If you had the option to pick your own price for a computer game that only runs on your Linux rig, would you pay to play? Not if you are a typical Linux gamer. At least, that’s the popular perception of fans of free and open source software. Linux is available freely. So why pay for a game — or any other Linux app — when the FOSS mantra is based on a no-cost buy-in? The team behind the Humble Bundle set of computer games is trying to buck the notion that Linux users are cheapskates. That company allowed its customers to name their own prices to purchase and download their software.
The word free, when used in the context of free software, refers to freedom, not cost. Think of how free speech refers to liberty to speak rather than a monetary cost to speak.
Software that is free must guarantee the following four freedoms:
1. The freedom to run the software for any purpose.
2. The freedom to study how the program works. The source code is a prerequisite for this.
3. The freedom to sell or otherwise redistribute copies of the software.
4. The freedom to sell or otherwise redistribute copies of your modified versions of the software, so long as the four freedoms remain intact.
Is that half the time, when someone does make a Linux game, it doesn't work as well as the Windows one, and usually due to half the bells and whistles being dependent of stable drivers, with support for what is on the video card. There is a terrible track record from vendors with respect to doing either of those right. The net result being that, if you want the latest tech in a game, you go with Windows. If you want 5 year out of date tech, you still go with Windows, because those games where never written for Linux. You put up with an OS that eats half the system resources, gets in the way of the game itself, and often includes ports of some games from console that manage to take something that ran on 10 year old hardware well, and suddenly needs 4 cores, 8GB memory, and a 1TB hard drive to just "install", on the PC... (Ok, not quite that bad, but try installing Force Unleashed on a single core processor, with or without twice the memory that the console it came from needed to run the same thing. Betting you will give up about 30 minutes into the install, when it becomes obvious why it says - Recommended: Dual core processor).
Basically though, Linux is hampered by incomplete drivers, which is caused by not having games on it, which is caused by it being so hard to design games that work with the incomplete drivers. Beyond that, the idea that no one will buy a game, is pure idiocy. Quite a few "cross platform" ones have come out, for MMOs, like Eve, and Second Life, etc. The inevitable result, with monthly fees for those, which are oddly, the same no matter which system its on, is almost always, "We are improving the client beyond what we can manage under Linux, or can afford to keep upgrading, so as of X date, we will no longer support a Linux client (or won't be upgrading it at the same pace)."
In any case, bets on how many of those, "They won't pay for games", people buy consoles instead, and *do* buy/rent those games, because, a) the damn things work, b) they won't use Windows, and c) Linux can't run any of them, including the ones that have non-console versions? Its not that Linux users won't buy things, its that they don't want to be overcharged for something that either, in the case of applications, can be done some other way without a $1,000 price tag (like Adobe Photoshop vs. Gimp), or, in the case of a game, it works worse than the Windows version, due not to the OS getting in the way, but the video driver being screwed up, out dated, and incomplete, all the time.
Put simply, if you have the option of the equivalent of watching a movie in a tent, with a leaking roof, during a windy rain storm, with a working projector, and your only other option is going into a heated, warm, non-windy, theater, where the projector only works "part of the time", which would you pick, and how much would you pay for that? This is the choice between OSes for games. You pick the one that at least *usually* doesn't crash for no reason, and where most of the game works, and put up with the leaking tent, or... you sit in comfort, wondering if it will even start, and how long before something goes wrong with the game itself.
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It's a Roll of the Dice for Linux Game Makers
Posted by: Jack M. Germain August 23, 2011 05:00 AMIf you had the option to pick your own price for a computer game that only runs on your Linux rig, would you pay to play? Not if you are a typical Linux gamer. At least, that’s the popular perception of fans of free and open source software. Linux is available freely. So why pay for a game — or any other Linux app — when the FOSS mantra is based on a no-cost buy-in? The team behind the Humble Bundle set of computer games is trying to buck the notion that Linux users are cheapskates. That company allowed its customers to name their own prices to purchase and download their software.
Software that is free must guarantee the following four freedoms:
1. The freedom to run the software for any purpose.
2. The freedom to study how the program works. The source code is a prerequisite for this.
3. The freedom to sell or otherwise redistribute copies of the software.
4. The freedom to sell or otherwise redistribute copies of your modified versions of the software, so long as the four freedoms remain intact.
MAKE YOUR LINUX GAME LOOK, RUN, AND FEEL BETTER ON LINUX THAN ANY OTHER PLATFORM...
duh.
Basically though, Linux is hampered by incomplete drivers, which is caused by not having games on it, which is caused by it being so hard to design games that work with the incomplete drivers. Beyond that, the idea that no one will buy a game, is pure idiocy. Quite a few "cross platform" ones have come out, for MMOs, like Eve, and Second Life, etc. The inevitable result, with monthly fees for those, which are oddly, the same no matter which system its on, is almost always, "We are improving the client beyond what we can manage under Linux, or can afford to keep upgrading, so as of X date, we will no longer support a Linux client (or won't be upgrading it at the same pace)."
In any case, bets on how many of those, "They won't pay for games", people buy consoles instead, and *do* buy/rent those games, because, a) the damn things work, b) they won't use Windows, and c) Linux can't run any of them, including the ones that have non-console versions? Its not that Linux users won't buy things, its that they don't want to be overcharged for something that either, in the case of applications, can be done some other way without a $1,000 price tag (like Adobe Photoshop vs. Gimp), or, in the case of a game, it works worse than the Windows version, due not to the OS getting in the way, but the video driver being screwed up, out dated, and incomplete, all the time.
Put simply, if you have the option of the equivalent of watching a movie in a tent, with a leaking roof, during a windy rain storm, with a working projector, and your only other option is going into a heated, warm, non-windy, theater, where the projector only works "part of the time", which would you pick, and how much would you pay for that? This is the choice between OSes for games. You pick the one that at least *usually* doesn't crash for no reason, and where most of the game works, and put up with the leaking tent, or... you sit in comfort, wondering if it will even start, and how long before something goes wrong with the game itself.