Tux Games has no problem with Loki, we have a very good relationship with Loki and their people, and we fully support their attempt to bring cheap games to LUGs. We would prefer, however, that the LUGS be given an EQUAL discount not better.
We dont like getting information like this from LWN where we first heard it, and we dont really like being undercut. However for anyone that read my statements as an attack on Loki, please re-read. Loki has done a great service for the last 2 years and we hope they continue to do so. Tux Games will continue to support them. Two companies are perfectly allowed to disagree on some points, whilst working together in others. Its all just part of the day to day of business.
My comments did sound harsh (on re-reading) but when you see the business you have spent 18 months of your life on, being threatened by a decision like that, and you see a hundred people on slashdot saying what a great thing it is, well, it does tend to make me a little overly passionate about it. My apologies to anyone that may have been offended by it, but I stand by the comments that it could seriously damage the reseller chain. Without the reseller chain, sure, everyone will get cheaper games. Briefly.
With no resellers Loki will have to spend all of their time doing shipments and customer service support. That wont leave much time for development, and that isnt what Loki is supposed to be doing. Companies have their specialities. Loki develops. We retail. Doing both is never a good idea, that is standard business understanding.
Hmmm, goes to show you dont actually know anything about what Tux Games does.
We are in the middle of implimenting a number of things to help the community that does far more than the average small LUG.
We have plans to set up a support network where voulenteers get paid to support Linux, to give games companies a support network that allows them to publish games without the need to set up a Linux support department (which most of them refuse to do). This aims to give us all more games, and gives the Linux volenteers a nice extra income.
We have been working with two open source games projects to publish their games in the hopes of providing them with a stable income and maybe enough for them to quit their day jobs and work fulltime on their open source projects
We have been planning a number of other ways to assist the community that will bring more funds to good open source projects to allow them to continue their work. Im not going into those yet as the plans are a way away yet and we dont want people hassling us for 'when when when' before we are ready.
While I do not in any way say that the LUGs are not important (they are, I used to run a small LUG a few years back so I fully understand how important they are), the business people are also important. We work hard to get the games to the customers. What would you rather Loki be doing? Would you rather they be developing new games, or spending their time shipping to customers and dealing with non-delivery problems? I know I for one would prefer they do the development. That is what the middleman is for, they take the hassle of distribution away from the product producers. We have the hassle of non-delivery, the hassle of shipping one game at a time. We do this and Loki doesnt have to care less about it.
No middlemen mean less games coming out. Thats a plain and simple fact.
We took a community survey as to what the community wanted us to do. We made a lot of decisions based on that. Now hold on a minute, are you one of these people that flame companies for listening to the community - unless they are non-profit companies.
Please.
Yeah.
Its a pity you havent got the guts to stick your neck out and take a chance.
Or to do anything brave in fact. Insulting me anonymously is as big and clever as a 3 year old.
You, sir, are a troll, and I consign you to my killfile.
Yep, first I heard about this was from the link at linuxgames.com. I was, to say the least, startled.
First thing I did was fire off an email to Loki, to try and find out what was going on. Im sure they will reply, and Im sure we will all work out a deal or arrangement, but until them I am in the dark. Its quite worrying seeing my whole business hanging on what Loki will reply with, and knowing that over there in CA they havent started business yet so I have to sit here twiddling my thumbs and waiting to see if Im still in business or not. I think that that accounts for the harsh tone of my first post. Stress!
No, we wont ever stop selling the Loki games even if we have to sell higher priced than Loki does. Obviously we wouldnt get may sales but we would still carry them. We only refused to carry one game, and that was because the supplier (spiderweb software)demanded the email address of every purchaser...We refused to divulge private customer information to them, and they gave us an ultimatum... We chose to not do business with them.
No, we arent. Which is exactly the point. What is to stop a competitor claiming to be a LUG (last time I checked there was no legal procedure or even procedure at all for becoming one) and undrecutting us? Whatis to stop US claiming to be a LUG? I hereby proclaim that I am opening the GLUG (Gamers LUG) and anyone may join, and now we can get the discounts. Yeah I could do that but that would be being underhanded and practicing bad business.
