write for their machine. Maybe Mac users don't think of programmers as slaves that should produce free software and be grateful that we are willing to use the fruit of their labors.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've never understood software houses that insist on releasing games on a single platform with propriatry APIs rather then starting development with a cross platform engine and then porting to other platforms.
In any other industry, if I went up to a manager and said 'hey, this API will get us an extra 10-15% market share for similar development costs' and they will go 'wow! let's go with that! more money for us!'
yet in software there seems to be this almost psychotic attachment to 'we must support only Windows because that is all people use'.
you think the PS3 supports DX?
You think the PS3 matters if your business isn't big enough to have a contract with Sony, or if your game is in a genre whose control doesn't easily simplify to a SIXAXIS controller?
But then why keep D3D?
Because Xbox 360 doesn't work with OpenGL, and it's reportedly easier to get a contract with Microsoft for Xbox 360 than with Sony for PS3 (which uses OpenGL ES) or with Nintendo for Wii (which uses the OpenGL-like GX API).
you shouldn't amortise any of it?
I mean, if you support XP SP2 you'll not be able to guarantee amortisation of the work when SP3 comes out. If you support Vista AND XP, you have very different demands (XP won't do DX10, etc). How about Win7?
So again, why not use OGL when it means you can have an easy time porting your game to everything but the 360?
Because the product would have a better return on investment for Xbox 360 than for Mac and Linux combined, and Sony and Nintendo have declined to deal with companies of your size.
The game and modern versions of SDL don't like each other.
As with many great Linux ports, icculus maintains the Linux version.
Older bug report New bug report
*yawn* I almost got my hopes up: open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Device or resource busy
open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Device or resource busy
open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Device or resource busy
Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)
Once they've got an OpenGL renderer, I'll argue that they don't need a DirectX one.
No DirectX means no Xbox 360. This in turn means no consoles at all unless the developer is large enough to qualify to deal with Sony and Nintendo, which reportedly have stricter requirements on developers than Microsoft. (For one thing, Sony and Nintendo have no counterpart for Xbox Live Community Games.) And no consoles means very little audience for your console-style title because few people have both an HDTV and a spare PC running Windows to connect to it. Even fewer have both an HDTV and a Mac or Linux box.
Let's say that Mac OSX has 5% of the market and that windows has 90% of the market.
Say a game captures 50% of all Mac users. That is 50% of 5% or 2.5% of the market
If that same game captures just 5% of Windows boxes then it captures 5% of 90% which is 4.5% of the market.
A nominally unpopular on Windows is still more than a success on Mac. Even allowing Linux 5% of the market, a game would need 50% on both Linux and OSX to match a mere 5% of the Windows market.
In other words, a very popular game on OS X and Linux provides less profit and market share than an unpopular game on Windows.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
TINSTAAFL?! Duh! TANSTAAFL!
All the more reason to write your software in a portable way.
You said "portable". True, for some platforms, a proper separation of business/game logic from presentation allows for easier portability. But consider these hypothetical game platforms:
How do I write portable software for all of them?
CCP's efforts were a very shaky start for Mac (but then, given that they have a small user base by MMO standards in the first place, especially compared to Blizzard), it's understandable.
The recent QR patch, after tweaking, and with some updates to Cider, has made a world of difference to Mac performance in EVE. It still has problems - after running the game for any length of time, you need to log out and log back in again to fix graphical glitches in the rest of OS X (inability to scroll in Safari, totally white windows appearing with no content etc) that must be due to the Cider engine mucking something up with the window server, but it's much better than it was.
It's no native client like the WoW Mac client, but it has allowed me to try out the game.
It's a huge commitment to write a native client though, and the number of Mac and Linux subscribers may not provide enough justification.
It has got *a lot* better lately (I run EvE on a Mac with the Cider wrapper) compared to the Empyrean Age patch, so perhaps the Linux client, while not native, is a little better too.
