Slashdot Log In
Pushing Linux Adoption Through Gaming
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 02, 2009 12:05 AM
from the year-of-games-on-the-linuxtop dept.
from the year-of-games-on-the-linuxtop dept.
An article on CNet questions the viability of using games as part of a strategy to increase Linux adoption. It points out a blog post by Andrew Min which suggests:
"... Linux companies also need to start paying attention to the open source gaming community. Why? It's lacking. However, gamers can get excited about free games. They just have to be up to par with commercial games. The problem is, commercial companies pay hundreds of employees to build a game for several years, while many competing gaming projects only last several years before the developer moves on. It's time for open source developers to start getting paid for their jobs. Who better to pay them than the companies that benefit most?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Who better than who benefits the most? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't the people who benefit the most be gamers themselves?
Re:Who better than who benefits the most? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Paying the OS Game Developers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Paying the OS Game Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reason this won't work is that older games tend to be ported. Gamers want the newest out there in general. Also, Open Source just won't be able to keep up with the billions of dollars spent on this industry.
But we shouldn't have to. A lot of casual gaming is moving to flash. Linux can run flash. ALL the recent games I like are on flash (no, I have a Windows install too, it's not because it's the only game in town for me): for instance games like http://www.playauditorium.com/ [playauditorium.com]Play Auditorium and the http://rocksolidarcade.com/ [rocksolidarcade.com]Rock Solid Arcade games in general.
In my experience, the easiest to convert were the casual computer users (99% browsing activity). It would seem to me, that the casual gamers, which the Wii tapped into completely, is a larger market and one easier to bring over. Flash already works! No work to be done!
Sticking money into this area, other than a common toolkit/API to run games would be folly. Trying to win hardcore gamers whose current platform gives them practically everything.
If Linux need to get popular as fast as possible, perfect Wine a lot. Have it run Direct X whatever out of the box as well as the top games and top windows apps. Before long, a self-feeding cycle will have started where requirements will start listing Windows XP, Vista, or Wine 1.x. Then companies too, eyeing the lower TCO, will start switching, and perhaps native apps start taking off.
Parent
Re:Paying the OS Game Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
Really the money needs to go into the open APIs that are needed for gaming. OpenGL used to be the best API to use for graphics in games, now almost everyone is using DirectX.
I would love nothing better than to be able to run games natively in Linux, and have an option to strip the system down to the bare essentials to run a game, rather than having the ever-bloating Windows OS taking resources from my games.
Of course, as pointed out below, art is a major expense in game development, and getting artists to do a lot of work for a game, for free, is nearly impossible.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Too many people forget that if its not Microsoft its not DirectX/Direct3D.
OpenGL runs on the following platforms:
Apple - OSX
Sole 3D API of the PS3
Same for the Nintendo Wii
Google Android
Linux and other *NIX OS
Its also very competitive with D3D and is just as feature rich. Many people have the misconception that its more difficult to work with when in fact it is not. My brother has a degree in game development which pretty much means a CD degree in game development. He is writing his own turn based strategy e
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe this is an example where FOSS just work. Instead of FOSS games what they need to think about are games that run under Linux.
I still think what Linux needs is an iTunes/iTunes Store like system.
Think of it as synaptic with a good interface and an option to pay for software.
Let people write games and other software and publish in the store for free or for pay. I have a lot of free as in beer apps on my Touch.
There is room under the sun for both Frozen Bubble and Popcap games.
Open Source Games... (Score:5, Insightful)
Require Open Source Artists. Art assets are very important to games and most programmer art just doesn't cut it.
That's the real challenge, because while many coders will happily knock up a game engine for their own amusement, handling stuff like artistic direction to get a consistent "look" and generating inane brick textures is not something that many people do for "amusement". Of course, that could change if people got passionate about it, but it's much easier to focus as an artist when working on something like a Source Engine mod, where a lot of the inane brick textures already exist and you can concentrate on building cool character models (etc).
Re:Open Source Games... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it would be easier if FOSS game developers generally worked with a common toolkit. For example, if most developers and artists used Blender for a decent part of the games' development, then those models and textures would be easily reused or modified by others also using Blender. Engines are similar.
The real problem is that gaming is too proprietary. Once most of the engines, textures, sounds, and models necessary are made, creating a game will be much easier.
Parent
Re:Open Source Games... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or as an alternative, working on a commercial game and releasing the engine code as Open Source (like id software does).
You don't actually need the games to be completely free to users. But if the code is available for Open Source developers to port to Linux with the existing art (that costs money), then Linux still gets a boost. Of course, porting a Direct X game to OpenGL is a pain in the behind that is going to make the release lag a little.
But a lot of people here only claim to have Windows installed to play games.
Parent
Re:Open Source Games... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, nowadays there's less and less proprietary code in games. Everybody's licensing Havok's physics engine, for example. That's code that would either need to be released by the developer as open source (ha ha--when they make their money from selling the stuff, no way in hell will they give it away), or replaced wholesale (which is likely to not be as good, and would, at least in the case of gameplay-affecting physics, bork any hope of crossplatform multiplayer).
That also completely ignores the unlikelihood that any multiplayer code will be released, for fear of exposing vulnerabilities. Rather than dealing with paying to fix them, publishers would rather hide the code and hope that it works.
Parent
Myst Online will be Open Sourced (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a start [mystonline.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just because Havok costs money don't make the mistake on it being the best.
There are numerous physics engines out there that are much better which are open source.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just because Havok costs money don't make the mistake on it being the best.
There are numerous physics engines out there that are much better which are open source.
Can you give examples please? I know of a few like ODE [ode.org], which has been used in commercial games [wikipedia cite [wikipedia.org]], and Tokamak Physics [tokamakphysics.com] whose demos I've played with.
Perhaps someone like you who has experience/knowledge in this area can give some better examples than those, or even why you think they are better.
I wouldn't know!
Re:Open Source Games... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Starting an engine is easy and there are tons of them out already, getting it into a stage where it is usable for an actually half decent game is a completly different matter on the other side. Most engines out there are lacking a lot of very basic stuff, you sure can import some very basic 3d model into them, but if you ever try to import a more complex one with animation, multiple layers of texture and stuff you are pretty much out of luck, because there is no art pipeline in place to convert the stuff yo
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WFT?
What do Linux filesystems have to do with gaming?
Besides, you can access just about every filesystem that exists with Linux, which is more than you can say with Windows.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I feel that Linux's file system is even more of a sewer as the Windows file system, and until it takes a major jump up... perhaps it doesn't deserve to be everyone's desktop.
What do Linux filesystems have to do with gaming?
I believe GP is talking about the linux file structure (/usr, /etc, ...).
Pretty much what I had to assume to make any sense of it. Especially since there are multiple file systems. I prefer ReiserFS! I don't care that there is little doubt that he had killed his wife... the filesystem is still, to use the words of Peter Griffin, "Freakin' sweet". After all, I accept as a fundamental part of my world view that products of a person's life are not all interconnected. A murderer doesn't _just_ murder. He does other stuff... and if he did a much better job at the other stuff, t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Have a look at taspring (http://spring.clan-sy.com), that's a great open source game with a huge amount of user contributed mods and maps.
Making windows users jealous isn't going to work, because open source games will inevitably be ported sooner or later anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You hit the nail on the head, sir. It is not uncommon to see tons of artists and designers, but only 5 programmers in a commercial game development team.
I wonder though if one successful open source game - not just a quake3 mod, but an entire game including top-notch design and custom-made game art - would kickstart a wave of similar projects. At the very least, it would serve as an example how it can succeed.
Re:Open Source Games... (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't help that most artists are ridiculously greedy, pretentious, silly and overestimate the worth of their (usually) mediocre work... and as a consequence won't even consider releasing any of their precious efforts for free use.
Some coders are like that too... but less so. Coders tend to come from more of a science background.
Parent
Late to the Party (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me see if I've got this straight: PC gaming was a huge market during the 90's and first half of the 2000's. In the past few years, the PC market has been on the decline, propped up only by the massive MMORPG sales. Now in 2009, a year by which there are three incredible consoles on the market that easily make 80%+ of PC gaming irrelevant, we hear a call to action for more Linux games?