Its all well and good giving discounts, but a lot of game players are in LUGS and they will *obviously* buy at the cheaper price when they can. I have employees to pay and food to put on the table. If this goes ahead and cuts out 50% of my business, then Im the one going out of business because I stuck to the Linux market and tried to support the cause. When your supplier undercuts you, its just bad form.
Dont get me wrong, I do NOT AT ALL object to LUGS getting discounted prices. In fact Tux Games has offered discount prices ourselves to several LUGS because we DO support the community, but Loki offering prices LOWER than their reseller network have been buying for is bad practice.
As CEO of a company that has just shelled out MANY thousands of dollars on copies of Tribes 2 and Alpha Centauri, I was less than impressed to see Loki was selling to every LUG at a price LOWER than they are selling to their resellers. I can tell yuo for a FACT that Tux Games dos NOT get discounts like this, and we have been ordering Tribes 2 and Alpha by the hundred, not by the ten.
Loki has of yet not responded to my demand for an explaination, but I think this is NOT the way to win loyalty in resellers. If they charge LUGs less money than they charge resellers, the resellers may as well just pack up shop and go home.
Suffice to say, we arent best pleased at this news. All well and good to give discounts to LUGs, but please, lower than the resellers?? Thats a great way to kill your reseller channel stone dead!
</rant-mode>
The thing is, SHOULD a parent intervene? Unless it is serious, I say no.
Stealing the kids discs and bullying him is bad, but the staff of the school have the responsibility to stop that. A parent who goes in is simply going to make the situation a million times worse for his or her kids. Their bullying will increase tenfold, and the more their parents come in, the worse it will be.
The staff are the ones at fault, they should have stopped this long before. A parent should be AWARE of it, and maybe have an informal meeting with staff to make sure they are aware of it, but please, charging with assult for being kids and rowdy is insane. Kids who bully get put into detentions. They will learn after a while, or they get kicked out. If we are talking about breaking arms and lifetime scarring fair enough, thats serious assult, but legal action for pushing someone over in the classroom or kicking them in the shins is the reason that there are more lawyers in the average american city than in the average european country. Its insane.
Kids cant be sheltered for life, they need to learn how to handle themselves. The kids reaction, while maybe ill-thought-out probably had the desired effect, it made the bullies laugh and then probably leave him alone. That in my mind is creative and intelligent thinking that should be praised. He used his mental skills to get out of a tough physical situation. Good for him!
Hey, thing is, we're just trying to keep in business. Not everyone knows the name cos when I put a small comment in, we get between 50 and 100 clicks onto our site.
We try and keep it on-topic (for instance here it is), and we dont spam-flood these forums. But we know it DOES attract visitors. And while we restrict ourselves to JUST selling Linux games we are in a very competetive low margin business. We need all the visitors we can get. Its how we eat in the evenings and how wages get paid.
I appreciate what you are saying, however. Rest asured you will not see us posting to off-topic forums or posting big spammy messages.
And as to banner ads, slashdot charges a LOT for its banner ads and we all know how ineffective banners are these days. No thanks. We have been TRYING to go with other ad models with slashdot, but they have decided to ONLY do banner ads. They finally confirmed that decision to us on the day slashdot had a big story about how banner ads just didnt work. Go figure.
They disobeyed the rule of open source software. Release soon and release often. That wasnt the ONLY rule they broke, by a long shot, but it was one of the fundamental.
They had no idea of the community, and they ended up annoying all of Loki, Tux Games, Tribsoft, and several others that I am barred from even mentioning.
When you do that, you are pretty much dead in the water as far as the open source community goes.
What may be the only good thing tocome of this, would be if they GPL'ed the complete details of everything they have done the day before they go down, maybe give something back to the community that so far they have only ignored.
This could be a GREAT way of artists making money! Come on guys look at the bright side!
If the RIAA is saying they want the right to restrict the distribution of my music, then they are surely implicitly creating a contract between me and them. And this would imply that they should pay me for the rights to my music.
I like this idea. Go for it, RIAA, and give me all your money!