If their installed non-windows base grows enough, then a native client may be on the cards, but right now they are just testing the waters to see who is out there willing to try EvE without using Windows.
Releasing a game for Windows, Mac and Linux sounds all well and good, and the adoption rates on the smaller platforms may be higher as a percentage of the OS install base, but it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to spend the effort to write games for the mac, or especially Linux.
I'm a former game developer who has written games for Windows, OS X, Linux, and all the consoles, so I know the market and development challenges pretty well.
Windows, for the time being, is still the prime software development platform for games, the rest just don't have the necessary tools and third party software. It's pretty much certain that all of your game data will be processed on a windows machine, so windows will have de-facto support as long as this is the case.
If the game is written with portability in mind, and quite a few nowadays are, then it may be ported to the mac. The mac's development tools aren't as good as those available on windows, but between XCode, Shark, dtrace, and the OpenGL profiler, you can get some real work done. The problem is that even if your install rate on the mac is double that on windows, you're still talking about numbers off in the noise. Windows will probably be about 90% of your users, mac would be less than 10%, but it takes more than 10% additional effort to ship the game on the mac, so most companies won't bother due to the low return on investment.
Now, Slashdot is a very pro-linux crowd, so I'm bound to get a lot of disagreement on this next point. Linux will never be a first class game platform. No game company will ever devote the resources to support linux as a primary platform. The reason is that "Linux" isn't really a platform, the platforms are Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, and stuff we don't care about. If anyone claims that you can write the code once and run on all three, you've never tried to do so for a large project. What happens in practice is that you can get your game running pretty well, with random crashes in X and OpenGL that then take a huge amount of effort to track down, per platform. These platforms differ subtly in their API's and libraries for things like OpenGL, libc, and audio so you are guaranteed that you will never ship a single linux binary. All this extra work doesn't pay off.
If I was writing a game from scratch right now, I would still consider windows my primary platform and I'd probably port it to the mac, but Linux would not be worth the cost and then resulting support burden. Few people write games from scratch anymore. Most game studios have a library of of tools and engines that they try to re-use. Most of these tools and engines are windows only, and weren't written portably. So, the first mac or linux game for a company also includes the effort of porting this software to a new platform, which may also be a huge undertaking, and could scare management away from doing the port.
Windows has a development environment for games. It bears some resemblance to the platform used to develop for the XBox and XBox360. That means you can develop for one of these, and have some level of commonality with other platforms.
There is nothing at all like this on the Mac or Unix side of things. There are _some_ common points with other Unix platforms, but these are limited to lower-level plumbing. There is no real "games platform" that
exists that is nearly all-inclusive as DirectX:
OpenGL is certainly good, widely used, and essentially a standard.
OpenAL might be OK, but is not widely used with many other claimants to the throne.
There is nothing like Bink that allows for cross-platform in-game videos. This can be handled by one of a number of video libraries, but these are heavyweight solutions to a lightweight problem, and the ones that are cross-platform generally suck IMHO.
There is no standard GUI - using X on the Mac will result in instant failure.
There is no real equivalent to DirectInput, you have to roll everything by hand.
There is no standardized multiplayer networking system (some might consider this a benefit, but...)
There is no standardized lobby system for meeting other players online.
There is no standardized voice chat system. This is vital for modern online games.
So, when someone has a package that combines all of these parts into a single box, then "alternate platform" development might become more common. In the meantime we'll see "casual games" (which are often much more fun anyway) and hand-ports of blockbuster titles. Such is life; if you want to play modern games, you have to buy a console(or more than one) no matter how odious this might be to you.
Maury
TFA makes a compelling point, but I have a mixed feeling about that. I have a commercial program that's currently Windows-only, but with plans to port to Mac OS X and Linux.
While a Mac OS X port is an easy choice, I'm not sure about the Linux port at all. On one hand there's all the advantages that TFA mentions, but on the other hand, who uses Linux for audio production, Linux has an especially small market share in that domain, plus the reason everyone's given me, Linux users usually don't like to pay, even less for closed source programs... and of course each platform I start to support with platform-specific code everytime means more work to implement, maintain and test... But how would I know if it's worth trying or not?
