Battlefield Director: Linux Only Needs One 'Killer' Game To Explode 410
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."
YOLD! (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, The Year Of The Linux Desktop has come!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, you will be able to boot to a text-mode console and fiddle endlessly with X server dependency hell trying to get a graphical environment going.
Ah, I see your problem. You must be running a Linux distro from 10 years ago. I know your uptime is probably the stuff of legends right now, but maybe you ought to think about upgrading to a modern Linux distro if you want to play games.
Re:YOLD! (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, like SteamOS.
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I'm thinking SteamOS is going to have some problems running on a PowerPC device. :)
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I'm thinking SteamOS is going to have some problems running on a PowerPC device. :)
Well, I suppose it's good that Apple switched to Intel and the x86 architecture in 2005 and dropped support for PPC chips in 2009...
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: YOLD! (Score:5, Funny)
In former Soviet Union, grits Beowulf your pants cluster. Ah, forget it...
Re: YOLD! (Score:5, Funny)
All thanks to Tux Racer!!!
Re: YOLD! (Score:3)
I don't have much hope. Not that long ago there was a company called Loki that ported tons of games to Linux. I bought at least 4 of them. They were well do e ports, east to install and run, same price as windows games though not what we would call "new" releases. Not enough interest from the Linux community I reckon, because after about a year they went under.
most game houses make money by volume and Linux simply does not have much desktop volume. Better than 5 years ago? Sure, but enough to support de
Re: YOLD! (Score:2)
that'll sting for a while (Score:5, Funny)
It's fairly mild [dialsoap.com] so you should be OK soon.
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Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
ignoring your FUD about Google and Valve, there are good reasons why it's important for Linux to be viable as a desktop environment. The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want. Apple seems to be moving OSX towards the iOS model, with some iCloud features only available to software sold through their OSX app store. 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. That 30% cut looks pretty good to them.
Valve can see what's happening and wants to get ahead of the pack. They want to deploy on an open platform.
I want to be able to install any software I want without having to have it 'approved' by someone, and I'd like to have the option having my software and applications be open source so I can be more sure that various governments are not privy to my personal business. Of course, maybe that's just me. If you don't mind only having computing platforms that are basically walled-garden consoles, you need not worry. I'm sure they will also be available.
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
"They want to deploy on an open platform" should be "They want to deploy their own platform." Whether it will be "open" or not is very much in question.
Re: YOLD! (Score:3)
And Valve is willing to extend the Steam system to Apps and not just games. That might be enough to entice some porting, maybe some of the smaller Mac houses will bite.
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Windows developers are used to shitty looking UIs with crappy APIs, Mac developers are the opposite.
So Mac developers are used to crappy UIs with shitty-looking APIs?
(I kid, I kid. I just get these Sheldon moments from time to time...)
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Minor point: Valve doesn't want to deploy on an open platform, they just vehemently do *not* want to compete with Microsoft's "marketplace", or cede 30% to them. They want to control the store, just like Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Informative)
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:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want.
How is that any different from Valve's business model?
That 30% cut looks pretty good to them.
You mean that Valve let games in the store just because they're a bunch of nice guys?
Valve can see what's happening and wants to get ahead of the pack.
Call me jaded but, as I see it, this is just Valve's pushing for more control and a bigger slice of the pie -- just like any other company. The fact that they say Linux (but mostly SteamOS, really) might make us feel all warm inside, but it doesn't change that.
Oh, and let's not forget for a moment that STEAM is, in fact, a subscription service. Try to not to accept the next change to their ToS and see how many of those games you'll be to play.
RT.
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The difference is that it looks like SteamOS or will remain an open platform. If they start heading where Apple and Microsoft are heading, I'll agree with you, but for now it seems okay. They control their own market, but you can install install other markets. Same as the advantage of Android over iOS. One is an open computing platform and the other is an appliance.
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not FUD if it's true, it's simply FACT. Do you dispute that this is what's happening? It's not like Microsoft is trying to hide what they're doing.
Re:YOLD! (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has an app store, and they've moved it onto their desktop OS. No one uses it and Microsoft don't seem to care, they have an app store because they have a phone and a tablet. Nothing of any significance is distributed through it and outside of the RT which given that there's no real market for ARM based windows software doesn't even really matter, nothing at all stops you from installing software from wherever the hell you want whenever you want.
