Slashdot Mirror
John Carmack: Kudos To Valve, But Linux Is Still Not a Viable Gaming Market
dartttt writes "John Carmack recently presented a keynote at QuakeCon. He said Linux is still not a commercially viable gaming platform, and the two forays they have made into the Linux commercial market have not been successful. Valve's announcement about Steam for Linux changes things a bit, but it remains a tough sell."
To be honest, nothing Carmack and id Software produced in the last decade or so was marketable either.
I remember a time when people used to say DOS is the gaming platform of choice. Windows? Good enough for shitty-looking Reversi and Solitaire, but not much else.
Then Windows became the gaming platform of choice. Sounds familiar?
What I mean is, if Linux is to becomes a good gaming platform, someone has to get the ball rolling.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Without a good selection of available games, many people won't switch from Windows to Linux. And if many people don't switch to Linux, game publishers will be loathe to port any major games to Linux. -------- Steam may change this. It may change it a LOT. Even if just a dozen or so AAA games get ported to Linux, it would be a positive start. ----- I would love to run Linux instead of Windows 7. I really would. But the lack of games and some other applications on Linux keeps me on Win 7. ----- Good luck to any Linux gaming pioneers. Carmageddon: Reincarnation will be ported to Linux, so that is one potentially major game title being ported to the tux.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I can't believe this guy thinks that their "forays into Linux commercial market" are even close to the scale of Valve porting Source.
Speaking for myself - I've definitely been using Ubuntu practically exclusively now for a few months (12.04 is a joy). I WOULD get rid of my Windows PC if it weren't for gaming. This is definitely good news for the discriminating user. I'd like to see all of my Steam games moved to Linux (never going to happen), but a Steam version of a game will make a difference to me. Eagerly awaiting LfD2 on Linux. Using a closed source OS definitely makes me nervous, there've been too many cases in the past few years of manufacturers pulling info from users when they shouldn't - would like an OS that's open to community scrutiny.
Is the problem there are no gamers on Linux or the problem there are no games on Linux?
I am Linux only.
I play MassEffect, Skyrim, MindCraft, LoTRO, GuildWars, played WoW for far to long.
I will play GuildWars2.
I paid for but have still not activated SW:ToR. It worked on Linux in Beta and then they did a zig/zag and it did not. I know there is a wine patch. Just have not done it and interest in doing so is decling.
I am a paying Linux gamer. I would have given more money to SW:ToR, but they broke their game on Linux.
When Steam does it's "Check System" thing it reports my machine as windows *sigh*, so I am not even sure I am counted.
There is a Linux market, just not sure anyone knows it.
As far as I can tell Carmack's efforts boiled down to trying to sell individual games mostly and to just accept things on Linux as they are for better or worse. What Valve is doing is trying to integrate their entire platform and being a game delivery network that works across Windows Mac and Linux, that's exactly what it is...a platform. Just like the browser is a platform. Valve is also apparently working hand in hand with the big players in the Linux graphics card space to make drivers first class. They are profiling to find bottlenecks in how their code integrates with the kernel. Valve is making a very serious effort here and it extends beyond anything Carmack has tried so far. If anything maybe Carmack could learn something instead of just lambasting because he couldn't see it through. Of course these are early days still and Steam for Linux hasn't even been released yet which even more makes me wonder why Carmack is already predicting Doom (get it?) for it.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
You didn't get it: the "game" for Rage was getting Rage to run on your system, with in game achievements for various textures and colors displaying correctly. The actual run-around-and-shoot-stuff was just DLC for the people who had already won. I haven't won yet, but then again I haven't felt like doing complete AMD driver reinstall yet.
Or: after departure of John Romero.
The guys together were a great combo. Separately, they are just mediocre.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The big difference is that Windows actually was just capable of shitty-looking Reversi or Solitaire back in the day when DOS was still the primary PC gaming platform. DirectX changed that and it was only after the release of DirectX that gaming on Windows became viable.
Linux however has had gaming capabilities for a long time, but still there's a huge lack of compelling titles. The reason why gaming on Linux isn't taking of is because of politics, not a technical reason like with DOS/Windows.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I won't mean anything if the only games they bring over is L4D2 and Portal.
That's pure strawman and you know it. There is no way that only those two games will be on Linux. Peruse steam and look at the games for Mac and that will give you at least an idea of what can be expected for Linux. Also bear in mind the relative ease of porting between OS X and Linux (kind of like porting between iOS and Android) and you instantly add a significant amount of people to your potential non-Windows user base which should have a nice additive effect and make even more games show up in the Mac/Linux column.
Steam on Linux is 100% panic from Valve realizing that Steam is about to become irrelevant.
I'm sure it started out that way but who fucking cares? It's happening so they might as well give it all they have and make it work. As a Linux user I benefit and will definitely buy games.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
About to become irrelevant?
I'd love to hear how you came to that conclusion. Please. Anything?
I know this will turn into a "chicken or the egg" conversation...
"We shouldn't build games for Linux unless there's a proven market!"
"There can't be a market if there are no games to buy!"
But, there's an obvious "egg" here. There must first be a venturing company with a solid history of great games (*cough* half-life, portal, TF2, etc.) that's willing to take the risk. Forging new markets it ALL ABOUT RISK. If you're stunted by your fear of risk, then you're probably not a good entrepreneur.
Work it Valve. I hope it works out for the best. And if it doesn't, then EVERYONE will still thank you for giving it the ol' Orange Box try!
Sorry John but successful people create a market, they don't wait for it to be ready for you. Valve working with GPU manufacturers is a signal that they want to create a market. It is sad to say this but Id was a market defining company, now a follower
It doesn't matter. It's been too long since Carmack tried. So anything he has to say on the matter is terribly dated. It's like anyone else that tries to use Loki as an example.
So you failed 10 years ago? Big deal. It's been a long time since then. Things change.
They used to say the same thing about MacOS gaming too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It could be worse. At least Carmack hasn't married Yoko Ono.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
In what universe is this? Publishers are interested in any marketplace they can sell things on, as long as it's successful...Windows will have the marketplace built in. What do you think people's default is going to be?
Regardless, I'd say he's pretty familiar with the gaming market with a better-than-average understanding of how viable the platform is.
And I say this with all due respect to my fellow linux users, I'm pretty sure he's right on target here. That's not to say it can't change... it's just an accurate comment on the current state of things.
So there's no need to "poison the well" here by trying to sell everyone on Carmack's supposed irrelevance.
Enough with the personal attacks on Carmack. He's not the issue, the marketplace is. 15 years after it first appeared, desktop Linux has shown no sign of grabbing more than a tiny fraction of the market. Catering to that tiny fraction is not a sound business model, for game companies or anybody else.
Steam isn't going to magically create supply or demand by itself.
No it won't. Steam occupies that niche between the two: Marketing.
Steam doesn't create supply or demand. It aggregates them. It brings all the Suppliers and Consumers under one roof. Consumers looking for Linux games can browse Steam rather than hunting down lists of "10 Best Commercial Games For Linux (by Some Guy; Jan 23, 2008)", and developers looking for Linux customers can upload to Steam rather than create their own distribution channels.
PC gamers use PCs because they can upgrade hardware components easily. Macs have always been "black boxes" for the most part, have focused on proprietary hardware, and have generally approached gaming as a secondary priority, if a priority at all. Linux, however, will run on a PC, and supports a wider range of gaming-oriented hardware than Apple OSs ever have.
People don't buy Macs for gaming; they own Macs and then want to play a particular game. To make the switch, they have to spend more money (to get a copy of Bootcamp and Windows, for example). People who own PCs run either Windows or Linux; to switch from Windows to Linux is free. If you only run Windows to play games, you can dump Windows and run Steam in Linux without incurring any additional cost. Not so with Mac. So, comparing the Mac market to a potential Linux market is apples and oranges, really.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
But is what he is saying wrong? I don't think so. Other than a few things like the humble bundle the simple fact is FOSS is built around "free as in beer" as much as it is "free as in freedom" so there simply aren't enough users willing to buy to make it a market worth pursuing.
I mean you have at best estimates around 3% being actual desktop users (no you aren't allowed to count servers, routers, your CCC Droid phone, because lets face it those won't run the latest Quake engine games) and of those how many have bought software in the last 6 months? Frankly if that answer was 20% I'd be amazed, probably less than 10%. FOSS users are simply used to getting everything "free as in beer" and if you are trying to actually sell software that's just not a market you should target.
In the end we all know Old Gabe at Valve isn't looking at Linux because he gives a rat's ass about Steam on the Linux desktop, okay? Ballmer dropped trou and waved his sweaty ass at Gabe by trying to cut Valve out of the market with the appstore and old Gabe don't get mad he gets even by trying to royally fuck MSFT in a market they've spent billions trying to capture, the home console market. Well if you're Gabe how to you do this? Why using a stripped down Linux and COTS hardware of course!
I'm sure he'll have a nice little bidding war between Intel and AMD for the platform (which I wouldn't be surprised if AMD wins, they can sell Valve chips for less and with their A series APUs you could have built in crossfire with an AMD discrete and give the box some crazy graphics power).Once he settles on a platform its not like he is gonna have to worry about updates hosing drivers or anything like that since he'll control the system. Put in a hardware DRM chip and they're off to the races. He already has deals with most of the indies so all he has to do is get a few of the other big names like Activision on board and he can fuck over Ballmer AND make good money.
So I gotta agree with Carmack, if you are building a "steambox" type of device? Well Linux is a damned smart move, its mature, already has tons of coders working in embedded, it cuts the hell out of your time to market. But if you are like ID and only interested in selling software? It just doesn't make sense, just not enough money there to be picked up to make it worth the expense.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As a whole games are mostly pirated
I like to pirate stuff as much as the next guy, but that's simply not true. Yes, many people pirate software on the PC, but the fact remains that a HUGE part of the gaming market is not on a PC at all, and pirating games for console systems has become exceedingly complicated.
Even on the PC, sales still outweigh pirated copies by quite a bit. The media and industry really want you to believe that piracy is this HUGE issue driving them out of business, but it isn't at all. My personal experience is when working for Sony, our sales team estimated the total loss to piracy to be right around 1.2% of our total sales. Some months would be as high as 2.5% or so, but usually much less.
My only idea for why software developers might be struggling is a lack of original material. Is Killzone 8 or CoD:12 really going to sell as much as Killzone or CoD: 2/3? Of course not, people get bored with that identical rehashing of control, plot, graphics, etc. Also, the technology used for games has nearly stagnated. Yes, you have all the new DirectX 10/11 geometry shaders and cool features like that, but due to the cost of hardware to properly run them most people remain at a DX9.0c level of gaming. With new computers shipping with DX10/11 compatible hardware now, they can use the newer games but just because that feature is supported doesn't mean it will run at full, or even one step above the lowest settings. Even simple games like Minecraft (which prides itself in being low-res) require more in the way of graphics and hardware than a stock one-year-old i3 laptop can provide.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Carmack's relevance is not overinflated. He is a brilliant programmer. He's just not a designer. That used to be Romero's job, back in the glory days. Romero would put out the cool ideas, and Carmack would bring them to reality.
A lot of programmers are like that. You can be a technical genius, a creative genius, or somewhere in between. You can even oscillate between the two poles, but I've never heard of anyone being a creative technical genius. They are fundamentally contrasting modes of thought.
Give the man a great, fleshed-out concept and he will turn it into a top-tier game. He has a gift for tackling complex, multi-faceted problems that seem insurmountable. He just needs someone to provide those challenges, otherwise he will continue to churn out the same tired old crap.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
So besides that what else has changed for Linux since RedHat gave up on the desktop and Loki fell?
Valve is now porting the source engine to Linux (Left4dead 2 first, but other titles are sure to follow).
Many indie games on steam have been offered via humble bundles (which require they provide a Linux version).
And here I compiled a list of Kickstarter games (Thanks to the Phoronix and reddit/r/Linux community) that got funded and are releasing with a Linux version.
And of course, with all the work they're doing porting steam and the source engine to Linux, it would make sense that Linux would be a strong contender for their 'Steam Box' .
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Oh wow, hairyfeet is attacking his strawmen again. Linux users, on average, spend more than Windows users by the virtue of not consisting in large part of NEETs and high school kids. They just don't spend on software because they have superior software for free, and software they would consider buying, does not exist. Last year I personally spent something around $500 on Xilinx tools for Linux (not counting stuff that came with the development board that I also bought), just so I won't have to deal with "work-related/non-work-related" dichotomy in my open source projects. Before, when I had a company, I have bought licenses for multiple versions of VariCAD for Linux because I needed a 3D CAD that can interoperate with metal shops that mostly use SolidWorks. I am not much of a gamer, and I believe that open source is a superior way of developing game engines just like it is a superior way to develop all software, however I see nothing wrong with buying games. I have games from Humble Bundles, and would buy games that I find worth playing if they were available on Linux.
On the other hand, this is how much I have paid for Windows and all Windows software over 27 years that Windows existed: $0.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's been a very good month for me, +5-wise, so I can afford to say this:
"I don't know what Carmack is talking about -- Linus is a hell of a game market: there are hundreds of thousands of Linux users, each one of which is ready to bittorrent the games."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I remember a time when people used to say DOS is the gaming platform of choice. Windows? Good enough for shitty-looking Reversi and Solitaire, but not much else.
Yes, they said that when Windows was just an optional thing sitting on top of DOS.
Then Windows became the gaming platform of choice. Sounds familiar?
Yes, immediately after it went 32-bit and became its own operating system, in 1995. One year later in 1996 we had best selling games like Diablo coming out, Windows only, and setting record sales.
What I mean is, if Linux is to becomes a good gaming platform, someone has to get the ball rolling.
Problem is they started trying to get that ball rolling back in the 1990s.
This guy has open-sourced all of his game engines (baring id Tech 5, but only because it's still in use commercially at id), even going so far as to rewrite critical portions of an engine (id Tech 4, specifically the implementation of stencil buffered shadow volume algorithms) so that it could be open sourced in the first place (work he would get no money from and didn't have any obligation to do... and yet did it anyway), and what happens? The Linux community, the primary beneficiary for all this open-sourced goodness which has been used in countless free games, bash Carmack because he has the balls to say that iD Software have not had any commercial success with the Linux platform.
Now whether you agree with his criteria for measuring this success or not, the number of hateful comments I'm reading people make towards this guy is truly disgusting. If I were in his position, why the FUCK would I want to even look at the Linux community anymore after giving them so much?
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.