You just got troll'd!
Macs need to have better video card / hardware and a $2300 tower with a lower mid-range card as the base will not do it. A $130 cost of the base card + $150 for a 8800GT makeing it $280 for a 8800gt does not help.
Putting 9400m in the mini and macbook helps make them better but the mini needs to have a faster cpu + 256 - 512 of video ram that is not part of system ram and maybe a faster 3.5 hd. Also put in a 9500 / 9600 in the higher end systems. The imac needs to have system better video card and not a small video card bump that also comes with a bigger screen that makes you trun down the screen size to run games at good settings.
Where is the mac tower? maybe a $1200 - $1500+ base core i7 system with SLI / crossfire on the higher end? With a $2700+ 2 cpu core i7 mac pro. The Dual core i7 systems will likely cost more then to days dual Exon's and a mac pro tower staring at $2700+ will look bad next to a $600 - $900 mini with a slow cpu + 9400 video useing system ram with a 2.5 laptop hd. Other system at $800 - $900 have pci-e slots and or video cards with there own ram.
Also the $2000 mac book pro is lacking in video power next to other laptops that have 9700 / 9800 cards in them some even have sli at the same price or lower and they have 4gb of ram some even have a faster cpu as well.
Apple will have to deal with better EFiX and Psystar system and if the new mini comes with no firewire, mini DP need apple wants you to pay $30 - $100 more for the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter or the Mini DisplayPort to DVIDL Adapter, 9400m video that uses system ram.
1 more thing there better not be a intel atom based mini at $500+ as that will be slower then to days mini even if they put 9400m video on it and that will just say to Psystar we can't beat you in hardware but we can try in court.
(apologies if this is a re-post, my previous comment seems to be missing) Releasing a game for Windows, Mac and Linux sounds all well and good, and the adoption rates on the smaller platforms may be higher as a percentage of the OS install base, but it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to spend the effort to write games for the mac, or especially Linux. I'm a former game developer who has written games for Windows, OS X, Linux, and all the consoles, so I know the market and development challenges pretty well. Windows, for the time being, is still the prime software development platform for games, the rest just don't have the necessary tools and third party software. It's pretty much certain that all of your game data will be processed on a windows machine, so windows will have de-facto support as long as this is the case. If the game is written with portability in mind, and quite a few nowadays are, then it may be ported to the mac. The mac's development tools aren't as good as those available on windows, but between XCode, Shark, dtrace, and the OpenGL profiler, you can get some real work done. The problem is that even if your install rate on the mac is double that on windows, you're still talking about numbers off in the noise. Windows will probably be about 90% of your users, mac would be less than 10%, but it takes more than 10% additional effort to ship the game on the mac, so most companies won't bother. Now, Slashdot is a very pro-linux crowd, so I'm bound to get a lot of disagreement on this next point. Linux will never be a games platform. No game company will ever devote the resources to support linux as a primary platform. The reason is that "Linux" isn't really a platform, the platforms are Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, and stuff we don't care about. If anyone claims that you can write the code once and run on all three, you've never tried to do so for a large project. What happens in practice is that you can get your game running pretty well, with random crashes in X and OpenGL that then take a huge amount of effort to track down, per platform. These platforms differ subtly in their API's and libraries for things like OpenGL, libc, and audio so you are guaranteed that you will never ship a single linux binary. If I was writing a game from scratch right now, I would still consider windows my primary platform and I'd probably port it to the mac, but Linux would not be worth the cost and then resulting support burden.
Releasing a game for Windows, Mac and Linux sounds all well and good, and the adoption rates on the smaller platforms may be higher as a percentage of the OS install base, but it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to spend the effort to write games for the mac, or especially Linux.