Um, sure. I'll get right on that.
Do they? There was a time when that was certainly true. A lot of the remaining PC gamers I've seen purchase overpriced Alienware hardware and refer to it as their "rig". No offense to the remaining serious gamers who build their own PCs, but the incredible market power that used to be behind PC Gaming simply isn't there anymore. Look elsewhere for your coup de grace.
Re:Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument for OSS replacement of this or that program is starting to be less and less. There's tons of programs out there now that can replace proprietary programs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not so fast. Gaming on Linux doesn't have to be on the PC. The PS3 runs Linux well. It has decent hardware for gaming purposes already built in. If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux. Now you've developed for two platforms at the same time.
What we need is very real and very serious (possibly commercial) support of Linux on at least one game console to make this work. Once game devs see that the
Re:Late to the Party (Score:4, Informative)
And now that the PS3 browser has Flash 9, you can make Flash games on the PS3 and tell everyone they work on the computer as well!
Except for the minor issue of: WHY?
Using the Flash games example, there was a push to make flash gaming happen on the Wii simply because of the Wii's more interesting control scheme. First developers tried to understand mouse motions in a way that would evoke a new experience with the Wii remote. Then they managed to get a hold of development information to target the motion and multiplayer capabilities of the remote. So there was a valid reason to target the system. Despite the superior flash support of the PS3, no one is falling over themselves to create a "PS3Cade" because there is no special access to the hardware. You simply hook up a keyboard/mouse and use it like a PC.
Besides that, there's the issue that Sony has locked out the GPU on the PS3 specifically so that owners don't use Linux as a cheap development platform for PS3 games. Without GPU access, you're going to be limited to more crude games than would normally be possible on a PC. And with web gaming working its way up the low end, there's little room in-between for PS3-targeted games.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
PC gaming has been increasing - not declining. However, the growth rate was slowing/stagnating for a few years there, while at the same time it was going up massively for consoles.
That was partly due to the lackluster games being shoved at us, favouring graphics over gameplay and stability. After all, pushing bleeding edge graphics is the most important factor - who cares if the game crashes every 30-80 mins!
It's also partly due to the expensive Vista/DX10 upgrades required to play new games. Most people re
Re:Late to the Party (Score:4, Informative)
I need citation? The other guy didn't give any.
Go read a report like this one:
http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1911800&g=1 [marketresearch.com]
Or articles like this (more aimed at consoles):
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081223.wgtyearinreview1222/BNStory/PersonalTech/home?cid=al_gam_mostview [theglobeandmail.com]
Or read Gamasutra.
Most of the "doom and gloom" PC game sales figures are for retail outlets, and fail to factor in the tens of millions(?) of sales done online, through services like Steam, Stardock, Direct2Drive, etc.
There's lots of articles out there stating that 2008 was a good year for gaming.
Parent
Re:Late to the Party (Score:5, Insightful)
As a game developer, I'm kind of annoyed how trivializing this is to the development process. A great game can take a team of 200 people 3-5 years to make. Most games are between 3 - 30 million dollars to make, and 80% of them don't make money. That means you need to spend between 15 and 150 million dollars to finally get a game that catches on.
It's not a trivially easy hook to sell systems.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most games are between 3 - 30 million dollars to make, and 80% of them don't make money.
Genuinely "don't make money", or Hollywood-style "don't make money" ?
Re:Late to the Party (Score:4, Insightful)
In terms of game development, commercial tools are still far better than OSS ones (sadly). 3DS Max and Maya, while still junk, are light years better than Blender. Gimp is not as usable or fully featured as Photoshop, especially for toolchains that can directly utilize PSD files. And at 50 dollars an hour or so, there is a huge incentive to get retail developers better tools.
On that last point, the PC community enjoys a thriving modding scene, where great games *are* developed utilizing some of these tools in a community-driven rules free environment. Commercial projects are created in such a way that new scripts or entire new engine modules can be compiled into the game and run, opening up the software *almost* entirely. You're not competing with a straight retail market, but a hybrid one.
