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Battlefield Director: Linux Only Needs One 'Killer' Game To Explode
dryriver writes with an except from Polygon's interview with DICE creative directory Lars Gustavsson, who says it would only take one "killer" game for Linux to break into mainstream gaming (something some would argue it already has): "We strongly want to get into Linux for a reason," Gustavsson said. "It took Halo for the first Xbox to kick off and go crazy — usually, it takes one killer app or game and then people are more than willing [to adopt it] — it is not hard to get your hands on Linux, for example, it only takes one game that motivates you to go there." "I think, even then, customers are getting more and more convenient, so you really need to convince them how can they marry it into their daily lives and make an integral part of their lives," he explained, sharing that the studio has used Linux servers because it was a "superior operating system to do so." Valve's recently announced Steam OS and Steam Machines are healthy for the console market, Gustavsson said when asked for his opinion on Valve's recent announcements."
Finally, The Year Of The Linux Desktop has come!
Overall, he is right. I bought gaming systems for a single game. For instance, I bought the Wii just to play FireEmblem. I was already interested but it is only on FE's release that I bought it. Once I had it, I played other things as well. But a single exclusive game I was interested in convinced me to buy.
I think that the same thing could happen for Linux. But I am no sure it will ever happen. Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game? If you were a game developper, would you commit to realse your fancy need AAA game ONLY on Linux and not on Windows? That seems like a stupid move unless the company receives a ridiculous amount of money cash for the exclusivity.
I don't think that compatibility with Linux will be sufficient to see an "explosion", it is an exclusivity one need. And being linux exclusive look a lot like betting on a three legged horse.
/. promotes itself and can't even get the blurb right.
Poor Lars. . .
what publisher is going to exclusively publish to Linux if they have such a killer app? Is Valve going to? Certainly won't be Canonical.
It needs one killer game that you can't get elsewhere. Do you think Halo would have done what it did for the XBox if it was also available for the PS2?
And since I don't see many game companies jumping the Windows ship to start making AAA Linux exclusives, this guy's "insight" is irrelevant.
Put your games in it.
Give people f2p models or shareware models.
Let them purchase through web/ingame codes to unlock the full games.
Linux people will download the F2p versions by just tossing your repository in their package/software management apps a long with their other favorite repos.
Or even better roll out a distro with your game thats a clone of Fedora or Debian + the above with your own binary repo.
His example makes no sense.
What we need is some serious effort into platform integration between desktop, tablet and cellphone. Apple offers, Microsoft wants to offer it. Why don't we have it with Linux/Android?
If not already, this kind of seamless integrations between their devices is something people will require soon and, unless you think android is going to take over on the desktop, Linux developers might want to get cracking here, otherwise Linux might soon start losing all the ground it conquered.
morcego
Linux users tend to be very much into open source and freeware but the real question is if they are ready to actually pay to play? I think the biggest concern is if that demographic will gladly shell out $70 on a game or $50 on software like a word processor? I think that not knowing is the biggest risk and only those with the capitol can do it. It's not like releasing terraria or skyrim on linux will make a difference but I think that steambox will guide players into linux. Don't hold your breath though...
Given the overwhelming power of developing on Linux compared to Windows or Macs (Linux is so far ahead of both it's not even a contest) once developers move to the new platform, they'll never go back.
It took 20 years, but Linux won. Face it. It's just better technology.
Eh? Is there a precedent for that statement?
With each new game console that comes out, there needs to be a whole ecosystem to go along with it. Name me any game platform that took off because of one good game?
In a parallel example, what would you say to "Windows Phone would have taken off if it had one really good at in the app store." ?
Put another way, how good would a game have to be for an average user to want to reformat their hard drive?
Who gives a crap about it -- It is Linux Mr. whatever you are, please understand the distinction between a thing that runs on Mainframes and clusters and your Christmas toy.
