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Linux Game Publishing CEO Resigns
An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of the once fledging Linux Game Publishing, Michael Simms, has announced his resignation. Simms attributes his resignation from the Linux game porting company he founded more than a decade ago to being burned out and having little success as of late in his work."
In his place, Clive Crouse will be taking the helm.
The site needs to be updated and they need a properly designed logo.
That would be a start.
Has there ever been a Linux-exclusive game company that *didn't* either go bankrupt, face massive layoffs/resignations, or never deliver on their promised games?
I don't mean that sarcastically, I'm seriously asking the question. Seems like every time I hear about a Linux game company, it's something negative. There must be at least one or two success stories out there.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There is a Linux game company?
ok tux racer is kind of fun, and occasionally if a game was made in open GL companies might release a linux client (ie ID there for a little bit) but wow games on linux, that didnt run like garbage with wine???
mind blown
Considering they spell their name differently, and the fact that it would somewhat strange for someone to simultaneously hold the positions of CEO of a gaming company and editor for Slashdot, I'm going to say no, they're probably not the same person.
I got an email yesterday for a new Humble Bundle for Android (and Window/Mac/Linux). Just checked the total sold so far, and it is at over 484,000.00 already. As usual, Linux users pay the most for the bundle.
Seems like Linux/Android/Mac games are viable if you find a niche way to market them.
http://www.humblebundle.com/
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
somewhat strange for someone to simultaneously hold the positions of CEO of a gaming company and editor for Slashdot, I'm going to say no, they're probably not the same person.
I always thought the
Trolling is a art,
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
...on smartphones and tablets, particularly Android and its derivatives.
Cut the Rope is 99 cents with at least half a million downloads. There are two unknown factors - how many returns were there (downside) and how many over 500k are they (upside). So they've made around $500,000 on this app.
GTA III on Android - 4.99 and over 100,000 downloads - another $500,000 in revenue. And a lot of the graphics and engine code was already written.
I had a chat with one of the Big Mountain Snowboarding developers ($2.99 times 5000+ is $15,000, plus an ad-based Android version with over 500,000 users) who told me that over 85% of the C++ and OpenGL code from their iPhone version could be reused in their Android version. Companies with an existing C++/OpenGL code base don't have to re-invent the wheel to get on Android.
Fruit Ninja : $1.26 * 500,000+ = $630,000. Doodle Jump: $0.99 * 500,000+ = $500,000. Madden NFL 12: $4.99 * 100,000+ = $500,000. And so on. Then there's the money games make on their free, ad-based versions. As I said, many of these games have existing C++/OpenGL code on another platform, so the half million in sales, plus more in ads, that they've made thus far, is money they made just for the port. Which also helps keeping you in the game if some competitors want to take these established games on in this newer platform.
Android is a Linux kernel, with the rest of its code open source. Tim Bird and others recently started an effort to bring the Android developers and Linux closer together, so hopefully that will bear fruit.
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Just my 2cents
I still opine that the rapidly changing selection of APIs, libraries, sound daemons, desktop environments, etc. of Linux world are a turndown for commercial developers - be it applications or games. It's hard to figure what you should exactly target and, soon your product is broken anyway unless you keep re-adapting it constantly. Most of your stuff will be from the current distro repository.
Linux gaming, eh. I guess he resigned due to being overworked?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Cut the Rope [android.com] is 99 cents with at least half a million downloads. There are two unknown factors - how many returns were there (downside) and how many over 500k are they (upside). So they've made around $500,000 on this app.
In revenue, yes. In profit? It's not free to write the game.
What? No CZ on Linux?
Cut the Rope [android.com] is 99 cents with at least half a million downloads.
Shit, for a moment there I thought this (warning: not Goatse) was the current bomb in gaming.
or is the line up of games pretty sad. On another note... maybe they got their business sense from "Software Tycoon".
I'm just starting. With Linux-ONLY games. Yes, that's right. I want them to be killer features. There will never be a Windows or Mac version. Period.
I think the same thing should have happened with OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. People just didn't have the balls. Which is so typical for geeks.
Jobs did. But he was delusional.
The thing is: Women I showed Compiz and all the styling ablities of Linux to, asked me to switch them to Linux. That's all it takes! It's that easy! (They also liked OpenOffice over the MS Office ribbon UI.)
You know what put them off? Not being able to do video chat and have the animated emoticons, flash games and stuff in their instant messengers.
This should be a key priority. Communication is key to women. (And don't dare belittling that.)
Because if you get it to generally work (>90% done), all communication features (>80% done), all file management features (done), all media playback features (done) and all office features (done), that's all that ~90% of the home users need. Add a nice package manager frontend, and good support forums (we have that too), and you're on the same level.
Then it needs another killer feature on top of that, to win.
This is where Gnome and KDE failed. Because all they did was imitating. Which by definition is a guarantee that you always stay behind. Ask any race car driver: As long as you follow, you never take over. Only if you drive your own way can you win. (Again: This is one key part of Jobs' success. [Yeah, I hate him, but a fact is a fact.])
That’s why I decided to go Linux-only. And so should you.
Maybe distribute things as a live-CD/DVD/USB to ease them into it.
And: No, Linux game programming is not at all hard.
OpenGL, SDL, POSIX and the FreeDesktop standards, and you’re already nearly completely there.
Game input was a problem previously. But with generic event/button/key/axis devices and udev, that problem is solved.
The only place that needs improvement is the OpenAL effects (think EAX). But that was deliberate monopolism abuse by Creative.
I can live without it, or write my own.
This is why I proposed a 2-4-yearly standard base platform with a certain set of guaranteed features, like graphics processing power, RAM, APIs etc, that make it easy for game developers to target a stable platform. It would be marketed to end-users the same way as consoles. So when the PS4 and XBox 720 come out, GamePC 4 could also come out. (Yes, it's deliberately named "GamePC" to 1. make it clear that Linux is a PC platform too, and that 2. it is the *only* game pc platform. This is a naming strategy that MS uses all the time [Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc]. So why not kick their asses that way too, for a change. ^^) :D
It would also guarantee that all new games would work on your nearly 4 year old PC. But not on Windows. Only on a Linux GamePC.
My biggest peeve is the movement towards pulseaudio. It introduces a *TON* of performance issues that make Linux very non-game-friendly.
Wine hates it (it lags out)
VOIP apps also hate it (audio lag/sync issues).
About the only thing that it seems to be good for is having multiple outputs under a single target. It used to be useful to allow multiple input streams to mix at once without blocking, but that seems to work just fine with ALSA alone these days.
I have a PXE boot environment at home. In the PXE, I use XFCE and pulseAudio is disabled (by renaming the binary, damn thing comes back like the walking undead otherwise). In the non-PXE (booted from HDD) environment, I use gnome and thus Pulse is enabled because a bunch of gnome'ish stuff depends on it.
In XFCE, audio just *WORKS*. I can chat with friends on mumble while playing music and minecraft. The only weirdness is that my headphone auto-sensing seems off, but that may be an aspect of tweaking the soundcard driver settings.
In Gnome /w Pulseaudio, audio sucks. My headphones work, but audio stutters, lags, or doesn't work at all (especially in wine). Input and output have terrible sync issues, and quality overall sucks.
Pulseaudio needs to *DIE* - or be fixed greatly - for multimedia on linux to have a good future. Perhaps the ALSA devs and Pulse devs could work together to build a nice UI and plugin integration for the ALSA stuff (A2DP audio etc) that is also stable and functional.
