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Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers
An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post."
A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.
Linux geeks like video games, but have barely any available natively. They'll pay to encourage others to be ported in the future. It's a pretty simple idea. I find it fairly remarkable that people are just figuring this out.
"Windows for gaming" will still be the chant for the next 5+ years I fear, but I have to wonder some... "What If" someone got together with some other somepeople and created a "Linux gaming standard distribution" or something similar to LSB for gaming... something similar to "Wine bottles" but for game installation and playing. This could make Linux gaming SO much easier and more direct. It could ALSO aid in making the games more controllable by the software publishers (I know, no one likes that idea except the software publishers...) but consider that this would make a really nice link between console gaming and PC gaming. If this were to happen and somehow catch on, (yeah I know... fat chance) the new chant would be "Linux for gaming* because it can be faster and better than Windows can.
Are there still people running Windows 9X for their games? Last I saw (years ago) that was the case... makes me want to load up Win9X and then set up XvT and such... Those were some good ole days!
That part was most surprising for me - whilst I think .rpm is more of the standard for server based business apps, it appears debia (ie ubuntu) is the predominant platform for clients.
Ok, it doesn't surprise me at all now I've thought it through :)
There was a time when games came with a "DOS extender" program that allowed the game to use machine resources that weren't available to MS-DOS. It wasn't such a big deal for the software companies to ship that small program together with the game, and it wasn't such a big deal for the user to install it.
Imagine if games came in a live Linux CD-ROM. MS-Windows users could play those games with all the benefits of Linux and Linux users would have a natively compilated game.
Last week I found my original Tomb Raider CD lost in the bottom of a drawer. I tried to install it in XP, without success. I was considering installing windows 98 in an old computer, just to play that game again, when a friend suggested me to run it in a DOS box. I got it installed in DOSemu and it's awesome how well it runs in Ubuntu, with an i5-750 and a 9600 GSO graphics card.
If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.
Two manmonths of work is extremely little. Development studios like Inifinity Ward has 60 employees, Telltale Games 70, Bizarre Creations 165, Valve 225, Turbine 300, Bioware 500, Take Two 2000, Blizzard 4600. Some do publishing and other game-related stuff, but still two months is a drop in the ocean compared to the manyears laid down in many games. Even a small increase in sales would pay for much, much more. Enough? Tough to say, depends on how it scales. True this isn't proof but you also brought nothing but a very spurious argument for why it couldn't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm currently writing a 3D game for Linux using OpenGL and SDL. In a way those two cover a lot of bases, but there are some glaring holes as well:
* Middleware. DX owns the game middleware market.
* IDEs. I'm using kdevelop, and have looked at Eclipse, but there is no Linux IDE that can come close to Visual Studio. I say this as a huge Linux advocate, and someone who barely ever even boots into Windows - but credit where it's due, MSVC is simply a better product.
Otherwise, I don't see much reason to tie your game to just Windows and DX. Even boost helps a ton - it provides a lot of platform independent libraries to make your portability life easier.
This "linux gaming" concept is a very interesting subject, and perhaps my fellow slashdotters can help my brain tackle some "ethical dilemma's" that I am facing. Some quick backstory.. I love me some computer games. Grew up on the stuff.. Civ 1 was my first true computer game.. it came bundled with our first cd-rom drive that my dad bought. I never went back to a console again. I grew up, but never outgrew gaming.. although these days I try to temper "frivolous entertainment" with worthwhile projects and contributions to reality ;-)
Still, a system's "gaming potential" is the primary factor I must consider when working on my personal box.. and is one of the reasons I still have to boot back into Windows all the time. In fact, it is usually easier for me to just arrange everything in Windows so that I can do all my "*Nixy stuff" from inside Win7.. Cygwin, ssh, etc.. so that when I need to unwind for a few mins on TF2 pwning newbs I don't need to close EVERYthing and reboot into Win.. pain in my butt if I may say so.
For this reason, I have been eagerly anticipating Steam on Linux for many years.. the rumors began in '08, right? Shouldn't this be a very exciting prospect for me? Well.. I guess it has only been the last several months that Steam has started "irking" me.. Something about DRM and "anti-competitive behavior".. and for me to continue playing on Steam I feel I am having to compromise my personal code.
When I compare Steam to iTunes.. it comes down to just a few differences:
Steam is owned by Valve (yay Valve!), one of the best darn CPU game developing houses out there.
CPU games are much more appealing to me than music
But there are too many similarities for me to be comfortable:
DRM, anticompetitive practices, proprietary software platform requirement, Draconian developer/publisher agreement policies (ok I cannot verify that rumor).. yeah yeah, I know, a business is in the business of making money, blah blah.
I love my computer games, and I have loved EVERY SINGLE ONE of Valves products. And I know that Steam on Linux is probably going to be a net win for my favorite operating environment.. but I can't help but shake the feeling that Steam doesn't BELONG on Linux.. Does that make sense, or am I just being a whiny bitch? Flame-baiting aside.. I know that Steam has done some wonderful things for various small-time developers.. and that they are WORLDS better as publishers than the rip-off artists at EA, so it is all a very gray area for me..
I could go on for pages, but I will cut this short. In conclusion, I want to shout out Hooray for LINUX GAMING! It will be wonderful for me and for millions in the long run. I just wonder whether Steam should be the platform that we are pinning our hopes on.
According to the article, it already ran on OSX. That implies it was already using OpenGL.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You'd be in for a surprise then. Gamers love to tinker with their systems, and most of my friends, and myself would be using Linux full time if we could. It wouldn't be 99%, that's a bit of a stretch, but I know it would be around 10-20%.
Until Valve says anything about a Linux client, it's just rumor and speculation.
That's absurd. It's no longer just a rumor once it's been proven, regardless of where or who the proof comes from. What we have is better than an official announcement, since an announcement could be false.
We have the actual binary. Sure, it's a largely non-functional pre-alpha, but the build was frequently being updated, which indicates active development. And now the URL is an error 403 Forbidden. I'll bet the URL only works from Valve's internal IPs now, but that's just my speculation. The existence of a Linux client, however, is confirmed fact.
"t took Dave six weeks to do the port, including time spent testing across multiple flavours of Linux, and running the beta from start to end."
seems like computer game production is in much the same state as banks issuing loans.
the biggest entities in either need a scale of return so high that they miss out on a lot of the smaller customers.
so maybe computer gaming needs something similar to the concept of microcredit?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm