More Bioware For Linux? 287
GNious writes "Bioware has a thread about porting the upcoming game Dragon Age to Apple Mac OS X and/or Linux. Debate include such topics as porting houses, physics engines and the value of the market, with an enormous amount of requests for such games as Neverwinter Nights 2. With the potential for selling upwards of 1000 copies (counting individual requests) of a game at possibly $50 each, is the decision to exclude a platform and the associated revenue the correct one, or are the petitioners the ones that have gotten it wrong to think that their ca 1-5% marketshare matters?" I think the unfortunante reality is that in today's gaming market, you find that fewer people are willing to take a chance on the sales for these smaller markets -- too hard to predict revenue, and too hard to (some would say) to do the porting.
Not enough follow through. (Score:5, Insightful)
do the math (Score:5, Insightful)
porting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:do the math (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure you wouldn't want to specifically port a project when 50k is on the line, but if it takes half a day to sort out dependencies and linking then your 50k is looking better and better.
Need to popularize Linux as an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how the market works. The fewer people willing to buy something, the less they'll be willing to invest in porting it. If you really want to help get these games ported, work to increase Linux's market share. The more people that use it, the more ports you'll see. That's just the way it is.
-Eric
1000 thats it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way I really see any growth in the Linux games market is either an exponential growth in Linux users or companies adopting an open source partnership to allow games to be ported by volunteers.
Re:Replace Linux with any other system (Score:3, Insightful)
In 10 years computers will be (about) 100 times as powerful as they are today and it will be too expensive to create games which really push these systems to their limits. When that happens I expect most game engines will move to be programmed in Java (or another interpreted language) in order to improve the portability between Handhelds, Consoles and the PC; once a game is developed in Java (or another interpreted language) it should be reasonably easy to port it to Linux/Mac.
Re:Not enough follow through. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:do the math (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:do the math (Score:3, Insightful)
If you plan ahead and use OpenGL and OpenAL it shouldn't be too costly to port a game (probably only a month or so of work for a couple of developers) but until there are much better open source libraries (beyond OpenGL and OpenAL) you will require more than a recompile to get your game to work on Linux.
Re:porting (Score:2, Insightful)
And how, pray, do you do things like sound platform-independently? Synchronised with the picture, even?
Re:Not enough follow through. (Score:1, Insightful)
think there would lots of pent up demand for ANY games on that platform.
In terms of absolute number of sales that's a factor how much it is marketed
I suppose, but you might double your sales?
Why Port (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the unfortunante reality is that in today's gaming market, you find that fewer people are willing to take a chance on the sales for these smaller markets -- too hard to predict revenue, and too hard to (some would say) to do the porting.
The really smart gaming houses that know their titles will be successful (look at Id and Blizzard) also know that coding their titles to be portable is the way to go, even if they don't want to target other platforms. It encourages good coding practices and makes a better program. Most of them rely heavily on OpenGL and do plan to port their games at least to the mac as part of their original strategy. If your game is almost finished and you're just now considering portability and other platforms, you screwed up. You might as well wait till it is out and see how popular it is before going after other platforms.
Some might say the Mac or Linux markets are insignificant, but the truth is a lot of companies make good money from the Mac market. Lets not forget to include consoles as well when considering portability. I've seen some companies cite the practices of MS owned gaming houses as reason not to make games portable, but that is pretty laughable when you consider it. Also, I've seen some people point to horribly botched porting projects as reason to avoid it. Instances where a Linux port came out a year and a half after the Windows version, was buggy, was a game that required a community, and where the port was more expensive than the Windows version and was more buggy than using the Windows version in WINE. That too is pretty sad.
Coding for portability and aiming at Windows, the mac, and one or more consoles can seriously increase the revenue from a game, but it has to be part of the original game plan and you have to code with that in mind. Porting after the fact can make money, and if you have a very successful title outsourcing the port can make some pretty safe money, but not nearly as much of it. I don't see a reason for any big publisher (not owned by MS) to not target multiple platforms from the outset. Anyone want to bet the MMORPG that topples WoW's supremacy is another simultaneous cross-platfomr release?
For the last time, YES. (Score:2, Insightful)
Loki happens.
"Hi, I'm looking for ShinyGame."
"Oh, here you are. That'll be $9.99."
