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> 2. If games have to be rewritten to operate on Linux, most existing games never will. Most games, once their sales have ceased bringing in cash, are abandoned
by fhd2 13y ago
> 2. If games have to be rewritten to operate on Linux, most existing games never will. Most games, once their sales have ceased bringing in cash, are abandoned and never updated again. Legacy gaming support is important. A lot of people have beloved games that are years or decades old that they still occasionally play. If switching to Linux means they have to abandon those, they won't.
I don't see the majority of players care about old games. I certainly do, and so does a non-trivial amount of people, but it's not really anyone's focus I think.
New Windows versions make (edit: in my experience) most old games unplayable, I've had much more success getting Windows 98/XP games running on Wine than on Windows 7, to my surprise (Baldur's Gate is a recent example).
If there's a market for legacy games, someone will step up and port them to or emulate them on modern operating systems. It's already happening, both commercial (gog.com etc.) and non-commercial (console emulators, DOSBox, Wine, ...)
- nolok 13y ago> New Windows versions make most old games unplayable That is simply not true, the vast majority of games work fine, and most of those that don't only need you to fiddle with the "compatibility" settings. As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games.
- fhd2 13y ago> That is simply not true, the vast majority of games work fine, and most of those that don't only need you to fiddle with the "compatibility" settings. I realise that's just my experience, added a remark above. I've had very little luck getting even stuff that works fine on XP to run on 7. I'm not blaming Microsoft, I know they're going to great lengths for backwards compatibility. But I don't see old games running on new systems as a given, not on Windows, not on any other platform/OS. > As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games. Maybe I'm old, but 2-5 years old games aren't "old" at all in my book. I'm thinking about >10 year old stuff. Don't recall any trouble getting <5 year old games running on 7, indeed.
- kbenson 13y agoIn the cases where I got old games to play in windows 7 when they were having problems it had a lot to do with running them as administrator. Which is a shame, as I bet many of the multiplayer games are riddled with security exploits.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- foxhill 13y agothe plural of anecdote is not data - some games work, some games don't. i've had both successes and failures with older games.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago> the plural of anecdote is not data Yes it is. Biased, self selected, very hard to exploit. But it's still data. If you know the biases and counter them (for instance by asking people directly), you could even gather something useful.
- foxhill 13y ago> If you know the biases.. indeed. > for instance by asking people directly.. a terrible way of accounting for bias. people are often unaware of the bias they impart on what they say.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoOf course. Selective memory would still be a problem, for instance. But you would get rid of self selection. Though if you just ask your friends, you will have another kind of selection bias…
- barbs 13y agoIt's a shame gog.com have stated that they don't plan on supporting Linux anytime soon. The main reason being that they won't be able to provide reasonable support for multiple distros and distro versions. Why they can't just officially support Ubuntu like Steam does defies me...