Valve also doesn't give a crap about whether an OS is going to become controlled, they care whether they're going to be the ones who control it. Right now there's pretty much only one way to get the vast majority of games on Windows, and that's through Steam, even if you buy a physical copy you get activation through Steam.
Valve doesn't give a flying fuck about Linux, or freedom, or open source they care about their own profit margins. They seem SteamOS as a cheap way to build a console and get a piece of that market which is right now the majority of the gaming market. They are willing to open source it all because what they're exactly like Google. They want as many people consuming their services as they can.
This won't magically make Linux gaming, it'll still be virtually impossible to get games up and running on any given Linux distribution and publishers will still want DRM. What you'll get at the end of this is the ability to buy some games from Steam, on supported versions of Linux(essentially SteamOS only in all likelihood), with hardware that Steam supports. It might let you get rid of you Windows partition, but it won't make you free either as in beer or as in speech.
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Dude, Windows RT/surface, is completely locked into the Microsoft walled garden. You cannot buy or install an application from anywhere but the microsoft market.
So, Um, how is warning about that considered "fud"? It seems pretty fucking certain to me.
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Linux already dominates the gaming market. There are hundreds of thousands of games available for Android/Linux. If Debian/Linux and friends have trouble attracting the gaming crowed, it's quite simply not the fault of Linux.
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: YOLD! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure all college students are capable of understanding those concepts or even capable of caring about them. Most college students I have seen are more worried about the bling the neighbor has, how much jack they will pocket once employed, and of course where the party is tonight. Quite a bit of college students are only there because they were told it was what they needed to do if they wanted a decent job. They aren't there exactly to learn or learn about the concepts of a micro-kernel. While a few are there to learn and further their wisdom, it is more of a put my time in so I will make lots of money thing for most college students.
Re:YOLD! (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:5, Interesting)
Any games developed for it, will only work for about 3 months without needing constant patches against newer OS's bubblegum and bailing wire package management.
Wrong, I can still play Civilization, Call to Power(1999), Neverwinternights (2003), Doom 3 (2005) and other IDtech4 games, And yet It Moves(2009) on my current Gentoo/Linux installation. All these games haven't seem patches in ages.
If "Linux" wants to become a competitor to the PS4/Xbone, then throw all that GUI shit away and just have a thing bare-metal layer OS. NO GUI-wowzits. If someone wants to install a GUI later so they can also use their Steambox as a Multimedia PC, Office typing thingamigiggery, let them. But just please keep quit trying to be a desktop AND a game OS.
Guess what, "Linux" is exactly like this. Just install the latest GNU/Debian and you will have to explicitly select the GUI option. Besides, I don't really see why a GUI should be a problem. Most games open a window, often fullscreen, and then do all the drawing themselves, the only thing the GUI is doing is, drawing the windows frame if the game window is not fullscreen.
As it is, If I need Windows development, I use Windows, if I need Mac OS X, I have a Mac Mini to do iOS development. If I could just make a Universal Binary that also worked on Linux I'd sure as hell enable that. Just Linux itself never works.
Funny, I do all my primary development on Linux, and if I want to do cross-platform, the odd one out is usually MS Windows. Just getting all required libraries installed on Windows is a nightmare, because the only non-cygwin way to get a stable combination of libraries is to compile them all be yourself ensuring that you always use the same compiler flags.
Nobody in their right goddamn mind would use Linux as a Desktop, let alone a game PC except for people who enjoy "hacking" things to make them work.
No. I had two flatmates, one studying geology, the other working at a lawyers office, both preferred Ubuntu Linux, and they were certainly not "Hackers", they simply enjoyed an OS that worked on their Laptops without having to worry about the latest antivirus and with very simple means to get a lot of software for free with only a few clicks.
Joe-average-user just wants to put the Disc in the drive or click a menu and run the game, not fiddle with drivers, dependencies and GUI bullshit.
And Joe-average user can just do that: I bought two of the Humble Bundles and for all the games I actually cared to install I downloaded a bit TGZ, or SH file, unpacked it and the game just run. Doing the same thing with a CD/DVD should be no different. Even when I bought Civilization (call to power) in 1999 it worked by just popping a CD into the drive and installing on Linux.
Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall, he is right. I bought gaming systems for a single game. For instance, I bought the Wii just to play FireEmblem. I was already interested but it is only on FE's release that I bought it. Once I had it, I played other things as well. But a single exclusive game I was interested in convinced me to buy.