I'm a former game developer who has written games for Windows, OS X, Linux, and all the consoles, so I know the market and development challenges pretty well.
Windows, for the time being, is still the prime software development platform for games, the rest just don't have the necessary tools and third party software. It's pretty much certain that all of your game data will be processed on a windows machine, so windows will have de-facto support as long as this is the case.
If the game is written with portability in mind, and quite a few nowadays are, then it may be ported to the mac. The mac's development tools aren't as good as those available on windows, but between XCode, Shark, dtrace, and the OpenGL profiler, you can get some real work done. The problem is that even if your install rate on the mac is double that on windows, you're still talking about numbers off in the noise. Windows will probably be about 90% of your users, mac would be less than 10%, but it takes more than 10% additional effort to ship the game on the mac, so most companies won't bother.
Now, Slashdot is a very pro-linux crowd, so I'm bound to get a lot of disagreement on this next point. Linux will never be a games platform. No game company will ever devote the resources to support linux as a primary platform. The reason is that "Linux" isn't really a platform, the platforms are Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, and stuff we don't care about. If anyone claims that you can write the code once and run on all three, you've never tried to do so for a large project. What happens in practice is that you can get your game running pretty well, with random crashes in X and OpenGL that then take a huge amount of effort to track down, per platform. These platforms differ subtly in their API's and libraries for things like OpenGL, libc, and audio so you are guaranteed that you will never ship a single linux binary.
If I was writing a game from scratch right now, I would still consider windows my primary platform and I'd probably port it to the mac, but Linux would not be worth the cost and then resulting support burden.
The trouble with making a game multiplatform isn't "necessarily" the cost/time/effort/skill of using abstracted code or having to train DX programmers to use OpenGL. One large problem is that in the past, you could relatively easy put a game on 1 piece of physical media and have both the Mac and Windows tracks on the CD-ROM.
Now that games are coming close to filling DVDs or spanning multiple CDs, it isn't nearly as simple to provide a single disc that is Windows+Mac. Now you must provide either a box with two CDs and unless you're doing online play and some serious key-validation; you've essentially given the buyer two copies of the same game. If you split it up into a boxed sale of a "PC version" and a "Mac version" you're either going to have the big stores like Wal*mart or Target or Best Buy only buying the PC version; or getting pissed when they have shelves and shelves of Mac versions, or returned/pissed off customers when grandma buys the Mac version for Timmy and he returns it, or can't return it because he opened it before he noticed. It just isn't worth the overhead of mastering multiple DVDs and producing/shipping the packaging when the margins on games are already pretty razor thin for publishers and for the retailers.
Secondly, you have to consider it can quite difficult to provide "good" technical support (I'm talking about more than forums here...) for more esoteric distros or providing support to OS9 and OSX clients (at a time in history when PC games were really coming into their own). Can you imagine the backlash of Game Company X said they'd only support their new hot title on Fedora because they had to draw the line in the sand somewhere on what is a "supported" configuration, and left all Ubuntu users in the dark? The bigest problem with purchased software; particularly entertainment/gaming software is that the market has little patience for a product that doesn't install and run on a single double-click. So support is an absolute necessity.
Thirdly due to differences in APIs, available hardware (Mac) and quality drivers (linux) you're going to have widely varying system requirements and user experiences. Where if the Linux version is inferior to the Windows version, users are going to say it is a "half-assed" port, and drive down sales, which is going to further decrease the profitability of development for the platform citing reasons #1 and #2 (more unsold boxes and more technical support staff). You see this on consoles now; where the Wii version has weaker graphics and poor controller implementation, the PS3 has poor online play than XBox, and the XBox is generally not as "polished" as the PS3 version graphically. In each case the user base thinks their version is "crippled" and bitches about it to no end.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Not to reach the mainstream gaming market they don't. In fact, most of the top selling games already run on the Mac. The issue is, when you're thinking of gaming you're considering hardcore, niche products like Crysis instead of mainstream products like WoW or The Sims franchise.
a $800 - $1000 desktop is not for hardcore gameing it is for playing most games at a good screen res. Hardcore gameing is $1700+ SLI systems but apple $2300 desktop has a very weak video setup next to them and AIO are a trun off for people.