The article's proposition of pushing a Linux gaming machine is a bit absurd, and is the sort of thing that companies waste money on all the time not realizing just how insanely difficult it is. To name just a few failed ones: Apple Bandai, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Panasonic 3DO, Philips CDI, Milton Bradley Vectrex, Sega Master System / CD / 32x / Saturn / Dreamcast, Atari 7600 / Lynx / Jaguar, Neo Geo CD / Pocket, Pioneer Laseractive, Amiga CD 32, Casio Loopy, Tiger Game.com / Gizmondon, Nokia N-Gage, VM Labs Nuon, Tapwave Zodiac, Bandai's WonderSwan / SwanCrystal, and a host of edutainment consoles all on clearance at Marshalls. Heck, the idea of a dedicated linux gaming machine was tested by Indrema's L600, which was never released due to intense competitive pressure from the other consoles on the market. The GP2x game system runs on embedded Linux, as does OpenPandora, and occupies a tiny niche segment. Sony has been great about releasing Linux on their consoles, none of which have really gone places. If you want to break into the market, commit yourself to two generations of systems and a minimum expenditure of 800 million dollars (2x 100 ml development, 100 ml marketing, 100 ml manufacturing / distribution setup, 100 ml eating costs on the first units sold / other issues).
If you want to capture desktop market share: fix the glaringly obvious usability problems with Gnome/GnuLinux, pour some effort into a sane file system with only necessary components exposed to users, and remove technical aspects wherever they user doesn't need to see them (like -rwxr-xr-x file permissions). These are not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but at least your development dollars are going at the primary problems with the Linux desktop, rather than propping up Loki as a savior.
Linux is a world-class platform for servers, a halfway descent desktop, and a kind of crappy gaming machine. Pushing it as a proper gaming machine is an incredibly expensive way to not play to it's strengths, and wine compatibility (which the article does not focus on) can never surpass the target platform.
Parent
What a bunch of wank (Score:3, Interesting)
What has actually been observed to increase adoption (citation needed) is fancy crap like wobbly windows and spinning cube desktops.
Maybe collectively the companies could make a "content light" face booking, im-ing spinning flashing version of linux and attempt to lock up the teen market, i think you might find that would be of more interest to more people than the marginally smaller "hardcore pc gaming" crowd.
Personally i don't really care.
Is Desktop gaming healthy enough? (Score:2)
The only way I see this working is to somehow use the openness of a Linux console as an advantage. It's like having a gaming PC, without the disadvantages of a PC (viruses/maintenance), and with all the advantages of a console (couch/controller/TV vs monitor/keyboard/mouse).
But even as a hypothetical, I can't really come up with a good example. Maybe an extensive modding community? Maybe an easy way to do this with a laptop?
Demographics. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am 35. I got my first computer a Commodore64 around 1984. 1986 I first started connecting to BBS's and then to run my own BBS. I _was_ a hard-core gamer.
Now I play flash-games, or classics in a Dosbox window. Sorry but Linux gaming missed it's mark by being 15 years too late to the table. Don't get me wrong, I still occasionally play Enemy Territory, Padman, and other 'popular' games, but the kids today don't care. Not like we used to care. I am likely to hear BOOM-HEADSHOT! yelled across the LAN party these days as we would yell "I'M IN!!!" when 'searching' for a virgin ftp server to use as dump sites back in the day.
A little bit more complicated. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them, and I remember just about every version ever Windows breaking games that ran just fine either on DOS or older, lighter-weigh versions of Windows.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
So one big thing that needs to be overcome is how to optimize Linux so it's actually better for gaming than Windows or Mac. Do you strip it down and get rid of stuff games don't need, come out with a gaming-specific distro? Or do you work on making the internals as fast as possible in ways that matter to games? Or something else entirely?