I think that the same thing could happen for Linux. But I am no sure it will ever happen. Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game? If you were a game developper, would you commit to realse your fancy need AAA game ONLY on Linux and not on Windows? That seems like a stupid move unless the company receives a ridiculous amount of money cash for the exclusivity.
I don't think that compatibility with Linux will be sufficient to see an "explosion", it is an exclusivity one need. And being linux exclusive look a lot like betting on a three legged horse.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
>Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game?
The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
>Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game?
The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
Just delaying the Windows and MAC ports will do it. After all, they can also dual boot Linux, and this promotes the Steam Box as well.
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They should include flash storage on their new controller containing a Live SteamOS distro.
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The best candidate on the horizon is Half-Life 3 running on Valve's upcoming SteamOS linux distro. Would Steam take that chance to push it's own gaming platform?
Port Grand Theft Auto V to Linux. Just like that. I know it's not gonna happen, but man would it be awesome.
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If HL3 materializes in the next 5-6 years or so, it will be on all platforms: Windows, Mac, Xbox One, PS4, Linux. Valve still has to make money, and their primary interest is in building trust with their users. Telling people "we're forcing you to move over to our new system by putting our most anticipated game of all time exclusively on that system" would be perceived as a huge "fuck you, do as we say" by consumers, and a lot of that trust they've built up over the past 10 years (since the original debacle
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, a delayed exclusive would probably be enough. That is what OUYA tried with its proram to get 6 month exclusive games.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
The benefit of SteamOS is, strictly speaking they should be able to ship it as a bootable DVD/Blu-Ray that loads the OS and game, or runs straight off a USB key.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good luck getting 3D acceleration. :-(
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But I am no sure it will ever happen. Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game? If you were a game developper, would you commit to realse your fancy need AAA game ONLY on Linux and not on Windows? That seems like a stupid move unless the company receives a ridiculous amount of money cash for the exclusivity.
I agree that a game developer would probably not want to do it. But if someone like Red Hat or Canonical decide that a good long term strategy to get companies using linux in the workplace is to get linux in the home so that people are familiar with it, then Red Hat or Canonical might decide to pay to get an exclusive game made.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
That could work. But you need to give people incentive in release an exclusive version. Red Hat or Canonical could have the fund necessary to generate such an exclusive games. Or maybe one such effort could be crowdfunded. But nobody is going to develop a $10 million game and release it only on Linux without a significant incentive.
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So again- Valve (maker of Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, etc.) are releasing their own Linux distro and associated hardware. Sounds like they would have both the means and the incentive.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the poster is not correct. He said:
First, he means GNU/Linux, not Linux. There are tons of games for Android/Linux. For GNU/Linux, he's dead wrong. I built a machine yesterday with my son with parts from Newegg, and installed Ubuntu 13.04. The motherboard was DOA. Is the average gamer going to figure that out? The Samsung SSD wouldn't come up and talk to Ubuntu until I initialized it in Windows, and even then I had to set the SATA controller in BIOS to use "IDE" mode so Linux would find it. Installing GNU/Linux remains solidly in the domain of geeks. Will Average Joe Gamer buy a $1,500 "gaming rig", wipe Windows, and install Linux? Yeah, right. Maybe Dell and HP will start selling GNU/Linux gaming rigs so our poor gamer wont have to deal with figuring out how to deal with Linux? And they'll do that because there's so much demand? Unfortunately, GNU/Linux remains solidly a hacker OS. Now, as a hacker, I quite like it :-) GNU/Linux is what it is, and if you like it like I do, then great. However, we don't have to spread it like religion to the masses.
The GNU/Linux graphical desktop has been mostly dead for a while now, in terms of main stream adoption. Ubuntu bug #1 remains very much unresolved. It's not the fault of Linux, but of GNU/Linux. Linus won the OS kernel war, even against the great and powerful Microsoft, with his "Bazaar" approach. However, GNU lost the application war because GNU never accepted the hacker culture, where everyone is can create whatever hackish apps they like, and share them without friction. Instead, the Debian priests continue to maintain the purity of their "Cathedral" through exclusion of unworthy apps, and the process to publish an app is literally harder than getting married or getting a loan for a house. Arch is a good attempt to save GNU/Linux, but it's too little, too late, IMO. I hope I'm wrong...