About the only thing I can see is Steam OS becoming a hardware target for "white box" makers. Microsoft is back to an x86 console, so how will they keep game devs on the console and not just Windows? At some point they will lock up and cripple Windows... Again... To push everybody to console.
Enter SteamOS based on Linux. If they make it play nice with Ubuntu or Mint Linux they could grab the "power gamer" market and those people can just use Linux for their "homework". Even then Steam is already looking to be a target for APPS on windows and Mac so that might fix the missing multimedia stuff people bellyache about.
All the games are killer apps, in some sense. The player kills. And the games are full of explosions. So one more killer app? That is going to make linux explode?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's not like the original XBox was floundering until Halo eventually came along. How can you make the assertion that Halo "made" the XBox when you have no history of XBox without Halo?
Really timoth?
Is coded in .NET and runs on mono. I'm playing it on Linux right now. True, a little geeky but it'll happen.
The problem is though that Halo, Gears of War, God of War, etc are all produced under exclusivity licenses. No linux game developer is willing to be exclusively Linux. Maybe Valve will start doing it now that they have a Steam box, but the allure of the major established markets will be hard to pass up.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Let's say I'm marketing a game to the general public. For the purpose of this argument, it doesn't matter whether or not the game is commercial or noncommercial, and it doesn't matter whether the game is libre or proprietary, because these things basically hold true regardless.
Linux is based on open standards. Generally speaking, if you write a game for Linux, porting it to Windows and Macintosh is relatively easy. If your plan is to *sell* your game, you probably want to offer it to as many potential customers as possible, which means that porting it is an obvious choice. If your game is open source, even if you don't port it yourself, if it's a "killer" game, someone will just port it for you.
The only exception would be the unusual case of a closed-source game being written specifically to be so awesome that it will encourage people to switch to Linux. But that case necessitates your software be non-libre, and deny people access to the code and a choice of operating system. While a lot of windows gamers may not care about that, you need buy-in from the existing user base in order to generate enough buzz for your game to take off, and in this case you'd be trying to convince people who (on average) feel very strongly about FOSS that keeping your game proprietary is a good thing.
It needs a killer game that can't be open source so that it can't be ported to other platforms. Of course if it's not open source, Linux users won't touch it.
The headline led me to believe that there is a new Linux-only game called "Battlefield Director" which is claimed to be the killer app that Linux needs.
The summary dashes such hopes to pieces.
"This is "The Year Of Linux...No, really this time this is it. We mean it. For real, for sure. We have got to get it right sometime, right? "
I have recently purchased X-Com:Enemy Unknown. I run an xp box at home at much to my chagrine it would not run on anything less than vista... WINE to the rescue. Worked great for a few months until Steam was patched. Now my Wine is no longer running X-Com. Will the killer app be wine?
DICE's BF Director = BF5
SteamOS = HL3, Portal 3, and TF3 like The Orange Box (The Penguin Box?). ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
But but GNU Quake is already a thing. What more could you want?
Oh right, you want a game that frat boys play because frat boys play.
Sorry, the Bandwagon Effect says you're screwed.
One or two Good Game can certainly make a difference
One decent game would get me into Linux; I dual boot Win7 and Mint, but only visit Mint, I don't really
use it as there's nothing "special" I use it for.
Doom took me from the Amiga and to the PC, as did Quake II (made for my video card (3DFX drivers)) graphics were incredible.
Installed Win3.1, the easy networking and abundance of programs shelved the Amiga.
I have Portal 2 I can play from Mint but have played it on the PC already, and it's not as good as the first.
Guess the cake was my carrot and an out right lie.
The Games I've found for Mint are Civilization types, build this then you can build that; but those can
impede your progress or even stop you if not taken care of.
I tried Red hat in the 1990's bought the book and CD. The Red hat disk partition tool was so confusing
I quit at the very start. If the instructions had just said "or you can just use FDISK" things would be much different now.
