Slashdot Mirror
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."
When Wine is good enough to run Warcraft 3, what market is there for a company selling ports of decade-old games for $40-$50 each?
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
http://www.gamingonlinux.info/news.php?view=26
Well the article does little more than point out that LGP are not responding to hails and stopped updating their information. There is really no concrete facts to conclude that they are finished, thus all we can do from here is guess.
So lets say they are dead (Which might not be the case), what do you think killed them?
Could it be that there is just not enough Linux gamers that are willing to pay to see Windows games on their platform to sustain a porting company?
Could the original Windows publishers be at fault? Perhaps they are not willing to share the code for the porting purposes.
Could it be just a case of poorly run company that finally had their decisions catch up to them?
Really with so little information any guess is as good as another.
Aside: Anyone know why Loki folded? A quick search only states "financial troubles", which is not really helpful.
Steam's DRM is one of the least intrusive out there. I forget it's even there until some Slashdotter brings it up. Kind of diminishes your point when the evil DRM isn't even noticeable.
Steam's DRM is one of the least intrusive out there. I forget it's even there until some Slashdotter brings it up. Kind of diminishes your point when the evil DRM isn't even noticeable.
Quite the opposite. Just wait until you do notice the effects on everything you paid for but don't actually own.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
LGP's blog shows that the company is still active. Last update was from April 5, 2010.
As I said, I spoke to Michael Simms a couple of weeks ago over email to see what could be done about getting the license to the Linux port of Alpha Centauri so it could be patched and sold again, etc.
Didn't see any evidence that LGP had stopped working, they're a part time company mostly from what I gather, give them some credit!
Oh and as for SMAC, it seems Mr Simms tried hard; nay VERY HARD to get the rights to it but with no success, I'm hoping that if Steam does make it to Linux we can use that as the carrot to get a few of the older Loki titles back.
Cheers,
Maquis196
"Wed, June 23 2010
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational. For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer furether updates as and when there is news to update you with."
Seems like ya'll have hit a nerve! For me, I've bought 2 LGP games in the past, and enjoyed them, though they were certainly not AAA titles. I do wish they were more forthcoming with information though.
Can you elaborate on that? I have them in my RSS feed-reader because they're pretty much the only people who cover X and Mesa development.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/lokistory.html
I think the GP is doing a bit of hyperbole but it did come out of the bankruptcy proceedings that there was financial mismanagement and a few times they pulled from the company's budget for personal purchases.
Also in January, Draeker was subject to a second deposition, this time in a Federal 20-04 examination as part of the bankruptcy proceeding. In it, he testified that Loki did not retain such basic business records as bank statements or even keep careful track of the checks written by the company. After having testified in July that Kayt was and always had been chief financial officer, he now testified that she was not and never had been, and that he, Scott, always had been. And yet, Draker said, "there were several occasions where my wife mistakenly transferred money to our account prior to issuing money orders as opposed to issuing them from Loki's account." Asked if Loki had recorded these erroneous transactions, Draker replied, "We didn't have anyone keeping records at that time. It was -- it was in the bank statements, the record of that." Those bank statements had not been kept by the company. Additionally, the company was apparently unable to produce any financial records for the period from September 1999 to May 2001. The deposition took on a surreal air at times, with Draeker refusing to say whether or not he is a lawyer and in one spectacular moment testifying that as president of Loki he could say how much had been paid to Scott Draeker and when, but as Scott Draeker he could not say whether he actually received the money. Yet when asked if, shortly before the bankruptcy filing, Loki had paid him $13,000, he replied, "Uh, as I said before, there are several occasions on which Loki did pay me. And I don't recall specific dates or amounts."
No.
Longer answer:
LGP News
Wed, June 23 2010
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational.
For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues on the admin side of things, which explains most of our silence, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer further updates as and when there is news to update you with.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
I have been gaming on 64-bit Linux in GL mode since 2004. There aren't many titles to choose from, but everything that I have tried--Enemy Territory, UT2004, and a few others--run flawlessly and at higher framerates than they do in Windows XP, not to even get started with Win7. I have never had a video driver crash. I have been running NVIDIA 64-bit binary drivers the entire time.
At one point, I had a problem with ET not liking sound since it is Quake 3 based and was written to use OSS, but I was running Gentoo and of course had to spend a half hour trying to figure out how to restore sound. It runs flawlessly out of the box in Ubuntu.
The problem is not drivers and is entirely the selection of games out there. We will hopefully see some good Source-based games for Linux once Steam makes its way in.
Undercooked? It was a fucking disaster of a launch. They launched a game before they had the servers ready. For some reason they thought that the 80-90% of Linux/Unix UT servers would magically become Windows servers because they only had a Windows server at launch. That meant that 80% of the UT servers in the world didn't transition to UT3. Great idea - launch a multiplayer game, and hope your half-dozen servers serving 10-20 people each will cut it.
They made some of the most idiotic choices about their maps they could make. Before, maps were moderate sized. They relied on all the textures, sounds, meshes, etc to be installed on the client computer. If you didn't have those, you'd download them.
Their brilliant idea for UT3 was to "cook" their maps - essentially zipping ALL the textures, sounds, etc needed for a map into one gigantic file. Maps used to be 0.4-5 mb, at the absolute most. Now the average map runs 50-100 mb. Disk space usage is obscene like that, and the time it takes to download maps is noticeable on a fast connection, and game-ending on a slow connection.
Linux has pretty much perfected package managers. I don't for the life of me understand how they felt zipping it all up was a better idea.
Add to those disasters broken menus, designed for a console, (no back buttons, flaky arrow navigation, first letter of choice doesn't go there) a very shitty game selection screen, no crosshair customization which has been standard in UT for years now, and vehicles which drive like shit, and you've got a lot of angry fans.
In the last year, they've made some improvements. But overall, the game is still a half-assed implementation of what it used to be. A pretty one, but still very broken. You can hack around the cross hairs, but when they code a small vehicle to weigh 100x a large one because it doesn't have the traction they want, you know it's a half-assed game.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor