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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.
A good start would be to actually have a game from the past 10 years in their catalog...
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.
Some games work well, others don't.
WoW works well. So well, in fact, that you get more FPS than on Windows.
--
BMO
That's wasn't true in my case. It ran worse, and hardware acceleration on the mouse was totally broken.
Got a quarter of a mil burning a hole in your pocket?
Unless you can get a sweetheart deal, that's going to very likely be the price of admission unless you're dealing with Indies like I've been doing. Seriously.
You have to put up a royalty payment, as often as not, ranging from $20k-500k to get the rights to get a glimpse of the code.
You have to pay someone either a wage or offer them a decent chunk of the proceeds as a percentage.
You then have to do the porting work. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it's brutal for varying reasons. Some of it's poor code. Some of it is just simply...complex.
Then you've got to push it off to the duplicators. This is another somewhat complex aspect of things. You need to gauge the demand of the title and do at least a first production run of the gold master that will be enough to make your production and packaging costs reasonable. You owe that up-front. Depending on your royalty structure, you'll either owe the royalties per copy (and there's one there...) up front, or you'll owe it later on. This is how Loki ended up owing iD a quarter million on that disastrous rollout of Q3:A. (Loki did something iffy from what I'd been told at the time from people on the inside- they cranked out more than 10k units, which is where the $250k iD was owed came from...). If you produce more than about 2-6k units of the title, you can be out a LOT of money. Produce less than 5k units, though, and you have to raise your prices a bit to offset costs that're there on the low end for production, etc.
Once you've got your units, you've got to SELL them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I quite like Warzone2100 as a RTS
and Wormux (Worms 2 clone).
Then again, I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I guess it all depends on what you want out of a game. The above have given me hours and hours of fun, despite the low-end graphics (indeed I quite like the low end graphics, allows me to play on my phone, or on other underpowered machines, no need for big gaming rig).
If you get more FPS on Linux than Windows, that's usually because some cycle eating feature in the Windows driver is not present in the Linux driver. Whether "feature incomplete but faster" is the same as "better" is a subjective question.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No one said starting a game distribution company was easy. I'm speaking from the standpoint of the consumer. There is nothing on that list they have, that I would buy. However many indie devs have been creating a lot of good games for Linux the past few years. Someone who was on top of things, probably could have worked out a few good deals here lately, and came out on top for everyone involved. Instead the Indie Bundle guys took matters in to their own hands.
yea I hear that every single year, and I usually get suckered into dicking with it, so spending a shitton of time "tweaking" it and I might get a game that functions but runs slow as snot and has a lot of graphical artifices or anomalies, about the only thing I have gotten to run right on it is the older GTA games (1-SA)
Why would I want an FPS higher than my refresh rate? I never understood those people who brag of 120 FPS when your screen is only going to show 60 of those.
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
I get over 600fps on minesweeper
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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,
For all the years I've herad people joke about Tux Racer, I've yet to play it... maybe one of these days.
brb. minecraft is sucking up my slashdot time.
This wasn't a valid point even back when CRTs were the norm because it is far easier to run a CRT at a high refresh rate than an LCD, although flat-panels are now catching up (for 3D and such things.) But it's a valid point you make - it does my head in when people worry about increasing FPS at that level on a cheap-ass 60hz monitor.
I find that with most people it's pointless to argue this with facts. They fell better with 120fps, and by god, that's what their sticking with facts be damned. Definitely don't try to talk them into using vsync. That limits the fps to the refresh rate, and get's rid of horizontal screen tearing. Without that screen tearing, how do you know you're driving a Ferrari of the PC world? ;)
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.
Well, 60fps, where every second had 60 frames, and they were evenly spaced, would be incredible performance.
Unfortunately, even when I get 150-200fps in games, I still notice rather sizeable jitters. Sure, there may lots of frames that are 2-3 ms each, and they outnumber the one 600ms frame by enough of a margin to keep the average low, but that one 600ms frame is a killer. Usually this is due to a simulation task that takes too long, and rendering the scene over and over without an update in the simulation is pointless. So, the rendering hangs also.
There's a bit of a movement to start measuring performance in a more accurate way, but no one has come up with a real solution yet. So, we still use fps. If you play a game one day and get 120fps, and then your system launches a background task and your performance goes down to 80fps, the change will be rather noticeable.
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Heh... That they did. In fact, I helped there. (I did mention I was working in the Indie space, right? :-D)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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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.
Yep I have always been amazed at the disconnect between how Wine really runs and how the linux kool-aid drinkers think it runs.
Why would I want an FPS higher than my refresh rate?