I'm a new linux user that used Unix commands to get around on old shell accounts. So have a leg up;
but still trying to get know to the command line while Linux is swaying folks to the GUI.
Then there's the flavor of Linux I started with Ubuntu as it was very popular at the time, the Live CD
didn't work so stopped there. Another serious approach was Mint as Ubuntu was sending search
query's to third parties - and where I'm at now. Just that I have no reason to use Mint, at the moment
I play Battle Field 3 all the time - a very enjoyable game for me for close to two years now.
Of course, you have to get millions of people to load one of the many Linux distros successfully, and ensure that your game runs on at least the most popular plus all the various hardware implementations. Drivers will be your biggest problem. And when something craps out, who provides support?
No, I don't think Linux desktop is going to have any kind of market penetration like Windows or OS X, even if some mythical company is willing to put millions of dollars into a top tier game. And anyway profit in gaming has moved to consoles and mobile right now. Desktops and laptops are for programmers and engineers, not so much for consumers anymore.
I tried installing steam on my kubuntu system, but it wouldn't play any games, it said something about needing the latest opengl version, and to do that I needed the latest graphics drivers.. So i went to download the latest graphics drivers from ATI, only it didn't work and I ended up with a laptop that did not boot. After hours trying to find a solution, I left it and did a reinstall. Life is just too short, and I don't have time for this shit. Fortunately my home area was left intact after the reinstall.
After that I pretty much forgot about steam. Maybe they will fix this issue one day, maybe they won't. Just my experience trying to get steam working on a linux machine.
-- Fuck Beta
Hypothetically, the Xbox wouldn't have sold well without Halo, which was hyped to the stratosphere.
Circumcision is child abuse.
HL3 would either prove or disprove this theory.
It's March 14, 1994, and Nethack works just fine on Linux 1.0. Colossal Cave Adventure, too. They both make modern games look like shit.
"Creative directory"? Nice.
I dream of the day that I see a DICE listing that says "popular social news site seeks literate editor..."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm typing this from a Ubuntu computer delivered to me just 2 days ago from http://system76.com.
Is it fair to blame Ubuntu for all the issues that come with building a computer from scratch?
But with that said, I agree the current Linux distros aren't ready for the average computer user. It's not Linux that's the problem. It's the fact that distros just don't put in ( or have for that matter ) the resources necessary to "polish" the OS.
We know Linux can do this because we use Android phones, and they work just fine for most users.
And personally I believe until distros put philosophy aside and concentrate on bringing in enough resources to fund continued development, Linux will remain inadequate for the average home computer user.
Look at what Battlefield has become. It's CoD now. That basically killed my interest in the franchise. No commanders, pointless squad play, zero incentive to play as a team, NASCAR scoring, unbalanced jets, etc. Unless they 180 degree turn around, I'm done with BF games.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If Linux can take over gaming, not only will I be on board, all the young game geeks will follow.
And no, it's not one "killer" game - I read about some penguin racing game, but that wasn't anything near to pull me over.
Steam is the most public of "saving us from the newest windows abortion that's some sort of tile thingy that refuses to work if you turn off UAC".
My fervent hope is that Steam gets all my games translated over to Ubuntu or some linux platform. Then I'll be a firm linux shill.
You have my word on that.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Once you can get live DVD images to boot a game on "any modern PC with a graphics card", people will do that. The next step would be to "dedicate a hard drive or partition to the games" so you would have save games, cache and DLC available. Once you're at that point, people will get dedicated PCs just for gaming like they already have now, but they'd only boot into windows to play windows only games. The guy is right, getting people to run Linux to run games is only depending on the right game to come along.
Once there are a few "right games" people will appreciate the fact that they can upgrade their console when they want to and not be limited to a box from a single manufacturer that will have to milk the design for years and years They may start out with "an old peecee", upgrade it as they see fit and their budget allows and stay there, or get the baddest gaming box they can build and keep it that way.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And before i start on the reasoning - I'm talking about Linux gaming "exploding". I agree that it will get more games, but it is likely to be a secondary platform for a long, long time.