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
The issue of artists someone pointed out is the other big issue. You need to motivate the artists. And - especially if you want them to work for free - you need to give them something really compelling. That means something OSS that's better than what they have now. Something that beats DirectX, beats OpenGL, or whatever. I don't know whether adding OpenCL support like Apple is doing will help - that seems more aimed at offloading processing tasks to the GPU, not offloading graphics tasks to spare CPU cores.
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I honestly don't see it happening, though. :(
Re:A little bit more complicated. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to detract from your point, but you have a rather rosy recollection of DOS, my friend! ;-)
The way I remember it, the first step for every new game I got was to spend a half-hour working out a custom boot-disk that provided enough low-mem while loading all the drivers required by the game. After which I'd throw the disk in the box for the game so that I was only a reboot away from playing the game. God, what a pain in the arse that was! :-P
Honestly, it's the chicken and the egg problem. No game developer is going to spend the money to make Linux a first-class release unless there's a significant user base. And I imagine their market research currently tells them that the Mac is a better prospect than the Linux community.
In short, it's not a technological problem. It's a business problem. And the greater Linux community is not a business. It does not react to the nuances of the market, but rather provides an OS that appeals primarily to its user-base of developers and contributors. :-)
Parent
Re:A little bit more complicated. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a bit young to have first-hand experience writing DOS games, but I've talked with a few people who have. Writing DOS games was a pain because you had to write your own drivers for everything. That's why older installers card whether you had an SB16 or a Roland something-or-other or Disney's craptacular card - DOS provided no support.
Programming drivers is hard; most people bought a driver package from someone to include with their game. That drove up the cost of games somewhat.
Complete hardware independence is why DirectX - software pipeline takes over if they *don't* have a SB16, rather than crashing back to a command prompt.
Besides, Windows generally does a good enough job of not "running things in the background" during a game. DirectX locks your graphics card and your sound card; your game has exclusive control over that. If you check your performance logs, you generally won't find much CPU% being gobbled up your non-game process.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles
GTFO v.v
Parent
Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Lame, lame, lame (Score:3)
This is too pathetic for words.
Walmart.com will gladly sell you a HP Pavilion Slimline [walmart.com]
Quad Core AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 Bit Vista Premium, NVIDIA DX 10 graphics, a 640 GB HDD, an HDTV tuner and the combo Blu-Ray drive and DVD Burner for $1K.
Monitor extra.
The truth of it is that Walmart has never been able to sell OEM Linux at a significant discount.
Though every now and again the big W will unload a few carloads of junk it picked up on the cheap on the ever-so-naive and hopeful Linux Geek.
Linux distributions need to start sponsoring companies like the old Loki Software. Companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell would do well to sponsor some of that work.
The port is what you get when you are the PS3. The original big-budget production is for the Wii and the XBox 360. The port simply keeps you in the game. It is not the winning hand.
The commercial Linux distros are shamelessly enterprise oriented. There is no intelligible reason for Novell or Red Hat to go into the high risk, high stakes, game business.
What is the problem? Please get a move on. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of gamers who are pretty smart, and ready to make content using modeling and content creation tools, (www.racer.nl - huge libraries of fan-made performance cars and stuff imported from other games). Gamers are highly conditioned to not paying money for games... and ready to bit torrent anything they want at the drop of a hat. So I think all the ingredients for a OSS gaming revolution is there. What we need is a few killer projects to get things going. The few OSS games now aren't very good - they pale in comparison to some excellent indie games out there.
Wrong. In very many ways. (Score:5, Insightful)
The GP Metaarticle is wrong.
1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.
2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.
3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blender [blender.org] team [yofrankie.org] for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.
And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.
And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).
Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.
Bottom line: ... (I can't believe I just said that.)
If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too.
I think the article may be onto something. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think it's quite got it, though.
Proverbially, the path to wide adoption starts with a killer app and proceeds through early adopters. However a killer app in this situation is a bit of a catch 22. The kind of massive games that take hundreds of man years of art work and coding take investment, and investment is attracted by installed base. I suppose we can use Linux as a counterexample to this idea, but I think Linux is a special case for several reasons. First the basic kernel was not a huge engineering task. Second, the stuff that went around it was already largely done. Third, Linux is a platform and there are a lot of companies interested in not being beholden to a single monopolist for their livelihood.