Simms was making absolutely _no_ effort for about the past 5 years to bring _any_ game worthy of note to Linux. Look at what iD, Epic and the developers of Amnesia, World of Goo, et. al. were doing. Simms was getting the rights to bargain-bin titles that were at least three years old and then porting them to Linux with an ungodly markup. He practically drove the company into the ground. And if you mentioned that, on any public forum? He'd accuse you of being a "Microsoft shill." Yes, this guy was paranoid enough to troll the forums on sites like HappyPenguin looking for negative comments about himself just so he could accuse them of being paid Microsoft astroturfers instead of owning up to the fact that he had _no clue_ what he was doing.
The entire Linux gaming community is better off without Simms, his poor management and the poor quality of their products.
Seriously he says he works 7 days a week? What the hell has he been doing?
"Grim" has always been a bit less of a manager. His tendency over the past two decades has been to start projects, burn through his initial energy at start-up, toy with them while working on something else, wait until he's bored, then dump them. A good number of EWTOO talkers on which he worked have run that way, so I'm hardly surprised. Well, I'm also sure that setbacks such as the network hard drive failure, a few years back, probably cut the wind from his sails.
At this house both Windows games and Linux games are treated equally - such as not used anymore. Perhaps a decade ago I used to play a game or two on Windows (such as Thief, Deus Ex, Far Cry, etc.) But that was a hassle. General purpose computers are not designed for gaming; and if you go out and design them this way (by throwing wads of cash at Alienware, or by building your own box) then you are overpaying for your games a hundredfold.
I got myself a PS3 many years ago, and I never regretted that decision. The only major difference - keyboard/mouse vs. the controller - is solved by the Splitfish controller, for games that benefit from a mouse. Other games are actually just fine with two analog 2D sticks. The PS3 is an extremely deterministic system. Slide the BlueRay disk in and it plays - today just as good as yesterday. Patches, when released, are automatically installed. There is nothing to worry about. This was never the case with a PC.
IMO, what matters is not the platform that the game runs on but the game itself. Resistance is worth of getting a PS3, and if I want I can go out and buy Xbox if there is a game that is exclusive to it (a later Halo sequel, perhaps?) The cost of an appliance is relatively small, considering that new games are about $50 regardless of the platform.
Most game companies start with a great game, and then they release it on platforms of their choice. The game makes people want it, not the OS that it runs under. Linux games always had this political undertow. A few great Linux games that I saw were great not because of Linux but because of the game itself (Quake, obviously, perhaps Heretic, and a few other.)
There is also the DRM issue. As I understand, it does not exist on PS3 because it's part of the system. If you have the disk, it's your license. I have Assassin's Creed and I never even knew, until Slashdot told me, that it has some DRM. It just works. I suspect Xbox is similar in this aspect.
On top of all that, one fact certainly doesn't help Linux gaming - the fact that advanced functions of video cards were often denied to Linux driver developers, but Windows drivers were optimized all the way through and supported everything that the GPU had. There is no incentive to buy a Linux game and then fiddle with OpenGL settings if you can simply insert the CD into a Windows box and play right away. The unstoppable advance of DirectX is also a factor.
It all started like Slashdot: on a DEC Alpha.
Sincerily, ;-)
The
I downloaded mine before playing, and I must say that they have a feel for being a smaller form-factor than what you would expect from non-transient development group.
I've been waiting for a couple for a while and that's all-right because I have plenty of things to do on the nearby server. Majesty is interesting to watch for it's moments of non-interactivy. What I find somewhat interesting was Ballistics (screens http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/screenshots.php?id=13& ).
Linux is about saving money on windows licenses, get rid of virus/antivirus hassles and using mostly unencumbered software. So why as a Linux user should I have to buy a locked down Sony computer plus TV, which costs the same as a PC anyway? now I have two computers with two sets of peripherals, one which cannot run arbitrary software, where I would need only one.
I would rather buy a graphics card - which is cheap if you get a 100 watt model such as radeon 6770 - and go back to windows. Currently as the linux situation sucks, and Wine just cannot run a random game I throw at it, I just avoid gaming those days.
Even if it was spelled correctly it wouldn't make sense.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it