You can buy a computer with Ubuntu preinstalled (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm typing this from a Ubuntu computer delivered to me just 2 days ago from http://system76.com [system76.com].
Is it fair to blame Ubuntu for all the issues that come with building a computer from scratch?
But with that said, I agree the current Linux distros aren't ready for the average computer user. It's not Linux that's the problem. It's the fact that distros just don't put in ( or have for that matter ) the resources necessary to "polish" the OS.
We know Linux can do this because we use Android phones, and they work just fine for most users.
And personally I believe until distros put philosophy aside and concentrate on bringing in enough resources to fund continued development, Linux will remain inadequate for the average home computer user.
Re:You can buy a computer with Ubuntu preinstalled (Score:5, Interesting)
Android is a Linux distribution, there are already hundreds even thousands of game titles building up. All it is down too now is how the Android layer and other Linux distributions come together. Chances are for simplicity, they will simply load the Android layer to play games and for other major applications like office suites load them direct.
New games are neither here nor there the problem lies with a decades long game library and porting them across and it is looking like the Android layer will be the bridge to that porting of existing games to Linux.
Linux is making huge inroads into the windows market via Android.
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Same site, bought some new hardware for a ...ahem... GNU/Linux Gaming Rig. Everything worked out of the box on Debian Testing. However, being that I develop software and occasionally make games, I'm not scared of this weird "Internet" documentation thing. So, I did a bit of research before buying my hardware that I was going to assemble...
I-- I'm sorry. I just don't understand WTF you're saying. Who assembles hardware and doesn't research whether it will meet their use case? That's not a "uber" geek thing, if you're building PCs from components, it's a no-brainer.
I've had more problems installing Windows7 on hardware that came with Windows 8 on it, due to moronic driver issues than on GNU/Linux -- In fact, I used a live CD to get on the web to get the Ethernet drivers, put them on the windows partition then reboot and get it working. Are you saying the MOBO being dead would have been any different on windows? Or, what? Because it seems installing OSs is your gripe, and if you actually do that a lot, you'll find that the it's FAR more accessible in many cases to install Ubuntu than Windows. My grandmother can do it: Boot the CD, click "Install" move a slider to allocate space for dual boot (if it's already got windows), and it's basically next, next, next, install... just like any other software on windows really. Granny CAN NOT make a dual boot with Windows...
So, yeah. Lots of Developers Love GNU/Linux, and it's just as difficult to install the Java runtime as it is to install Ubuntu. Most of the crap issues I've seen with games on Linux have with it is that they're wine wrappers or macromedia wrappers or some noob mistake where it wasn't compiled against the generic shared library. However, most of the time they seem to work for me -- I've got more Linux games installed than I have time to play thanks to HiB and other indie devs.
It only takes someone like me to say, "Meh, maybe I'll make the windows port work later if there's interest, but I made it on Linux, so that's what it runs on." and have a game be as popular. If folks will install JRE for Minecraft, they could dual boot Ubuntu. Hell, I've seen folks on Windows applying crazy patches and compiling drivers themselves to get some game to work -- Gamers will jump through some damn hoops, just look at DRM! So, I don't really think it's too far of a stretch outside the realm of possibility; It would be kind of rarer to say a few years ago, but have you seen the indie scene? It's exploding.
So, yeah, most folks developing on Linux start off with cross platform in mind, I know I do but that's because OSs should be irrelevant. For one of my from-scratch engines the Windows branch lags far behind the Linux branch and just because I'd rather add new features than port and debug some input or sound system issue in Windows. I mean, my 76 year old retired air-force mechanic neighbor who is nearly computer illiterate has been on Debian for 3 years now. Your "GNU/Linux is for nerds" FUD is just, well, moronic. If it were installed by default folks wouldn't have a hard time using it any more than Apple products or a Windows upgrade -- Less in fact if they were used to XP and you give them something other than Unity. If they're facing swapping out OSs (hint WinXP dies in 177 days) then GNU/Linux is actually probably an easier and better choice (since it can consume less resources than new flavors of Windows, also it's free).
Arch is a good attempt to save GNU/Linux, but it's too little, too late, IMO. I hope I'm wrong...