I sure hope you're joking. I paid for my hardware, and I've paid repeatedly for versions of Linux that come with something I need whether that's support contracts or some piece of non-free software included. Mandriva, Novell, and Red Hat don't exist on goodwill alone.
Their are three main reasons I have Windows installed anywhere at all. One is because IE 7 and IE 8 under anything else is at best a pain and a gamble for a web application developer. Another is that I use it to play the games I buy for the PC. If I could play those games all on Linux, the gaming PC would not have Windows on it. The third is that my accounting software of choice runs on Windows. Again, if there was a Linux version of that there would be no reason for the accounting system in my office to use Windows.
Part of understanding market share is understanding cause and effect. Are applications (including games) written for Windows because Windows is installed, or is Windows installed because applications are written for it? It's some of both, but Steve Ballmer knows which one is more important. That's why you can see him at conferences dancing around on stage chanting about developers. People use Windows largely because that's where the software is. If the software was written for other platforms just as commonly, you'd see a much more balanced market share for the OSes.
Consoles prove my point entirely. Ports of games that are on all consoles tend to suck because there is no polish. Work that could have been spent on the game; making it better, faster, fancier or simply more playable is spent on the process of porting - to platforms in which bugs may not be reproducible at all. A variety of OS's, hardware configurations, kernel schedulers, drivers and whatnot doesn't make a game better. Just means more people, increased costs, more delays and less features.
It's simple. Nerds use OS X and Linux more than normal people; nerds play more games and advertise them to other nerds and non-nerds IF it's good. That can only mean one thing: ka-ching!!
Dead Space desperately wanted to be both Bioshock and Resident Evil 4 in space at the same time, not exactly innovative.
And System Shock 2 did it better with more primitive graphics nearly a decade earlier.
These are both developed cross platform, and quite well too.
www.s2games.com
Ambrosia Software was a company that for a long time only developed software for Mac users. The immense popularity of the third installment in their Escape Velocity series (Nova) eventually pushed them into making it one of their first releases for the Windows series of operating systems.
Eve Online. Runs on all three. Hit 45,000+ concurrent users this month -- a new record. Old game? Yes, but the devs are adding new content AND gameplay all the time.
Eve never fades. :)
Mac Pros are workstation not gaming machine. Go figure.
Yeah Id really looks like they're hurting for money and resources after doing all their games for at least Windows and Linux and eventually giving their source code away.
All companies sure seem to have more than enough time to write Linux dedicated servers. If Windows is superior then they should only write dedicated servers for Windows too.
The OS X client for City of Heroes is in beta now. Unfortunately for me, the client isn't for PPC machines. I abandoned CoH/CoV after the announced they'd have advertising in-game (even though it would have been opt-in), but since I wasn't playing at all at the time anyway, I figured I'd cancel my account and make a protest against the advertising. I would have tried out the beta OS X client, though.
Well, there's FreeMacWare.com, OpenSourceMac.org, Fink, MacPorts, and even VersionTracker lets you sort by license.
While I agree that some of the Mac shareware culture is kind of ridiculous, along the lines of trying to charge $20 for every variation of a digital clock, the fact that people are willing and used to paying $10-50 for a downloadable piece of software from an independent development company is good for indie-game companies, whose development model is exactly that.
I don't have any numbers, but I've heard anecdotally from folks like Chronic Logic that the number of Mac users who will shell out $10-20 for the full version of a game after trying out the free demo is much higher than what you'd expect from just Mac vs. Windows market share. Of course, there are other factors at work there too, like Mac users having fewer gaming choices overall, making the market less competitive.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
it would be much more concise if you just said "Mac hardware costs more and does less"
For FTP/SFTP there's Cyberduck for free, but I paid for Transmit. I was a WS-FTP user for years and love the 2-pane view.
