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."

Create a repository.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your games in it.

Give people f2p models or shareware models.

Let them purchase through web/ingame codes to unlock the full games.

Linux people will download the F2p versions by just tossing your repository in their package/software management apps a long with their other favorite repos.

Or even better roll out a distro with your game thats a clone of Fedora or Debian + the above with your own binary repo.

Re:Are linux users willing to pay money?

[ArbitraryName]

Yes [twolofbees.com]. When asked to pay what they think a game is worth, Linux users consistently pay significantly more than users of other platforms.

Re:Linux needs a killer game?

[houstonbofh]

Who gives a crap about it -- It is Linux Mr. whatever you are, please understand the distinction between a thing that runs on Mainframes and clusters and your Christmas toy.

Good thing you left out the comma... Since Linux runs on Mainframes and clusters, and on your Christmas phone and tablet.

Re:YOLD!

[PopeRatzo]

you ought to think about upgrading to a modern Linux distro

Yeah, like SteamOS.

Re:Just one game?

[techno-vampire]

Safely setting up customer's computers for dual boot is fairly easy: just set up the installer so that nuking your Windows installation isn't even an option. If the only way to install Linux on your computer so that you can play this game is with dual boot, most people would be less reluctant to give it a try, especially if booting into Windows is the default, and you only get Linux if you specifically ask for it at boot time.

Re:YOLD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerdfest accuses others of spreading FUD

ignoring your FUD about Google and Valve...

Then does it himself

Microsoft, now that they are no longer being monitored closely for anti-competitive behaviour has had the way paved by iOS, and is implementing the same model with 'Metro'. You'll start to see the 'classic' interface an installation model lose support in future versions.

Re:YOLD!

[muridae]

Before the game needs patched? If the game is making calls to OpenGL, then the game doesn't care how the window manager/desktop or the X11/X.org/Wayland/etc handle those calls as long as the version of OpenGL is supported. The only issue will come down to how kernel updates are managed. Too many people punch their package manager for every update, then whine when the bleeding edge kernel isn't supported by the closed-source binary driver for their bleeding-edge graphics card. This is either a problem in the distribution (pushing kernel updates without full support) or the user (updating the kernel without the right binaries available) depending on how you want to look at it. Or to save space, they update a library with a rapidly changing API to the newest version every time a release comes along, and then file bug reports everywhere. If the library isn't stable, then the game devs should force dependency on a certain release, or static link it. And if the user wants to uninstall the library when the game says 'hey, I depend on that' and the package manager allows it? That's back to a distro problem. So it seems like the real problems are average users using bleeding-edge distributions, or stupidly uninstalling things they shouldn't. Hey, I wonder what would happen if I went and uninstalled all those DX patches in SysWOW folders, think everything will still run right afterwards?

Frankly, stabilizing a set of "these files will be available to all games if the OS level is at least at patch version X.Y.Z" seems to be what SteamOS is aiming at. Which would let users do exactly what you say the average users want to be able to do.

Re:YOLD!

[interkin3tic]

Google's store is not exclusive on android, you can install apps outside the store or via amazon without google having any say over it. You uncheck an option in settings. So I'd argue that "control just like google" is actually a pretty loose standard compared to how apple does it on the ipad or iphone.

I'd bet good money against steam limiting where you could install aps from on steam OS. In the beta for the steamboxes, they explictly say you can do whatever you want with the free computers they're handing out. On PCs, obviously, steam has become dominant without following the apple model of being the only store allowed on hardware, so I can't imagine why they'd need to resort to it now.

Re:Unportable killer game

[muridae]

Ever seen the Humble Indie Bundles, where GNU/Linux users tend to buy closed source games? I have FTL installed on my A/V workstation, just for those bits of 'brain frozen, working must stop for a few minutes' and it runs just fine. Not exactly an open source game; you might take a look at the Steam library of all the closed source Linux games they support now.

Re:YOLD!

[Andtalath]

Not really in question no.

They can go back on everything they've said and make it closed, but it is supposed to be open and hackable from everything they've said.

Not steam itself, but everything else.

Re:YOLD!

[Eskarel]

On Surface RT, that's true. On Surface Pro and Windows 8, it's not. It's not even entirely true on RT, though given that there's bugger all supported ARM software for Windows and RT doesn't have the non RT libraries on it, you'll have a hell of a time finding anything else to install on it.