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"People who are commenting in this way completely miss the point. Linux gaming is a growing opportunity. Nobody expects it to remain at 1% forever." I'm sure S

by cwyers 12y ago

"People who are commenting in this way completely miss the point. Linux gaming is a growing opportunity. Nobody expects it to remain at 1% forever." I'm sure SOMEBODY does, and anyway that's a bit of a strawman -- if Linux triples its marketshare it's still under 5% of the PC gaming market, which itself is often not given the same amount of attention as the primary two consoles. And if the bulk of big AAA game ports to Linux are badly-wrapped Windows games, or even well-wrapped Windows games, then it seems hard to see what will motivate more than a small portion of gamers to leave Windows. EDIT: And Valve can throw as many resources as it wants at Linux gaming, the general problem of making Linux into a desktop OS capable of competing alongside Windows and OS X has had a lot more resources thrown at it in the past, and unless and until that effort finally pans out, having Linux gaming as a functional subset of Windows gaming is not going to induce people to switch en masse.

ekianjo 12y ago
> And if the bulk of big AAA game ports to Linux are badly-wrapped Windows games, or even well-wrapped Windows games, then it seems hard to see what will motivate more than a small portion of gamers to leave Windows. There are many ways to develop games nowadays for multiplatforms. If you use C++/SDL it will run on all systems in the very same way and you don't need to spend time porting. If you use Unity3D you can export for all formats including Linux (x86). If you use Unreal Engine, CryEngine you can now export to Linux as well. Seeing the massive amount of support for Linux in the middleware/engine area, I'd be very surprised if most future Linux versions are not Linux native ones. Of course Witcher 2 was developed way before this current state of things so it could not benefit from the same tools and it was anyway built for Windows in mind in the first place.
- cwyers 12y ago
  I know this is kind of a sidelight to the main discussion, but you brought it up, so... is there a single instance of a AAA game being made with Unity3D? And using third-party engines doesn't directly address a lot of the other questions about Linux gaming (drivers, fragmentation, back-catalog games), it doesn't help out with the large number of AAA games that are made on first-party engines (Square Enix uses a lot of Crystal Engine, Ubisoft has a handful of its own engines, EA games use their own engines for the most part), and it doesn't help turn Linux into a more compelling general-purpose desktop OS. Generally in order to convert people, you need to be able to offer something better than what they currently have (for THEIR definition of better, not yours), not close-to parity on a subset of what they currently have. EDIT: And third-party engines make it easier to port, so long as you're using them as-is. If you have a source code license and you're modifying the engine, then you're right back to supporting another platform in code. And even if you're shipping the stock engine with your game, you still have an increased testing and support burden when you ship a game for Linux.
  - pionar 12y ago
    I think the hope is that with the pressure of Valve, with the SteamBox and Steam OS, the game publishers will make that investment. Valve is also making considerable investment in abstracting away all that fragmentation and drivers worries through the Steam Runtime (linked to in another comment).
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Well, yes, that's certainly the hope. But it's not necessarily a guarantee. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the thing about addressing it from the egg side alone is that not all eggs are chicken eggs. Even if you make Linux games, it's not guaranteed to result in chickens. Valve hasn't managed to come up with a single value proposition to make gaming actually better on Linux than Windows, or to come up with any games that run significantly better on Linux than Windows, or any exclusive Linux games.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    > And using third-party engines doesn't directly address a lot of the other questions about Linux gaming (drivers, fragmentation, back-catalog games), it doesn't help out with the large number of AAA games that are made on first-party engines (Square Enix uses a lot of Crystal Engine, Ubisoft has a handful of its own engines, EA games use their own engines for the most part), and it doesn't help turn Linux into a more compelling general-purpose desktop OS. Wow, a lot of points made in a very few words. Here's my take on your comments: * Drivers: massively improved for nVidia cards, probably very close to Windows performance nowadays. For ATI, I guess the state of it is "meh", but it's getting a bit better progressively. For now gaming on Linux should be with nVidia (and Intel). * Fragmentation: this problem is a myth and has been debunked so many times already, I don't want to discuss it here. * Back catalog games: a lot of it can be handled with WINE with no additional modification needed. * AAA games engines: Square Enix is a Japanese publisher, focused on Consoles first, then PC, and when they mean PC they only have the image of Windows because Linux is non-existent in Japan (mostly). So I would not be surprised if they were the very last ones to jump on the bandwagon. UbiSoft has become a "console first" publisher as well, so I don't hope much from their side as well. * compelling desktop OS: Linux in some of its best distros IS already very compelling, much more than Windows 8 where you have to relearn everything from scratch again. It's faster, you have repositories for updates, Firefox runs like a dream on it (on the same hardware I always find the Windows version running way more slowly), and you have great Free Software for most of the uses you need, without viruses, ads and stuff like that. It's VERY functional. Of course some people will bitch about not having Adobe products, or X or Y software, but you can always keep a double boot or a virtual machine if you really need something. Distros get updates automatically, instead of the ancient way of doing updates on Windows with service packs and the like. Since I've switched to Linux years ago I have never looked back, except for games and video editing. And I know I'm not the only one, and I see Linux distros improving release after release.
ekianjo 12y ago
> I'm sure SOMEBODY does, and anyway that's a bit of a strawman You'll probably have to explain to me how having more games being developed and released for the platform is going to attract LESS gamers in the future. It can only go up, and more so when the Steam Machines are out. Maybe it will go to 2% only, maybe 10%, who knows, but betting on it stagnating is not very credible.

