Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers 131
An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post."
A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.
Duh? (Score:1, Interesting)
Really good news (Score:5, Interesting)
"Windows for gaming" will still be the chant for the next 5+ years I fear, but I have to wonder some... "What If" someone got together with some other somepeople and created a "Linux gaming standard distribution" or something similar to LSB for gaming... something similar to "Wine bottles" but for game installation and playing. This could make Linux gaming SO much easier and more direct. It could ALSO aid in making the games more controllable by the software publishers (I know, no one likes that idea except the software publishers...) but consider that this would make a really nice link between console gaming and PC gaming. If this were to happen and somehow catch on, (yeah I know... fat chance) the new chant would be "Linux for gaming* because it can be faster and better than Windows can.
Are there still people running Windows 9X for their games? Last I saw (years ago) that was the case... makes me want to load up Win9X and then set up XvT and such... Those were some good ole days!
.deb v .rpm (Score:4, Interesting)
That part was most surprising for me - whilst I think .rpm is more of the standard for server based business apps, it appears debia (ie ubuntu) is the predominant platform for clients.
Ok, it doesn't surprise me at all now I've thought it through :)
Re:Really good news (Score:2, Interesting)
After I installed xubuntu recently and tried out Playonlinux, I was shocked to see that all my games were running, and only my graphics drivers were holding me back. I tried downloading the radeon 5830 drivers, and their website's fucked up and they still don't have the download fixed.
Frankly the year of gaming on linux is right now and I may have even missed some of it.
More games work through linux than windows for me!
Remember DOS extenders? (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a time when games came with a "DOS extender" program that allowed the game to use machine resources that weren't available to MS-DOS. It wasn't such a big deal for the software companies to ship that small program together with the game, and it wasn't such a big deal for the user to install it.
Imagine if games came in a live Linux CD-ROM. MS-Windows users could play those games with all the benefits of Linux and Linux users would have a natively compilated game.
Last week I found my original Tomb Raider CD lost in the bottom of a drawer. I tried to install it in XP, without success. I was considering installing windows 98 in an old computer, just to play that game again, when a friend suggested me to run it in a DOS box. I got it installed in DOSemu and it's awesome how well it runs in Ubuntu, with an i5-750 and a 9600 GSO graphics card.
Re:One game? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.
Two manmonths of work is extremely little. Development studios like Inifinity Ward has 60 employees, Telltale Games 70, Bizarre Creations 165, Valve 225, Turbine 300, Bioware 500, Take Two 2000, Blizzard 4600. Some do publishing and other game-related stuff, but still two months is a drop in the ocean compared to the manyears laid down in many games. Even a small increase in sales would pay for much, much more. Enough? Tough to say, depends on how it scales. True this isn't proof but you also brought nothing but a very spurious argument for why it couldn't.
linux game middleware and IDEs (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm currently writing a 3D game for Linux using OpenGL and SDL. In a way those two cover a lot of bases, but there are some glaring holes as well:
* Middleware. DX owns the game middleware market.
* IDEs. I'm using kdevelop, and have looked at Eclipse, but there is no Linux IDE that can come close to Visual Studio. I say this as a huge Linux advocate, and someone who barely ever even boots into Windows - but credit where it's due, MSVC is simply a better product.
Otherwise, I don't see much reason to tie your game to just Windows and DX. Even boost helps a ton - it provides a lot of platform independent libraries to make your portability life easier.
Worth mentioning.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Two man-months? (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the article, it already ran on OSX. That implies it was already using OpenGL.
A note from LGP. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wed, June 23 2010
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational.
For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues on the admin side of things, which explains most of our silence, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer further updates as and when there is news to update you with.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Valve hasn't said a word. (Score:3, Interesting)
Until Valve says anything about a Linux client, it's just rumor and speculation.
That's absurd. It's no longer just a rumor once it's been proven, regardless of where or who the proof comes from. What we have is better than an official announcement, since an announcement could be false.
We have the actual binary. Sure, it's a largely non-functional pre-alpha, but the build was frequently being updated, which indicates active development. And now the URL is an error 403 Forbidden. I'll bet the URL only works from Valve's internal IPs now, but that's just my speculation. The existence of a Linux client, however, is confirmed fact.
It's called quality assurance (Score:1, Interesting)
"t took Dave six weeks to do the port, including time spent testing across multiple flavours of Linux, and running the beta from start to end."
Re:One game? (Score:3, Interesting)
seems like computer game production is in much the same state as banks issuing loans.
the biggest entities in either need a scale of return so high that they miss out on a lot of the smaller customers.
so maybe computer gaming needs something similar to the concept of microcredit?
Re:Remember DOS extenders? (Score:4, Interesting)
1 and 3 - yes, we should all install an extra partition for each game. Then we can top that with a nice grub menu with 25 entries. That's much better than having the games in a fucking folder.
2 is false for Windows users, which is who GGP was talking about. Go re-read his quote in my previous message.
4 seems to come from someone who has no idea of the current games market. Steam has a huge user base, and they're the undisputed leaders of the online games distribution, which is growing immensely.
And people *like* the social aspect of Steam: the friends list, the groups, the in-game chat, the way you can join a friend with one click, the achievements, the server browser, etc. Personally, I use Xfire for server browsing and filtering, and it's a massive improvement over in-game browsers.
The quote in my post was about Windows users, not Linux. Linux is still almost irrelevant as a desktop platform, and games are not the main thing holding it back.
Seriously? "Who runs IM anymore?" That can't be a serious question, can it?
"Windows Live Messenger (formerly named MSN Messenger) is an instant messaging client created by Microsoft. In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month" - so I'd say very few, obviously:|
In games like Call of Duty, everyone uses Xfire for setting up matches and inviting people to clans. No, people don't use the phone for talking with strangers they play with - they use integrated systems. If they want to talk, they'll use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo.
I don't see how the games market is *anything* like SAP. The games require one paid thing - Windows - and that comes with 99% of the computers anyway (yes, people pay more for it. It doesn't matter, because people wouldn't know how to install anything else). The rest is hardware - which Linux wouldn't "fix" - and stuff like DirectX, which is free anyway.