And as you said, TextWrangler for text editing.
When my spouse and I wanted to take up an MMO, we had an obvious requirement: It had to run on a Mac, because my spouse is a Mac user. So, we got WoW. (There weren't many competitors at the time who did Mac; even now, the most obvious is Eve which is of anti-value to me because I don't, ever, under any circumstances, want PvP.)
So far, that's two copies sold. But wait. My brother-in-law now plays with us. My sister-in-law now plays with us, because her husband plays with us. A friend of mine from some message boards who'd given up got back into the game because I was playing it. So I can name five people (and more than five monthly subscriptions) that came from that sale. Only one of whom plays primarily on Mac.
For games that are played with other people, the effect isn't just the actual sales to Mac users; it's the sales to people who want to play with Mac users, and the moment anyone provides an option for the Mac market, a lot of other users will end up being drawn to that product by preference.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's a huge commitment to write a native client though, and the number of Mac and Linux subscribers may not provide enough justification.
Sure, it is. But why do a half-assed attempt? Since they're paying Transgaming I assume they're committed enough to invest in Mac/Linux to get more subscribers that way. It really boggles my mind. They could've just told people to simply use wine which isn't much different from what they're doing now.
If their installed non-windows base grows enough, then a native client may be on the cards, but right now they are just testing the waters to see who is out there willing to try EvE without using Windows.
Sure, but by then they've probably blown so much money on Transgaming that they could've hired a developer or at least give the task to one of the existing developers.
There is simply no alternative to well written, cross-platform code.
There is an old parable about two shoe salesmen (old parable = gender specific) visiting a country. Turns, almost nobody in this country was wearing shoes when the two salesmen visited. The first salesman reports back, "Bad news, nobody around here wheres any shoes." The second salesman reports back, "Great news! Country filled with people needing shoes!!!". Well, the original had fewer exclamation marks.
The most annoying thing about this topic when it comes up, is the people who say "Which platform are you going to develop for? The one with 90% marketshare, or the one with 5%?"
This strikes me as artless and demeaning. I wouldn't want to buy software from somebody who thinks like this. It's like a musician saying "Well, 90% of the market likes Britney Spears style bland pop, so that's the music I'll make." Where's your goddamned passion? Do you care about what you make, or is it just something to sell to the lowest common denominator?
The world is full of niche markets, and they are often very satisfying, much more so than the 90% of generic crap. But for some reason, this is overlooked in computing. People find it normal that there are Ferrari dealerships and high-end gourmet BBQ, but a software company catering to a minority platform? Unthinkable! The software world needs to grow up and join the rest of the world.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If you take a look at the web page for the game it's pretty clear why it isn't selling so well on Windows.
The game looks awful for a start, perhaps this is a good choice given the available games on Mac/Linux it's more appealing but for Windows it looks like the kind of Half-life (one not two) mod you'd expect to get for free and play for few hours at most.
Not only that but it sells for $19.99 I have no idea if this is a good deal for a Mac/Linux game but running through what I can get for the same price or less on Steam it's pretty clear why it isn't selling on Windows.
Congrats!
Except you're wrong. Memtest86 is largely assembly, based on the (2.2?) Linux kernel. It requires no OS and handles all hardware access on its own. Memtest OS X is a userspace app that one runs from the command line. As it is a "fat binary" that runs on PPC as well as x86, and was around before there even were Intel Macs, I rather doubt it was based on Memtest86 at all. They just happen to share similar names.
Before you drag someon'e name through the mud, please know what you're talking about.
± 29 dB
As it is a "fat binary" that runs on PPC as well as x86, and was around before there even were Intel Macs, I rather doubt it was based on Memtest86 at all. They just happen to share similar names.
Oops! You're right. It's actually based on memtester, a different GPLed program written by a different author than Memtest86 (and MemtestOSX). Other than that, every single point stands.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?