Dont get me wrong, if someone could come up with a way where this wouldnt hurt Linux gaming, I would be all for it. But saying 'we wont put effort into WineX compatability for games that are already available' doesnt always work. If you do a good enough job, then the gamesd WILL work. Then what, add some code in that will disable them working? No of course not that would be silly.
I *do* wish there was a way that both sides could live together without hurting each other, but I just cant see how it can happen {:-(
I can say right now that Tux Games stands against Emulators. While emulators could be good in the short term, and they would certainly give Tux Games a much wider variety of games to sell, and thus more profit, they will kill native Linux apps. Take Loki for example. They produce top quality games for Linux. But these games cost money to port, and they generally are sold for somewhat more than the windows versions (as they are released a little later). What chance would these games have if the windows versions could be bought for 30% less but only ran 10% slower. Loki and tribsoft and Hyperion would all go broke in a month!
Sure, it may be the quick fix, but in the long term it will hurt Linux more than it will help. And dont forget, Emulation only works till the next version comes out. Do we really want to sacrifice platform independance to the whims of microsoft not changing directX? I know I dont.
And to cap it all off, the new Sims multiplayer server is Linux based, from what we have been told. And it has a graphical front end so the administrators can zoom to games to debug. This is obviously only a very small step away from being Linux-ready for the desktop. So, to to Tux Games and sign the petition for The Sims for Linux!
It would be hard to close off the entire web to non-microsoft browsers. All they have to do down in mozilla-land is impliment the tags and browser identifier of IE and the world re-opens. And Im sure that if MS starts to completely ignore W3C standards, and sites on the web start closing off to netscape, thats exactly what the mozilla people will do (at least as a compile-time option maybe).
Heh, thats fine, business is business afterall.
Sometimes the big boys can give out better offers than we can. However I can guarentee that if you buy from us, Tux Games will call off the sad looking people we have hired to sit outside your house to make you feel guilty {:-)
Well, speaking for ourselves, Tux Games found that the best-selling available game for the month to date for Linux is Descent 3 and its Mission Pack. Jagged Alliance II was the best-selling pre-release game (which unfortunately wont quite make it for the christmas delivery deadline).
We wont reveal exact stats on order levels, but we can say that the majority of purchasers were male, but that the US for the first month since we started trading, comprised less than 50% of our orders. North America was responsible for 52% of our sales, Europe 40%, while the rest lagged well behind with Asia at 3%, Australia 2%, South America 2% and Africa 1% (rounded figures).
The rush is starting to die down now, with people realising that games will now be unlikely to arrive befrore the 25th.
Slashdot Mirror
Tux Games has no problem with Loki, we have a very good relationship with Loki and their people, and we fully support their attempt to bring cheap games to LUGs. We would prefer, however, that the LUGS be given an EQUAL discount not better.
We dont like getting information like this from LWN where we first heard it, and we dont really like being undercut. However for anyone that read my statements as an attack on Loki, please re-read. Loki has done a great service for the last 2 years and we hope they continue to do so. Tux Games will continue to support them. Two companies are perfectly allowed to disagree on some points, whilst working together in others. Its all just part of the day to day of business.
My comments did sound harsh (on re-reading) but when you see the business you have spent 18 months of your life on, being threatened by a decision like that, and you see a hundred people on slashdot saying what a great thing it is, well, it does tend to make me a little overly passionate about it. My apologies to anyone that may have been offended by it, but I stand by the comments that it could seriously damage the reseller chain. Without the reseller chain, sure, everyone will get cheaper games. Briefly.
With no resellers Loki will have to spend all of their time doing shipments and customer service support. That wont leave much time for development, and that isnt what Loki is supposed to be doing. Companies have their specialities. Loki develops. We retail. Doing both is never a good idea, that is standard business understanding.
Hrm, good idea. I'll add it to the TODO list {:-)
We are in the middle of implimenting a number of things to help the community that does far more than the average small LUG.
We have plans to set up a support network where voulenteers get paid to support Linux, to give games companies a support network that allows them to publish games without the need to set up a Linux support department (which most of them refuse to do). This aims to give us all more games, and gives the Linux volenteers a nice extra income.