Interesting. So, what if you consider them all as GNU/Linux OSs instead of nit picking cons of each one? I mean, the "App Store" (software repository) model is pretty new to most Windows users who dealt with that cluster fsck of downloading crap from the web and a myriad of different installers and updaters... So, Hosting my game on my own site with a .deb and .rpm and .tar.gz isn't
Re:Overall right but unlikely to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't believe he does. The name "Linux" is overloaded and is used to refer both to the Linux Kernel and to the desktop operating system built around that kernel.
You well may feel that the GNU userland tools are more important than the Linux Kernel and that therefore the GNU project should have first billing. As such it is your right to prefix the OS name with "GNU/" if you feel that helps anything. But that doesn't make the more widespread usage wrong, and neither you nor Richard Stallman get to tell us what we call the OS.
This has been a public information announcement. Thank you for your attention.
DICE (Score:2, Funny)
Poor Lars. . .
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Digital Illusions CE is not to be confused with DICE Holdings, two completely different companies.
Really though, Digital Illusions is an EA subsidiary. Poor Lars indeed.
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Did you note poor Lars' new job title ?
Clarification: (Score:5, Insightful)
It needs one killer game that you can't get elsewhere. Do you think Halo would have done what it did for the XBox if it was also available for the PS2?
And since I don't see many game companies jumping the Windows ship to start making AAA Linux exclusives, this guy's "insight" is irrelevant.
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Valve might do it. If they are to stand up for their Steam Machines idea, they should release Half Life 3 exclusively, at least for a reasonable amount of time.
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2053680/valve-amd-based-steam-machines-are-also-en-route.html [pcworld.com]
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That's true. Although, I think it'll cause sales of the Steam Machine console, not necessarily Linux in general. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2053680/valve-amd-based-steam-machines-are-also-en-route.html [pcworld.com]
Why? You can dual boot your Windows or MAC box and get the Linux version right now. That gives more uptake on the Linux side, and convinces other publishers to release for Linux / Steam Box.
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Maybe, but something tells me they won't simply ignore the current market landscape just out of principle. Kudos if they do, but highly unlikely.
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It needs one killer game that you can't get elsewhere. Do you think Halo would have done what it did for the XBox if it was also available for the PS2?
Yes, there is no way Halo could have done as well on the Xbox if it had shipped on other [amazon.com] platforms [amazon.com] too.
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You do realize that the PC and Mac versions were released about 2 years after the XBox version, right?
Re:Clarification: (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the company with the most invested in this? Valve has made some AAA games over the years that most gamers have played, and if they announced Half-Life 3 as an exclusive for Steam OS, you can bet that Steam OS would suddenly see an uptick in users. Not to mention if they followed that up with Portal 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, etc. x3.
Hell, they could really confuse everyone by launching Dota 3 while they're at it.
Create a repository. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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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.
Like Steam for Linux?
Or even better roll out a distro with your game thats a clone of Fedora or Debian + the above with your own binary repo.
Like the Steam Box OS?
Wtf? Halo was a launch title. (Score:2)
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Hypothetically, the Xbox wouldn't have sold well without Halo, which was hyped to the stratosphere.
Cross device integration (Score:2)
What we need is some serious effort into platform integration between desktop, tablet and cellphone. Apple offers, Microsoft wants to offer it. Why don't we have it with Linux/Android?
If not already, this kind of seamless integrations between their devices is something people will require soon and, unless you think android is going to take over on the desktop, Linux developers might want to get cracking here, otherwise Linux might soon start losing all the ground it conquered.
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What we need is some serious effort into platform integration between desktop, tablet and cellphone. Apple offers, Microsoft wants to offer it. Why don't we have it with Linux/Android?
I guess you missed that whole Ubuntu Phone thing, huh?
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Even without that, Linux plays very nicely with Android phones. You can set up all sorts of integration between them. Yes, there's Ubuntu phone, and KDE Plasma is also designed for small screens, but personally, I don't really want the same interface on both. I want to be able to choose the interface I want on each environment and still have them communicate without limitations.
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I want to be able to choose the interface I want on each environment and still have them communicate without limitations.
Damnit! Where is the "Like" button?
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What we need is some serious effort into platform integration between desktop, tablet and cellphone. Apple offers, Microsoft wants to offer it. Why don't we have it with Linux/Android?
I guess you missed that whole Ubuntu Phone thing, huh?
Oh, I guess I did miss it hitting the shops and getting widespread acceptance and vendor support.