"No, wait, I want the Linux version."
"Oh, I'm sorry. There you go. That'll be $49.95."
Any serious gamer already has a Windows partition/second drive/second box for gaming. Thus, the Loki concept is bitchslapped by logic: $49.95, for a possibly mediocre port, with untold problems*? Or $9.95, for the same version everyone else is using - with no weird problems?
(* Google. Loki's ports weren't always all they were cracked up to be.)
The choice is obvious for all but the foam-spewing zealot. Despite the best efforts of zealot OS loonies to tell us otherwise, the majority of Linux users aren't zealots, and are thus going to save themselves $40.
So, now we have a weird situation. Games like Quake 3 sold like mad. Hard to tell what OS they're being run on though, eh? Meanwhile, the idea of porting games.. "Hey, remember that one company? They did that, didn't they? Went bankrupt, didn't they?"
The fact of the matter is, yes, it is stupid to consider the Linux market. There is no Linux market - 1000 signatures on a petition isn't a market, it's a bunch of nuts who don't know the cost of developing software for multiple platforms. Unfortunately, that won't change anytime soon. When a game is released for both Linux and Windows, companies don't know what percentage is actually being run on Linux. And the porting idea has been dead for years, thanks in part to Loki. (Naturally, they aren't entirely at fault; after all, they were only porting the games of other companies - I'm sure their hands were tied in pricing.)
I dont understand (Score:2, Insightful)
So, what is the major technology that you can't fairly easily replace with some pseudo-OSS libraries?
And: hahaha. NWN2 banner add while posting this.
Re:Only 1000 copies !? (Score:2, Insightful)
And on what are you basing your 10,000 - 100,000 figure? The fact that you bought a game?
The "Linux Game Market" for any given game is the set of people who are all of the following:
How many people is that really?
The Linux market may be the same size as the Mac market, but the vast majority of Macs are desktop machines owned by individuals. I would bet that the vast majority of Linux systems are not - many of them probably don't even have a GUI running or a monitor or mouse attached.
Re:Replace Linux with any other system (Score:1, Insightful)
Middleware is a lot better than a bytecode language. In fact calling java portable is like saying x86 is portable (sure, you can code an x86 VM, same deal as java). And rather pointless, rapid development is a waste of time, if you can simply reuse code instead. You say java can be used to develop a physics engine in half the time? Well, why would I *want* to code a physics engine myself to begin with? Also, if the middleware was ported, you can be crossplatform, for example developing for SDL+OpenGL covers linux, ms windows and mac osx and probably a couple of consoles.
Re:porting (Score:4, Insightful)
Game programmers aren't stupid. The vast majority will use the library that means:
a) The game is written quickly.
b) The game runs well on the largest range of computers.
I am not a games programmer, but I go to the pub with a lot of them. Using OpenGL over directx means writing a fairly substansal part of your game twice, once using nvidia extensions and once using ATI extensions. For things other than graphics, then you end up with two choices:
a) The library you are using is a wrapper over directx, so you are getting extra bugs / slowdown without significant gain or
b) The library is distinct and usually has bugs with all kinds of very cheap cards many people have (in particular sound).
Unless you can be sure changing libraries isn't going to break your game on less than 2% of windows machines, then making it platform independant is going to reduce the size of your overall market.
Re:cost of porting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:porting (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it costs a lot more to do that than you might think. At a conservative estimate I'd guess that targeting Linux would take at the very least 10% more time. If the development budget for the whole game is $5,000,000, then you'd need to expect that you could make back at least half a million dollars from Linux purchases just to make it break even, let alone worthwhile.
Re:Replace Linux with any other system (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, games have been known to push hardware but at one point in time an office suite was also know for pushing the limits of hardware. If you look at what it costs to produce a XBox 360/PS3/PC game currently, developers can not afford to continue to push the hardware; consider that since the NES there has been a standard 4 times increase in development cost for each generation, games went from costing $5 Million (on average) on the XBox/PS2/Gamecube to $20 Million on the PS3/XBox 360/PC, how many games can cost $80 Million and still turn a profit?
The working formula? (Score:1, Insightful)
Follow through (Score:3, Insightful)
The way I see it, it's Bioware who have a problem with following through.
Re:Not enough follow through. (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet you were successful at it being one anyway!