The reason, is that the one "killer" game needs to be a platform exclusive. And to be something to encourage people to switch, it will need to be AAA. To be AAA means big art, music and programming effects budgets.
And NO ONE is going to be spending that sort of money on a Linux exclusive game before the market exists.
It's possible that it could have happened a few years back, as a self-booting DVD or similar, but I think the boat has been missed - optical media is dead/dying and to get online to stream it that way you need an OS installed.
So no, given the above I don't think the Linux gaming market will "explode". You'll likely see it grow slowly as people install SteamOS rather than windows if/when the AAA games start getting ported to it. The steam box will help that, as previously there's been no reason for people to not just run games on the copy of windows that came with their PC. If valve push the steam box hard enough, people will be buying hardware which never had windows on it, saving a windows license and there will be an actual reason to run Linux for gaming on it.
I'm really keen to see it happen though, the only reason I'm running a copy of Windows at home at all now is for games. My laptop is a Mac, my NAS is FreeNAS. My desktop i just recently built (i5-4430, GT760) just runs win8 as a steam bootloader, effectively.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's fairly mild so you should be OK soon.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
the PS3 is running linux...go to the 'about software' menu and see for yourself...how is it that linux hasn't 'taken off' again?
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
I'm doing my part, much to my potential peril as I've devoted 3.5 years to it and it stands at over 30k lines of code:
http://eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
I know SSDs are tough but if my linux box explodes will it survive? And will I?
The "Redmond Crunch" seemed promising:
http://www.commodore.ca/misc/jokes/Linux-vs-Microsoft.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
There was a time when I also thought that Linux was going to storm the market, including the desktop. That was when I read Eric Raymond's paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." One of the major themes was, "so many people are working on open source, that commercial software would not be able to compete." It seemed reasonable to me, and I wrote an article with a friend in 1998 that made it onto Linux Today, and into a crappy book by Wiley called, "Linux at Work." Eric Raymond was wrong. The problem with Desktop Linux, is Linux. I've been involved with Linux since the beginning (though not anymore if at all possible). Much of my career has been working on and with Linux servers and Desktops. I've heard over and over that, "this will be the year of desktop Linux," and it never has been. Open source development has a critical flaw, no one forces anyone to do the final grunt work on various components of the desktop that are necessary to put the final grunt work polish. Linux, and open source do not have the millions spent by Apple and Microsoft on user testing. No paying developers to stay in their chairs and finish that grunt work that no one wants to do to put the final polish on software/operating systems. Ms and Apple thoroughly QA test their products, which is a whole boatload of grunt work that people will only fully complete when they are paid to specifically do that. No, this is not the year of Desktop Linux. Linux is good at many things, but it is nowhere close to the commercial operating systems in ease of use, documentation and direct support if necessary. If you like spending Saturdays attempting to get some obscure error figured so you can attempt to get a crappy half-assed driver for Linux working, then it's for you. If you just want to do things, and play hundreds of great games, choose a well supported and developed commercial operating system. "
Linux Only Needs A Few Killer Graphics Card Drivers To Explode. FTFY.
Half-Life 3 confirmed.
I would consider Unreal Tournament 2004 a "killer" game for its time, but maybe the problem was it was available for other platforms.
Tux, A Quest for Herring!!!!
Why are we still talking about operating systems? Next thing you're gonna tell me you built your computer by hand and don't have a cell phone or a laptop.
Linux is all over the place. I know plenty of people who use it daily. I lived on Linux for years. Hell, I even ported the Opera Web Browser to the platform.
What it boils down to is simple, OS wars are dead. There's more than just Microsoft now. I personally prefer Windows 8 because it's faster than anything I've ever used before and it has less obvious bugs than the other platforms. Other people like Mac, others Linux, others Chrome (which is more of a Java platform than a Linux platform).
