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.
It's called the "I'll take two" syndrome. (Score:3, Interesting)
At All.
We've all seen this happen at least one time.
It's not just a one-time cost... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not as simple as "just recompile it for Linux, duh". Every time I see someone scream for some MMORPG to release 'the Linux client we know you have', they always forget to include the recurring dev cycle costs.
If the cost to make it + the cost to maintain it > the additional revenue it brings in... then it doesn't get made.
Re:cost of porting (Score:3, Interesting)
Even then, I'd bet companies that are interested in porting their games have their sights set on consoles that are a much bigger market than on alternate OSs, specially in a market as competitive as games where the window to make money off a product is so small, and even one big failure can be enough to doom an entire company. I guess the only big chance to really get gaming companies to notice alternate OSs regularly is to actually get more people using them... which leaves us in the perpetual catch 22, since gamers aren't really willing to use linux only unless there are more games for it.
I'm cheap and love GPL (Score:1, Interesting)
Gaming on Linux is crossing a line, but nobody is noticing it. Its not cutting edge gaming, but it falls under *good enough*. Projects like ioquake3 are moving the better quake3 mods to linux like "World of Padman";"Western Quake 3"; and the fantastic "Tremulous". Open source projects like "Cube 2"; "Battle of Wesnoth"; "Glest" get better every day. As well as Linux franchises really hitting there stride with "Frozen Bubble 2"; "Planet Penguin Racer"; "Eternal Lands" All this for Completely Free and good enough for the occasional game.
For commercial gaming *in my stocking this year" and at bargain prices...I know because I bought just them. Quake 3 Gold - £9.99 Doom 3 - £9.99 Quake 4 Special Edition - £9.99 Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil Expansion - £2.99 Return to Castle Wolfenstein - £8.45 Unreal Anthology £12.99 ...and I know that these have enough MODS and other Addons to keep me busy for years literally. I will not appear any statistic because I bought the windows version.
What is clear is that the Linux gaming for a part time gamer is very healthy, and Linux gaming is cheap.
My belief is that Linux gamers will not buy cutting edge games at premium prices, and definitely not buy last years games at them...but we will buy *good* games regardless of release date for a *good* price.
1000 games is a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
The 1000 number for OS X is a joke though. Seriously, Any decent game should sell more than 1000 copies on the Mac. There are far too many Macs in use in homes for a GOOD game to not sell reasonably well. The Mac has issues.. it's rare to see them with really good video systems. The recent Intel machines have solid offerings but they aren't fantastic ( Elder Scrolls would play like crap on a stock iMac with underclocked X1600 video). I have, however, played Battlefield 2 at native rez with decent settings on a 1st gen Intel 17" iMac and it ran great. It beat the hell out of my Athlon X2 3800 w/ AGP Nvidia 6600GT. The current iMacs are much nicer too.
The bigger problem, as I see it, is that the gaming industry is in a lull. I don't see any really compelling titles. I love WW2 era FPShooters but the Genre has been played out to death. The Battlefield series has been solid but every new version is just a new veneer on the same game. To me and my friends, EQ and WWC MassivelyMulitPlayer games are played out. The frustration of dumping time into them has long since outweighted the enjoyment (I never did try World of WarCraft.. I got burned out before that).
Really, I walk through the gaming isle at Frys and nothing excites me and I've been looking to have another lan party. There's literally dozens of FPS War games but none stand out and I'm not going to try them all so I can tell people to buy one just for a night at my house.
The other problem is crappy coding though this is more minor issue. If the developer houses wrote tighter code, there'd be a larger range of medoicre machines that could run that code. Remember when the big guns were Doom3 vs. HalfLife2.. HalfLife2, to me, looked every bit as good overall and it ran MUCH better on less than cutting edge hardware. Doom3 was the killer benchmark for a while and the lighting system does look nice but the HL2 engine looks great and I really enjoyed the game (more so than the 'turn the corner and shoot' story line of Doom3). IMHO, HL2 is a superior game because the sum of the whole package is superior [visuals, story, environment, gameplay..]. The impressive thing is, Valve pulled this off without forcing everyone to run out and drop $500 on upgrades. If Valve, for instance, started supporting OS X, I'm sure they'd be able to run on a pretty large Mac installed base. Everything over the Mini should run HL2 fantastically. [other noteable crap-tastic games I'd never buy for a Mac.. BF Vietnam.. which crippled my Radeon9800Pro back in 2003, EQ (HORRIBLE CODING) and even EQ2 which seemed un-reasonably slow on decent PC hardware)
If we had good, compelling games.. I'd guarantee that a port of a GOOD game to OS X would sell a hell of a lot more than 1000 copies with annual sales of Millions of computers and poor enterprise market penetration (most macs go home or at least into EDU markets).
Re:do the math (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:do the math (Score:4, Interesting)
1. A selection of FOSS high performance game engines (for small games that need high triangle counts, an engine for high performance and lower triangle counts, and an engine for maximum network performance - very low triangle counts or other tricks to maximize FPS and network throughput) - designed to work on multiple platforms (linux, windows, et al). If these game engines are the best of breed, they will be used by the game development community.
2. A DirectX to SDL translator to lower the cost of entry into the Linux market for the 99% of development shops that develop for Windows - and have a huge investment there.
These two things would do much toward bringing popular Windows games to Linux.