Sorry, my bad.
And (Score:2, Interesting)
Given the overwhelming power of developing on Linux compared to Windows or Macs (Linux is so far ahead of both it's not even a contest) once developers move to the new platform, they'll never go back.
It took 20 years, but Linux won. Face it. It's just better technology.
Just one game? (Score:2, Insightful)
Eh? Is there a precedent for that statement?
With each new game console that comes out, there needs to be a whole ecosystem to go along with it. Name me any game platform that took off because of one good game?
In a parallel example, what would you say to "Windows Phone would have taken off if it had one really good at in the app store." ?
Put another way, how good would a game have to be for an average user to want to reformat their hard drive?
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Re:Just one game? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Wii Sports qualifies. Certainly many bought a WII for that game alone
Re: (Score:2)
There's no game that would cause me to format my hard drive and wipe out the applications that have already led me to install Windows.
Linux users have been dual booting to play games for years. Turnabout would actually be kind of amusing! :)
Re:Just one game? (Score:4, Informative)
Steam OS on multiple hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
About the only thing I can see is Steam OS becoming a hardware target for "white box" makers. Microsoft is back to an x86 console, so how will they keep game devs on the console and not just Windows? At some point they will lock up and cripple Windows... Again... To push everybody to console.
Enter SteamOS based on Linux. If they make it play nice with Ubuntu or Mint Linux they could grab the "power gamer" market and those people can just use Linux for their "homework". Even then Steam is already looking to be a target for APPS on windows and Mac so that might fix the missing multimedia stuff people bellyache about.
Funny thing to say. (Score:2, Funny)
Creative directory (Score:2)
Really timoth?
Re: (Score:2)
Really timoth?
You must be new here...
Kerbal Space Program (Score:2)
Is coded in .NET and runs on mono. I'm playing it on Linux right now. True, a little geeky but it'll happen.
The problem is though that Halo, Gears of War, God of War, etc are all produced under exclusivity licenses. No linux game developer is willing to be exclusively Linux. Maybe Valve will start doing it now that they have a Steam box, but the allure of the major established markets will be hard to pass up.
The problem with that is... (Score:2)
Let's say I'm marketing a game to the general public. For the purpose of this argument, it doesn't matter whether or not the game is commercial or noncommercial, and it doesn't matter whether the game is libre or proprietary, because these things basically hold true regardless.
Linux is based on open standards. Generally speaking, if you write a game for Linux, porting it to Windows and Macintosh is relatively easy. If your plan is to *sell* your game, you probably want to offer it to as many potential cu
Unportable killer game (Score:3)
Re:Unportable killer game (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
HL3 & BF5! (Score:2)
DICE's BF Director = BF5
SteamOS = HL3, Portal 3, and TF3 like The Orange Box (The Penguin Box?). ;)
One or two good games can certainly make a change (Score:3)
One or two Good Game can certainly make a difference
One decent game would get me into Linux; I dual boot Win7 and Mint, but only visit Mint, I don't really
use it as there's nothing "special" I use it for.
Doom took me from the Amiga and to the PC, as did Quake II (made for my video card (3DFX drivers)) graphics were incredible.
Installed Win3.1, the easy networking and abundance of programs shelved the Amiga.
I have Portal 2 I can play from Mint but have played it on the PC already, and it's not as good as the first.
Guess the cake was my carrot and an out right lie.
The Games I've found for Mint are Civilization types, build this then you can build that; but those can
impede your progress or even stop you if not taken care of.
I tried Red hat in the 1990's bought the book and CD. The Red hat disk partition tool was so confusing
I quit at the very start. If the instructions had just said "or you can just use FDISK" things would be much different now.
I'm a new linux user that used Unix commands to get around on old shell accounts. So have a leg up;
but still trying to get know to the command line while Linux is swaying folks to the GUI.
Then there's the flavor of Linux I started with Ubuntu as it was very popular at the time, the Live CD
didn't work so stopped there. Another serious approach was Mint as Ubuntu was sending search
query's to third parties - and where I'm at now. Just that I have no reason to use Mint, at the moment
I play Battle Field 3 all the time - a very enjoyable game for me for close to two years now.
