Mad Penguin published interesting article on Linux games. Matt Hartley, the author, tries to predict the future of Linux gaming.
He sees three possible scenarios:
- Holding Onto Ideals Or Bringing Gaming Into a Cross-Platform Realm?
- Build Your Own Games.
- Back to Windows-Only Gaming.
The article is available here.
This isn’t that complicated, just 2 needs that don’t align easily (but aren’t necessarily conflicting).
First, what do game developers need? Return on investment…they need you to pay so they can make money.
What do Linux users want? Easy integration with their package manager (click-click-installed!) and for the applications to behave like Linux apps - without activation codes, invading their privacy, and other Windows-isms that Microsoft customers are used to putting up with. Contrary to popular myth, they don’t need games to be all open-source (just look at Adobe Flash usage in the community…).
What I’m shocked at is that game developers haven’t tried having the game ENGINE be open-source while charging for the artwork (the majority of effort in game design). This has the benefit of not requiring game studios to pay an army of developers to make it run well in perpetuity on everything in existence (from Windows PC’s to things like the GP2X game console). Just look at older proprietary games for an example of how they can become “abandonware” which only runs on the most arcane configuration versus games like Quake and Warzone2100 which have been open-sourced by their studios and not only manage to STILL run on more platforms than originally designed but have improved their stability while adding new features (such as TCP/IP support).
Comment by Bake — April 15, 2008 @ 11:56 pm