I think it's about time to consider that 99% of game development has moved into a new era of platform independent game engines. Using Unreal Engine, Unigine Game Engine, Unity3D and others you write the game once and tweak the controls for a dozen different platforms from phones to XBox/PS to Linux. Companies who code their own game engines and want to reinvent the wheel can do so if they want, but honestly, it's not so interesting. These days, if a game system developer really wants their platform to take off, they can make agreements with the platform system company and pay for the port or do it themselves.
Take a look at Microsoft. No one wanted to port to the Metro platform and Microsoft basically made it happen by working with the game engine companies. Now all the game vendors need to do is simply generate a new executable and tweak the controls.
If Valve wants support for SteamOS, the answer is simple, port the game engines. But I have no interest in games locked into a platform. I stopped buying consoles because I don't need a special machine for games anymore. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, etc... are all powerful enough to play the best of them. Game consoles were only interesting when porting to a platform meant an endless amount of problems with hardware incompatibility. We don't do it anymore. These days, the game engines do the work for us. Content developers can produce awesome games without worrying about AMD vs. Pentium or nVidia vs. Intel vs. AMD. Hell, they don't even have to think much about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux. They can develop games and simply deploy them.
SteamOS seems interesting, but I want one device for everything. I use a Surface Pro at the moment. Surface Pro 2 later this month. It's a laptop, a tablet, a video player, an ebook reader and a game system. Would I like better graphics? Yep... but Pro 2 has better graphics. And the graphics on the Surface Pro 2 are good enough that it's now more about game content than graphics quality. I carry an XBox controller in my backpack so I can play Sonic Racing or Lara Croft on airplanes.
It'll be pretty cool though if Valve makes it so I can buy a game and play it on SteamBox or my Surface without buying a second copy.
haha yeah Red Hat 6.2 on magazine covers.
"please type in the horizontal (not vertical!) monitor refresh rate"
pretty much skipped linux until Ubuntu 5.
...comong "soon" - Linux will take over desktop dominance.
I would buy any system that would let me play HL3. If it would take a Steambox to let me play it? Yes, I'd pre-order the thing immediately. Anything to get my grubby little hands on the mad adventures of Gordon and Alyx.
World of Warcraft runs perfectly under WINE. Like it or not - it's an AAA title, but this did not help gaming on Linux at all. And this has nothing to do with WINE. It simply doesn't matter whether a game runs natively or under WINE, Java, Flash, JavaScript or whatsoever.
Not Gonna Happen.
The game is Quake.
Let me know when Visual Studio is released as a Windows Store Application. Once the developers of developer tools have to eat their own proverbial dog food, then we'll know the environment formerly known as Metro has truly arrived.
The problem is of course any game that becomes popular on Linux will be ported to other platforms like Xbox,PS3 and Windows. So that immediately kills that idea.
Imagine yourself in a tech support role, answering the following question: "How do I keep instant messaging, web browsing, and music playback running across a dual boot?"
Is it fair to blame Ubuntu for all the issues that come with building a computer from scratch? [...] It's the fact that distros just don't put in ( or have for that matter ) the resources necessary to "polish" the OS.
You appear to have answered your own question. Yes, we can blame Canonical for not having put in the effort to polish Ubuntu to the point where PC makers other than System76 are willing to preload it.
We know Linux can do this because we use Android phones, and they work just fine for most users.
Gorilla arm Linux with a calculator app that fills the screen no matter the size of my device's screen has taken off. Linux that's comfortable for hours of work (meaning focused activity) at a time where I can see both what I'm working on and what I'm referring to, not so much.
If folks will install JRE for Minecraft, they could dual boot Ubuntu.
JRE for Minecraft can show reasonably efficient 3D graphics while Spotify/Pandora/iTunes/whatever is running. This is not true of dual booting. Or has virtualization become better at OpenGL since I last checked?
So, Hosting my game on my own site with a .deb and .rpm and .tar.gz isn't actually hard
32 or 64 bit?
