Linux Game Publishing CEO Resigns 142
An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of the once fledging Linux Game Publishing, Michael Simms, has announced his resignation. Simms attributes his resignation from the Linux game porting company he founded more than a decade ago to being burned out and having little success as of late in his work."
In his place, Clive Crouse will be taking the helm.
A Linux game company that wasn't troubled? (Score:5, Interesting)
Has there ever been a Linux-exclusive game company that *didn't* either go bankrupt, face massive layoffs/resignations, or never deliver on their promised games?
I don't mean that sarcastically, I'm seriously asking the question. Seems like every time I hear about a Linux game company, it's something negative. There must be at least one or two success stories out there.
Re:A Linux game company that wasn't troubled? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Company site (Score:5, Interesting)
Got a quarter of a mil burning a hole in your pocket?
Unless you can get a sweetheart deal, that's going to very likely be the price of admission unless you're dealing with Indies like I've been doing. Seriously.
You have to put up a royalty payment, as often as not, ranging from $20k-500k to get the rights to get a glimpse of the code.
You have to pay someone either a wage or offer them a decent chunk of the proceeds as a percentage.
You then have to do the porting work. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it's brutal for varying reasons. Some of it's poor code. Some of it is just simply...complex.
Then you've got to push it off to the duplicators. This is another somewhat complex aspect of things. You need to gauge the demand of the title and do at least a first production run of the gold master that will be enough to make your production and packaging costs reasonable. You owe that up-front. Depending on your royalty structure, you'll either owe the royalties per copy (and there's one there...) up front, or you'll owe it later on. This is how Loki ended up owing iD a quarter million on that disastrous rollout of Q3:A. (Loki did something iffy from what I'd been told at the time from people on the inside- they cranked out more than 10k units, which is where the $250k iD was owed came from...). If you produce more than about 2-6k units of the title, you can be out a LOT of money. Produce less than 5k units, though, and you have to raise your prices a bit to offset costs that're there on the low end for production, etc.
Once you've got your units, you've got to SELL them.
Re:Theres games on linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, 60fps, where every second had 60 frames, and they were evenly spaced, would be incredible performance.
Unfortunately, even when I get 150-200fps in games, I still notice rather sizeable jitters. Sure, there may lots of frames that are 2-3 ms each, and they outnumber the one 600ms frame by enough of a margin to keep the average low, but that one 600ms frame is a killer. Usually this is due to a simulation task that takes too long, and rendering the scene over and over without an update in the simulation is pointless. So, the rendering hangs also.
There's a bit of a movement to start measuring performance in a more accurate way, but no one has come up with a real solution yet. So, we still use fps. If you play a game one day and get 120fps, and then your system launches a background task and your performance goes down to 80fps, the change will be rather noticeable.