For one thing, uigrad_2000 pointed out that what you really want is a high minimum frame rate. 600 FPS is all well and good until loading all the geometry and textures associated with a new area causes you render one frame in 100 ms, at which point you're running 10 instantaneous FPS. For another, higher FPS allows the use of an accumulation buffer to motion-blur the video, providing more subtle realism cues for e.g. the fast rotations of the camera seen in twitch first-person shooters.
stolen
*given away (fixed that for ya)
The actual truth is a little more complicated. Consider the following:
For eons, Linux was a very difficult operating system for non-technical computer users. Basically it was impossible to use, even under Knoppix unless you had a firm understanding of all of the underlying parts of Linux, how to call the commands, what switches to include, and how to navigate and manipulate file systems, permissions and user accounts.
In other words, Linux was never intuitive. You needed at least a little bit of a background in programming (ie: shell scripts/batch files), to gain any traction.
Now, on the other hand, take the gaming community. This is a huge community filled with all different kinds of people, but the vast VAST majority of gamers, while VERY computer literate, and generally technologicaly savvy, are not technical. Almost everyone attracted to video games is used to having a reliable intuitive GUI. One that is so easily accessible that, you need no greater technical skills that to simply press the CD-ROM drives eject button, insert a disc, close it, and pick up a controller and wait for the prompt to PRESS START.
Honestly, this wasn't truly available until Ubuntu came along, and Ubuntu didn't really pick up steam until 2007, amidst the throes of Microsoft's infamous Windows Vista debacle.
Now that Ubuntu has brought a groundswell of non-technical users, I predict a market will emerge, indeed even a closed-source DRM imprisoned market will work with Ubuntu/Mint freely available. It just needs time to grow, and maybe some investment.
120 Hz monitors, for starters. Also, the extra frames lend smoothness to the rendered video, well above 60 Hz. In the past, the more FPS you had, the faster you would move through the game space (Quake 3). Add in 3D effects and triple monitors and you start to see why you would want a card that can do above 60 Hz
Good-bye
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?
Ok, I give up, what is CZ?
The closest I could find was Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, but I'm not sure why that particular game (which came out 7 or 8 years ago) is relevant?
Heroes of Newerth run natively 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.
I've been using WINE on OS X to play a lot of games that I've got from GOG. Most of them work with no tweaking at all. Given that OS X isn't exactly a tier 1 platform for WINE, I'd be surprised if it works better than on Linux. The main difference is the 3D drives. On Linux they're a complete crapshoot: they may be great, or they may be completely unusable. On OS X, they're usually okay (not great, but consistent).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
or is the line up of games pretty sad. On another note... maybe they got their business sense from "Software Tycoon".
Wine tends to work very well, for non-gaming applications. It's constantly getting better on the gaming front, too, but that class of application tends to really put pressure on the parts of the API not so well understood or known.
I'm about the same as you, I love(d) those games.
Although over the years I've come to the point of leaving gaming to the game systems and computing & internet to the computer. It's a personal preference thing with games, though. World Of Warcraft (I refuse to use WoW as a term for it), Everquest, and whatever other MMORPG there are, really suck you in I guess when your faceplanted against the screen with keyboard and mouse.
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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.
hardware acceleration on the mouse
lol wut
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
He is probably talking about rendering of the cursor. If the GPU supports it then the cursor's position is controlled by two GPU registers & it is the last item to be overlayed on top of the frame buffer. When you move the cursor the framebuffer does not need to be rendered again.
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
Maybe it's a very advanced mouse.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He is probably talking about rendering of the cursor. If the GPU supports it then the cursor's position is controlled by two GPU registers & it is the last item to be overlayed on top of the frame buffer. When you move the cursor the framebuffer does not need to be rendered again.
It was not seen on any hardware that anyone sane would use for running games, for years. However it IS mentioned on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1051483 , what confirms my suspicion that most "complaints" here are posted by Microsoft marketing people googling Ubuntu forums for plausible descriptions of bugs and problems.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Huh? Almost all display cards support this, and infact it is part of the VESA BIOS Extensions & Accelerator Functions.
Don't pretend to be dense. Problems with this functionality weren't seen for years.
But what exactly is wrong with posting problems about Linux on Slashdot?
Lying and shilling for Microsoft.
Also, do you have any evidence that exists outside of your head which shows that Microsoft pays or has ever paid a third-party to post on Slashdot while hiding their affiliation with Microsoft.
The fact that there are hundreds of posts referring to nonexistent, long ago solved, or severely misrepresented "problems", and all of them match top results from a Google search for "Linux <whatever> problem" or similar?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.