Even without that, Linux plays very nicely with Android phones.
That was true of Android 2.x, which used FAT over USB mass storage. But Android 4.x's move to MTP has caused me problems on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. Have current *buntu releases learned to automount MTP tablets?
All the games are killer apps, in some sense. The player kills.
Did you intend this as a complaint the fact that most major-label video games that get ported to desktop Linux are M-rated shooters, not less-violent fare?
My favorite OS is the penguin.
I mean who will make money because of linux becoming popular gaming platform?
You're plain wrong.
Gabe constantly says that his business model thrives on free competition, and that he doesn't believe that a walled garden would be good for Valve. And technically, too, Valve made open choices for SteamOS and Steam Machines, where they didn't have to.
Consider that Apple took a free OS as its base and have closed it: Valve makes it clear that it has no intention in restricting you from sideloading applications on SteamOS or installing whatever you want on your Steam Machine.
Valve might change in the future, but for now they are absolutely pushing an open platform.
In the Linux desktop world, application developers usually don't provide a package you can just download and install (there are exceptions of course). Unless you want to compile software from source code, you are entirely dependent on your linux distribution vendor. Here is an example:
"Ubuntu includes whichever VLC version was the latest at the time the Ubuntu release was frozen (typically about two months before the official Ubuntu upgrade). Afterward, you can still get security and critical bug fixes, but no further major VLC version updates until the next Ubuntu release." -- VideoLAN.org (VLC)
What does that mean? For a new major release of the famous video player, you have to install a new version of the whole operating system! (Sometimes there are inofficial binaries provided by people who are just annoyed as you by this matter, but can you trust them?) Linux will not become mainstream as long as this issue is not resolved. Simple as that.
Like the fix for Android 4.3's Bluetooth keyboard problem, the USB Mass Storage enabler requires root, and as I understand the process for rooting a Nexus 7, I'd have to wipe all the files and unlock the bootloader to gain root. So how should I back up the files on the tablet before wiping it? Would it be best to find a Windows PC to do this over MTP, or would using a file manager to upload all files to a Samba share on the Xubuntu machine be more practical?
I think the best sci-fi, alien landscape, puzzle-solver mystery game I've ever played is Gnome 3
./startpacman.sh
Desktop operating systems are too big and too slow for games and there may be lots to be gained from writing small custom OSes bootable from whatever. Rather than install games to the hard disk why not boot them from ROM and play them directly off the ROM like console machines do. Most game level stuff should all fit in main or GPU memory anyway. The PS3 OS, as I've heard, is pretty crude and behold the results. OSes have a lot of code game players simply don't need.
Finally will get some use out of my gaming desktop
Writer/Editor http://deluxevideoonline.org/
Android isn't designed to run Eclipse
It is, however, designed to run AIDE.
It took Halo for the first Xbox to kick off and go crazy
He was probably not born back then or he'd remember that MS's PR had rabid Xbox fanbois shrieking the glory of Xbox all across the internet, while condemning the PS2 "Jaggies!" (thanks 3DFX!) long before the console was released.
The Halo example isn't really comparable - yes it was a new IP on a new platform and it did a great job of getting it's platform sold but the difference is that the XBOX was at least in people's mind as a gaming platform even if they weren't inclined to buy it before. Linux is not viewed as that and I can't see something like Steam OS changing that without a massive marketing push - which often means a big exclusive to showcase it and that brings me to the next problem which is that Steam is already spread across various platforms and I just can't see someone, even Valve developing a AAA exclusive game for it. Games of that calibre are just too damn expensive to develop to risk it sinking without a trace because of the platform. It's a different story for someone like Microsoft or Sony to entice exclusives because they are massive corporations with huge amounts of money to throw at it, even so it seems to be going the way that "true" exclusives are getting rarer and I might be wrong but it seems to me that many of those tend to either be developed by a studio they own or a smaller house that they take under their wing.