We have been working with two open source games projects to publish their games in the hopes of providing them with a stable income and maybe enough for them to quit their day jobs and work fulltime on their open source projects
We have been planning a number of other ways to assist the community that will bring more funds to good open source projects to allow them to continue their work. Im not going into those yet as the plans are a way away yet and we dont want people hassling us for 'when when when' before we are ready.
While I do not in any way say that the LUGs are not important (they are, I used to run a small LUG a few years back so I fully understand how important they are), the business people are also important. We work hard to get the games to the customers. What would you rather Loki be doing? Would you rather they be developing new games, or spending their time shipping to customers and dealing with non-delivery problems? I know I for one would prefer they do the development. That is what the middleman is for, they take the hassle of distribution away from the product producers. We have the hassle of non-delivery, the hassle of shipping one game at a time. We do this and Loki doesnt have to care less about it.
No middlemen mean less games coming out. Thats a plain and simple fact.
We took a community survey as to what the community wanted us to do. We made a lot of decisions based on that. Now hold on a minute, are you one of these people that flame companies for listening to the community - unless they are non-profit companies.
Please.
Yeah.
Its a pity you havent got the guts to stick your neck out and take a chance.
Or to do anything brave in fact. Insulting me anonymously is as big and clever as a 3 year old.
You, sir, are a troll, and I consign you to my killfile.
Yep, first I heard about this was from the link at linuxgames.com. I was, to say the least, startled.
First thing I did was fire off an email to Loki, to try and find out what was going on. Im sure they will reply, and Im sure we will all work out a deal or arrangement, but until them I am in the dark. Its quite worrying seeing my whole business hanging on what Loki will reply with, and knowing that over there in CA they havent started business yet so I have to sit here twiddling my thumbs and waiting to see if Im still in business or not. I think that that accounts for the harsh tone of my first post. Stress!
No, we wont ever stop selling the Loki games even if we have to sell higher priced than Loki does. Obviously we wouldnt get may sales but we would still carry them.
We only refused to carry one game, and that was because the supplier (spiderweb software)demanded the email address of every purchaser...We refused to divulge private customer information to them, and they gave us an ultimatum... We chose to not do business with them.
Its all well and good giving discounts, but a lot of game players are in LUGS and they will *obviously* buy at the cheaper price when they can.
I have employees to pay and food to put on the table. If this goes ahead and cuts out 50% of my business, then Im the one going out of business because I stuck to the Linux market and tried to support the cause.
When your supplier undercuts you, its just bad form.
Dont get me wrong, I do NOT AT ALL object to LUGS getting discounted prices. In fact Tux Games has offered discount prices ourselves to several LUGS because we DO support the community, but Loki offering prices LOWER than their reseller network have been buying for is bad practice.
Loki has of yet not responded to my demand for an explaination, but I think this is NOT the way to win loyalty in resellers. If they charge LUGs less money than they charge resellers, the resellers may as well just pack up shop and go home.
Suffice to say, we arent best pleased at this news. All well and good to give discounts to LUGs, but please, lower than the resellers?? Thats a great way to kill your reseller channel stone dead! </rant-mode>
Stealing the kids discs and bullying him is bad, but the staff of the school have the responsibility to stop that. A parent who goes in is simply going to make the situation a million times worse for his or her kids. Their bullying will increase tenfold, and the more their parents come in, the worse it will be.
The staff are the ones at fault, they should have stopped this long before. A parent should be AWARE of it, and maybe have an informal meeting with staff to make sure they are aware of it, but please, charging with assult for being kids and rowdy is insane. Kids who bully get put into detentions. They will learn after a while, or they get kicked out. If we are talking about breaking arms and lifetime scarring fair enough, thats serious assult, but legal action for pushing someone over in the classroom or kicking them in the shins is the reason that there are more lawyers in the average american city than in the average european country. Its insane.
Kids cant be sheltered for life, they need to learn how to handle themselves. The kids reaction, while maybe ill-thought-out probably had the desired effect, it made the bullies laugh and then probably leave him alone. That in my mind is creative and intelligent thinking that should be praised. He used his mental skills to get out of a tough physical situation. Good for him!