by cwyers 12y ago

ekianjo 12y ago

> And if the bulk of big AAA game ports to Linux are badly-wrapped Windows games, or even well-wrapped Windows games, then it seems hard to see what will motivate more than a small portion of gamers to leave Windows. There are many ways to develop games nowadays for multiplatforms. If you use C++/SDL it will run on all systems in the very same way and you don't need to spend time porting. If you use Unity3D you can export for all formats including Linux (x86). If you use Unreal Engine, CryEngine you can now export to Linux as well. Seeing the massive amount of support for Linux in the middleware/engine area, I'd be very surprised if most future Linux versions are not Linux native ones. Of course Witcher 2 was developed way before this current state of things so it could not benefit from the same tools and it was anyway built for Windows in mind in the first place.

cwyers 12y ago
I know this is kind of a sidelight to the main discussion, but you brought it up, so... is there a single instance of a AAA game being made with Unity3D? And using third-party engines doesn't directly address a lot of the other questions about Linux gaming (drivers, fragmentation, back-catalog games), it doesn't help out with the large number of AAA games that are made on first-party engines (Square Enix uses a lot of Crystal Engine, Ubisoft has a handful of its own engines, EA games use their own engines for the most part), and it doesn't help turn Linux into a more compelling general-purpose desktop OS. Generally in order to convert people, you need to be able to offer something better than what they currently have (for THEIR definition of better, not yours), not close-to parity on a subset of what they currently have. EDIT: And third-party engines make it easier to port, so long as you're using them as-is. If you have a source code license and you're modifying the engine, then you're right back to supporting another platform in code. And even if you're shipping the stock engine with your game, you still have an increased testing and support burden when you ship a game for Linux.
- pionar 12y ago
  I think the hope is that with the pressure of Valve, with the SteamBox and Steam OS, the game publishers will make that investment. Valve is also making considerable investment in abstracting away all that fragmentation and drivers worries through the Steam Runtime (linked to in another comment).
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Well, yes, that's certainly the hope. But it's not necessarily a guarantee. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the thing about addressing it from the egg side alone is that not all eggs are chicken eggs. Even if you make Linux games, it's not guaranteed to result in chickens. Valve hasn't managed to come up with a single value proposition to make gaming actually better on Linux than Windows, or to come up with any games that run significantly better on Linux than Windows, or any exclusive Linux games.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > And using third-party engines doesn't directly address a lot of the other questions about Linux gaming (drivers, fragmentation, back-catalog games), it doesn't help out with the large number of AAA games that are made on first-party engines (Square Enix uses a lot of Crystal Engine, Ubisoft has a handful of its own engines, EA games use their own engines for the most part), and it doesn't help turn Linux into a more compelling general-purpose desktop OS. Wow, a lot of points made in a very few words. Here's my take on your comments: * Drivers: massively improved for nVidia cards, probably very close to Windows performance nowadays. For ATI, I guess the state of it is "meh", but it's getting a bit better progressively. For now gaming on Linux should be with nVidia (and Intel). * Fragmentation: this problem is a myth and has been debunked so many times already, I don't want to discuss it here. * Back catalog games: a lot of it can be handled with WINE with no additional modification needed. * AAA games engines: Square Enix is a Japanese publisher, focused on Consoles first, then PC, and when they mean PC they only have the image of Windows because Linux is non-existent in Japan (mostly). So I would not be surprised if they were the very last ones to jump on the bandwagon. UbiSoft has become a "console first" publisher as well, so I don't hope much from their side as well. * compelling desktop OS: Linux in some of its best distros IS already very compelling, much more than Windows 8 where you have to relearn everything from scratch again. It's faster, you have repositories for updates, Firefox runs like a dream on it (on the same hardware I always find the Windows version running way more slowly), and you have great Free Software for most of the uses you need, without viruses, ads and stuff like that. It's VERY functional. Of course some people will bitch about not having Adobe products, or X or Y software, but you can always keep a double boot or a virtual machine if you really need something. Distros get updates automatically, instead of the ancient way of doing updates on Windows with service packs and the like. Since I've switched to Linux years ago I have never looked back, except for games and video editing. And I know I'm not the only one, and I see Linux distros improving release after release.

ekianjo 12y ago

> I'm sure SOMEBODY does, and anyway that's a bit of a strawman You'll probably have to explain to me how having more games being developed and released for the platform is going to attract LESS gamers in the future. It can only go up, and more so when the Steam Machines are out. Maybe it will go to 2% only, maybe 10%, who knows, but betting on it stagnating is not very credible.