Is LGP Going the Way of Loki Software?

An anonymous reader writes "After the demise of Loki Software, Linux Game Publishing sprouted up in its place, and for the past nine years has ported a number of games to Linux. But LGP may now be sharing the same fate as Loki. Linux Game Publishing hasn't updated its blog or news pages in months, has stopped responding to e-mails, and its only active ports are games they began work on in 2002/2003."

Comments

Re:Is this really surprising?

[hairyfeet]

Has anyone tried getting the games at Good Old Games to work in Wine? I know they're older titles comes with a pre-configured DOSBox (works 100% better than DIY DOSBox and is 100% X64 Win7 compatible) so those shouldn't be a problem, and since ALL their games have the nasty DRM stripped out and use a simple .exe installer the games there should be easier to get going than all those infested with SecuROM or Starforce. And of course at $5-$10 the price is a hell of a lot better than the prices you get for ported games.

So how about it? Has anybody given the games at GOG a shot on Linux?

Re:Speculations anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Loki's "financial problems" were largely mismanagement. Lurid tales of the owner using the company accounts as his personal ATM for buying cars and designer dresses for his wife; choosing games to port based on prestige and vanity over sound financial consideration of licensing costs and such; and other things. Loki was making money; their management just pissed it away faster than it came in, while shining everyone on until it eventually blew up.

  See, it's true that "the market is small," as other posters will point out, but porting is a pretty low-overhead proposition. You hire a couple of programmers, negotiate a licensing deal, and get porting. The game design, art, music, and other assets are all done already. It's much more like running a game company in the eighties, when you could have a couple of guys working out of a garage, than the gargantuan multi-million-dollar enterprises that you see today, so it really doesn't matter so much if the market is kind of small, as long as there's a market.
  (Plus, as the Humble Indie Bundle showed, there is money out in Linux-land. They got about 25% of their revenue from Linux, outdoing Mac users, even.)

Re:Is this really surprising?

[TheRaven64]

I think the point is that it's cheaper to make a game run under WINE than it is to do a full native port. Games don't require any platform integration, so no one cares if they aren't using native widgets - in fact, they're more likely to complain when they do. If you care about the Linux market, just add a guy to your QA team who tests it under WINE and pay a couple of consultants to add the missing features to WINE (or just get your devs to avoid them). It's much cheaper than paying a third-party company to do a full port.