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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
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.
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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 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,
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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
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.