We try and keep it on-topic (for instance here it is), and we dont spam-flood these forums. But we know it DOES attract visitors. And while we restrict ourselves to JUST selling Linux games we are in a very competetive low margin business. We need all the visitors we can get. Its how we eat in the evenings and how wages get paid.
I appreciate what you are saying, however. Rest asured you will not see us posting to off-topic forums or posting big spammy messages.
And as to banner ads, slashdot charges a LOT for its banner ads and we all know how ineffective banners are these days. No thanks. We have been TRYING to go with other ad models with slashdot, but they have decided to ONLY do banner ads. They finally confirmed that decision to us on the day slashdot had a big story about how banner ads just didnt work. Go figure.
The games can be ordered from Tux Games (Alpha Centauri and Tribes 2). We are also selling the discount bundle.
They had no idea of the community, and they ended up annoying all of Loki, Tux Games, Tribsoft, and several others that I am barred from even mentioning.
When you do that, you are pretty much dead in the water as far as the open source community goes.
What may be the only good thing tocome of this, would be if they GPL'ed the complete details of everything they have done the day before they go down, maybe give something back to the community that so far they have only ignored.
I know, I was assuming people would see the sarcasm.
If the RIAA is saying they want the right to restrict the distribution of my music, then they are surely implicitly creating a contract between me and them. And this would imply that they should pay me for the rights to my music.
I like this idea. Go for it, RIAA, and give me all your money!
Dont get me wrong, if someone could come up with a way where this wouldnt hurt Linux gaming, I would be all for it. But saying 'we wont put effort into WineX compatability for games that are already available' doesnt always work. If you do a good enough job, then the gamesd WILL work. Then what, add some code in that will disable them working? No of course not that would be silly.
I *do* wish there was a way that both sides could live together without hurting each other, but I just cant see how it can happen {:-(
I can say right now that Tux Games stands against Emulators. While emulators could be good in the short term, and they would certainly give Tux Games a much wider variety of games to sell, and thus more profit, they will kill native Linux apps. Take Loki for example. They produce top quality games for Linux. But these games cost money to port, and they generally are sold for somewhat more than the windows versions (as they are released a little later). What chance would these games have if the windows versions could be bought for 30% less but only ran 10% slower. Loki and tribsoft and Hyperion would all go broke in a month!
Sure, it may be the quick fix, but in the long term it will hurt Linux more than it will help. And dont forget, Emulation only works till the next version comes out. Do we really want to sacrifice platform independance to the whims of microsoft not changing directX? I know I dont.
It was live on CNN, the altitude counter hit 0 at around 5:58 GMT
And to cap it all off, the new Sims multiplayer server is Linux based, from what we have been told. And it has a graphical front end so the administrators can zoom to games to debug. This is obviously only a very small step away from being Linux-ready for the desktop. So, to to Tux Games and sign the petition for The Sims for Linux!
Tux Games has sent you two emails this week alone.
One of them I sent personally.
I suggest you reconfigure your mail server.
I wonder if they will give up networksolutions.org then.
It would be hard to close off the entire web to non-microsoft browsers. All they have to do down in mozilla-land is impliment the tags and browser identifier of IE and the world re-opens. And Im sure that if MS starts to completely ignore W3C standards, and sites on the web start closing off to netscape, thats exactly what the mozilla people will do (at least as a compile-time option maybe).
Heh, thats fine, business is business afterall. Sometimes the big boys can give out better offers than we can. However I can guarentee that if you buy from us, Tux Games will call off the sad looking people we have hired to sit outside your house to make you feel guilty {:-)
You can pre-order this game at Tux Games for $46
We wont reveal exact stats on order levels, but we can say that the majority of purchasers were male, but that the US for the first month since we started trading, comprised less than 50% of our orders. North America was responsible for 52% of our sales, Europe 40%, while the rest lagged well behind with Asia at 3%, Australia 2%, South America 2% and Africa 1% (rounded figures).
The rush is starting to die down now, with people realising that games will now be unlikely to arrive befrore the 25th.
Bah you troll, I meant Team Arena {:-)