Steam broke my linux system (Score:2)
I tried installing steam on my kubuntu system, but it wouldn't play any games, it said something about needing the latest opengl version, and to do that I needed the latest graphics drivers.. So i went to download the latest graphics drivers from ATI, only it didn't work and I ended up with a laptop that did not boot. After hours trying to find a solution, I left it and did a reinstall. Life is just too short, and I don't have time for this shit. Fortunately my home area was left intact after the reinstall.
Re: (Score:2)
This is probably Linux's biggest hangup for desktop acceptance at the moment.
The video drivers are fucking terrible.
Hello Half-Life 3 (Score:2)
HL3 would either prove or disprove this theory.
Fine. I guess it's 1994, then. (Score:2)
It's March 14, 1994, and Nethack works just fine on Linux 1.0. Colossal Cave Adventure, too. They both make modern games look like shit.
I agree, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
And before i start on the reasoning - I'm talking about Linux gaming "exploding". I agree that it will get more games, but it is likely to be a secondary platform for a long, long time.
The reason, is that the one "killer" game needs to be a platform exclusive. And to be something to encourage people to switch, it will need to be AAA. To be AAA means big art, music and programming effects budgets.
And NO ONE is going to be spending that sort of money on a Linux exclusive game before the market exists.
It's possible that it could have happened a few years back, as a self-booting DVD or similar, but I think the boat has been missed - optical media is dead/dying and to get online to stream it that way you need an OS installed.
So no, given the above I don't think the Linux gaming market will "explode". You'll likely see it grow slowly as people install SteamOS rather than windows if/when the AAA games start getting ported to it. The steam box will help that, as previously there's been no reason for people to not just run games on the copy of windows that came with their PC. If valve push the steam box hard enough, people will be buying hardware which never had windows on it, saving a windows license and there will be an actual reason to run Linux for gaming on it.
I'm really keen to see it happen though, the only reason I'm running a copy of Windows at home at all now is for games. My laptop is a Mac, my NAS is FreeNAS. My desktop i just recently built (i5-4430, GT760) just runs win8 as a steam bootloader, effectively.
Is it really about the OS anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
What it boils down to is simple, OS wars are dead. There's more than just Microsoft now. I personally prefer Windows 8 because it's faster than anything I've ever used before and it has less obvious bugs than the other platforms. Other people like Mac, others Linux, others Chrome (which is more of a Java platform than a Linux platform).
I think it's about time to consider that 99% of game development has moved into a new era of platform independent game engines. Using Unreal Engine, Unigine Game Engine, Unity3D and others you write the game once and tweak the controls for a dozen different platforms from phones to XBox/PS to Linux. Companies who code their own game engines and want to reinvent the wheel can do so if they want, but honestly, it's not so interesting. These days, if a game system developer really wants their platform to take off, they can make agreements with the platform system company and pay for the port or do it themselves.
Take a look at Microsoft. No one wanted to port to the Metro platform and Microsoft basically made it happen by working with the game engine companies. Now all the game vendors need to do is simply generate a new executable and tweak the controls.
If Valve wants support for SteamOS, the answer is simple, port the game engines. But I have no interest in games locked into a platform. I stopped buying consoles because I don't need a special machine for games anymore. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, etc... are all powerful enough to play the best of them. Game consoles were only interesting when porting to a platform meant an endless amount of problems with hardware incompatibility. We don't do it anymore. These days, the game engines do the work for us. Content developers can produce awesome games without worrying about AMD vs. Pentium or nVidia vs. Intel vs. AMD. Hell, they don't even have to think much about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux. They can develop games and simply deploy them.
SteamOS seems interesting, but I want one device for everything. I use a Surface Pro at the moment. Surface Pro 2 later this month. It's a laptop, a tablet, a video player, an ebook reader and a game system. Would I like better graphics? Yep... but Pro 2 has better graphics. And the graphics on the Surface Pro 2 are good enough that it's now more about game content than graphics quality. I carry an XBox controller in my backpack so I can play Sonic Racing or Lara Croft on airplanes.
It'll be pretty cool though if Valve makes it so I can buy a game and play it on SteamBox or my Surface without buying a second copy.
Porting always happens. (Score:3)
The problem is of course any game that becomes popular on Linux will be ported to other platforms like Xbox,PS3 and Windows. So that immediately kills that idea.
Re:Are linux users willing to pay money? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
However, it is now Must Accuire iShiny!
Re:Linux needs a killer game? (Score:5, Informative)
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.