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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."
>Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game?
The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
The benefit of SteamOS is, strictly speaking they should be able to ship it as a bootable DVD/Blu-Ray that loads the OS and game, or runs straight off a USB key.
Android is a Linux distribution, there are already hundreds even thousands of game titles building up. All it is down too now is how the Android layer and other Linux distributions come together. Chances are for simplicity, they will simply load the Android layer to play games and for other major applications like office suites load them direct.
New games are neither here nor there the problem lies with a decades long game library and porting them across and it is looking like the Android layer will be the bridge to that porting of existing games to Linux.
Linux is making huge inroads into the windows market via Android.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Any games developed for it, will only work for about 3 months without needing constant patches against newer OS's bubblegum and bailing wire package management.
Wrong, I can still play Civilization, Call to Power(1999), Neverwinternights (2003), Doom 3 (2005) and other IDtech4 games, And yet It Moves(2009) on my current Gentoo/Linux installation. All these games haven't seem patches in ages.
If "Linux" wants to become a competitor to the PS4/Xbone, then throw all that GUI shit away and just have a thing bare-metal layer OS. NO GUI-wowzits. If someone wants to install a GUI later so they can also use their Steambox as a Multimedia PC, Office typing thingamigiggery, let them. But just please keep quit trying to be a desktop AND a game OS.
Guess what, "Linux" is exactly like this. Just install the latest GNU/Debian and you will have to explicitly select the GUI option. Besides, I don't really see why a GUI should be a problem. Most games open a window, often fullscreen, and then do all the drawing themselves, the only thing the GUI is doing is, drawing the windows frame if the game window is not fullscreen.
As it is, If I need Windows development, I use Windows, if I need Mac OS X, I have a Mac Mini to do iOS development. If I could just make a Universal Binary that also worked on Linux I'd sure as hell enable that. Just Linux itself never works.
Funny, I do all my primary development on Linux, and if I want to do cross-platform, the odd one out is usually MS Windows. Just getting all required libraries installed on Windows is a nightmare, because the only non-cygwin way to get a stable combination of libraries is to compile them all be yourself ensuring that you always use the same compiler flags.
Nobody in their right goddamn mind would use Linux as a Desktop, let alone a game PC except for people who enjoy "hacking" things to make them work.
No. I had two flatmates, one studying geology, the other working at a lawyers office, both preferred Ubuntu Linux, and they were certainly not "Hackers", they simply enjoyed an OS that worked on their Laptops without having to worry about the latest antivirus and with very simple means to get a lot of software for free with only a few clicks.
Joe-average-user just wants to put the Disc in the drive or click a menu and run the game, not fiddle with drivers, dependencies and GUI bullshit.
And Joe-average user can just do that: I bought two of the Humble Bundles and for all the games I actually cared to install I downloaded a bit TGZ, or SH file, unpacked it and the game just run. Doing the same thing with a CD/DVD should be no different. Even when I bought Civilization (call to power) in 1999 it worked by just popping a CD into the drive and installing on Linux.