An existing, hugely popular IP would maybe have a good shot at raising the profile of the platform but why take such a risk with something that would be massively profitable if published in it's normal channels? A timed exclusive is unlikely to generate too much interest since people will just wait unless the period is on the long side and then the potential customers will just get resentful instead.
Quake III Areana was clearly a 'killer' game. One of the best FPS of all times, still being played today, 14 years later.
It was realeased for windows and linux almost simultaneously, and it changed almost nothing about the status of linux for gaming.
Ok, it wasn't a linux exclusive but it actually ran slightly better on linux.
It's not simple availability we need. It's either exclusivity, or superior experience. Simple parity will not do the trick. SteamOS might be a good start though.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I want you! To create a exclusive Linux game.
Hi Guys, Why not?
Big Budget AAA's have been dead for years!!! The big names are not dropping millions on these "New and Upcoming" titles this stuff was already in production or completed years ago, with 99% of the content being simply refreshed(old made to look new). Subdivide that, refresh these textures, pull those models from the archive's use that plot. lol
Some one on here quoted 30 Million for production ROFL. Ok then you keep thinking that. No wonder some of you get suckered into $60+ CoD and then Monthly Subscription Fees and take it like champs.
Anyways the top 10 Games of the last 5 years were all indie title's.
Once Mocap Setups become affordable, to your average "Joe Indie" that will be the end of your Big Budget Production.
As far as your average user they could care less if its Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS, Blackberry, or ShittyOS5000 as long as it runs whatever game/app at any given moment.
The vast majority of the people I know who use computers, stuffed that old dust windows desktop in the closet around the time of there second android phone or tablet upgrade. I know "one" window user and he is a die hard AAA game fanatic, has to have all the latest and greatest.
It will only take 1 run of system updates to then drive those gamers away from Linux and back to Windows. Nothing like that great feeling of installing Linux, being amazed at how perfectly it works, installing the proprietary graphics driver to get the maximum performance of your GPU, then running an automatic update check, rebooting, and be left stuck staring at a black screen or worse yet a command line.
Linux still has a long way to go before it is ready for the unwashed masses.
Issues that remain in 2013:
-Proprietary graphics driver gets corrupted after automatic updates
-Underscan enabled by default when connected to a TV over HDMI with no way to turn it off until the proprietary driver and custom vendor software is installed that provides the option to do so.
-1080P not detected for TV connect via HDMI resulting in a max resolution of 1280x768
-No a/52 surround sound when using SPDIF out for audio unless you manually hack together the module for it
-No stereo sound when using SPDIF if you manually hack together the a/52 module
-Log files having no default size limit allowing them to consume the entire boot drive, and no means provided to set a limit on them or disable them
Linux is fine on a server where I don't care about graphics or sound, but for a HTPC or primary desktop it still is a pile of shit. My latest attempt for my HTPC lasted all of 3 days before I got fed up and tossed Windows 8 on it. By comparison, Windows 8 worked flawlessly and was up and running within 2 hours will all drivers and primary software installed. No problems with resolution, surround sound, or disappearing drive space.
If linux got one good game it will be seen as a much more viable gaming platform. however since linux is a computer os the game WILL be ported to other os's and linux will lose some of its luster in the gaming market. lets just hope that linux doesnt become the next apple. what i mean is that bungie originally was a mac exclusive developer, putting out great games exclusive to macs. they were great but they didnt get much notoriety. macs would be considered computers to play games on because of a game named halo. however microsoft bought bungie and apple computers were doomed to be second class gaming machines.
OK .. So here's one that could have been in the foundry since the Quake 2 Engine was made available.
But the Red Dwarf could have been use as a massive map for a decent single player...
it start's off with Dave Lister taking a Pot Noodle out of the Microwave .. and setting off for the engineering decks to fix a flux subverter
Linux was always a lonely backwater like a Silent Running's anyway.