There are lots of games on Linux, and the best ones aren't very complex, they're just fun to play. And that's the catch 22. A simple game is readily cloned to Windows. Think about Tetris in its many manifestations. It's a fun game, but simple enough to be given as a student programming assignment. On the other hand, really complex games take investment for very little guarantee that you'll get a winner.
I think, however, there is a paradigm, which is the Wii. Wii Sports isn't a terribly complicated game; if it were a killer app then it could readily be cloned on other platforms. However, with Wii sports and the Wii, you had an affordably priced killer bundle.
So, what I'm thinking of is a netbook, with good battery life and fast boot time. The idea is that you'd be to take it out at more or less any time and within thirty seconds to a minute be playing a simple but addictive game. Where the article goes wrong is this: success won't come from exploiting the early adopters willingness to try something different, although that is part of the formula. Success will come from pricing the package affordably enough for an impulse purchase, without making any part of the system seem cheesy. The Wii is well and innovatively designed without necessarily being cutting edge technologically. Buyers get something new and well made at a pretty much no-brainer price for the amount of pleasure they anticipate getting from it.
We're pretty close, I think, to being able to put together that killer package. The EeePC is now sellign in its 512MB version for as little as $219. That's getting into handheld console territory. For a bit more than a hundred more, you can get a netbook with a GB of RAM and a 1024 x 600 display. This tells me the technology is there for the killer package, especially if the battery issues can be resolved. All that's needed is an app that is addictive, from which a $300 machine can get you your fix in under a minute.
Re:The way I see it... (Score:5, Informative)
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
Ok, now that that's out of my system... your statement is completely and utterly incorrect. Memory usage is generally not a major factor in performance unless the system becomes memory constrained. In that case a system that is not starving for memory will absolutely outperform a system which is not. But in today's world of 2GB+ systems, explorer.exe is not exactly the biggest memory hog. (Try your web browser for a good start.) Video games often worry more about the space available in the GPU's memory than the amount of main memory available.
Secondly, the vast majority of Linux users are going to launch their game via their favorite desktop environment. Since the feature-rich KDE and GNOME desktops are the most popular, there's a good chance that their Linux-based desktops are eating just as much if not more memory than Windows XP's explorer.exe. But no one is really concerned about that on today's multi-GB systems, so I recommend you either not worry about it or run something slimmer like XFCE.
Thirdly, am I the only one who remembers the late 90's where much of the Linux community took it for granted that Linux was faster than Windows? That is, until benchmarks came out in '99 that showed that Windows had a significant performance advantage, especially in I/O heavy areas such as web serving. The news did result in a newfound focus to make Linux highly competitive, but it seems to me sir that your post needlessly repeats history.
Learn from history, least you repeat it. ;-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The way one plays windows games via Wine is to create a separate account with X that only spawns an xterm. One gets better performance than Windows does, doing this way.
Perhaps one could load a 2d Windows platformer via Gnome or KDE, but it'd probably be slow. oh well.
Re:The way I see it... (Score:4, Interesting)
I honestly don't know what you're smoking. I submit the following example:
Running World of Warcraft + Firefox (and system monitor) in Vista = 15 frames per second, over 2gb RAM usage
same hardware, ... WoW for x86 isnt really meant to run in OpenGL mode, and like I said, under WINE, and I'm getting four TIMES the performance?
WoW (under WINE, no less) + Firefox (and system monitors) in (a fresh install, no tweaking) of Ubuntu = 60 frames per second, only 700MB total RAM usage.
J
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The way I see it... (Score:4, Informative)
> Linux would be great for gaming, since the OS itself uses so little memory, it means there's a good chance that games are going to run faster than on Windows (XP) with explorer.exe taking up a large chunk of memory.
Linux is terrible for gaming; the driver support makes Vista look like heaven. As a result, assuming you can even get drivers for your card, and you can get them to run with the distro you use, and you can get the accelerated mode to work, they're still probably going to be slower than the Windows drivers.
Parent