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I strongly disagree with Carmack on this


Ladro

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http://mygaming.co.za/news/news/50241-carmack-would-be-stunned-by-mainstream-linux-gaming-support.html

 

Normally I really like what Carmack says, but he says something here that I don't subscribe, not at all.

 

It's ok for me to have ALSO the choice of the emulation to sell, but not the only way to play/sell games on Linux. He say that the market it's not big enough, but also the budget needed for a porting on Linux it's not so expansive. In some cases, we have seen one man making good porting, look to Ryan Gordon, IE.

(he ported a lot of games on Linux, IE, Aquaria, Prey, Postal1-2, Unreal tournament, etc etc)

 

And now also Steam is paying to have a LinuxLab http://steamcommunity.com/linux and http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/ to make porting, not emulation, so it's a demonstration that the market it's not so tiny as he says. And look also on every Humble Bundle: they have an incredible success on selling game, and the major contributor payed for single game (average), is always by Linux people.

 

See https://www.humblebundle.com/

 

What do you think about?

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Not too long ago Gabe Newell said in an article 'No to Linux' basically. Guess something changed. I think he must've realized that any market share lost is market share lost. They already were halfway there anyway and had many customers asking for the support.

 

But he also said they weren't going to make their own console, and now it looks like that's exactly what they are planning, especially after he saw Win8.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Not too long ago Gabe Newell said in an article 'No to Linux' basically.

 

Linux has been in the "not to be considered" area for the longest of time when it comes to gaming, because what most people hear about Linux is that it's just software that pirates and pimple-faced geeks use that want to "fight the system" and that it has no real value.

Most of all, and the thing I've heard often, is that people refuse to even entertain the idea to sell software/games for Linux because they automatically think that they can't. Linux is free so of course the software on it has to be too, no one sitting on a free OS is going to want to pay for games and/or software.

 

I think that after the, I'd say, wild success of HIB sort of showed the world that Linux is a viable option- bigger companies started realizing that Linux isn't just a plaything for the nerds and the "misguided", it's a real thing- ergo- a real market.

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I completely agree with Carmack, and there are many things I don't agree with his ideas (MT, heh).

 

The nature of Linux and the expense of keeping up with the generic gnu/linux fragmented developments is extremely high. Most commercial interests will just pick a 1-2 distros to support and call it a day. That's not even taking into consideration that Steam will need to try and ensure that games also keep up in part. You're stuck with the constant changing and breaking of the graphics ABI and APIs, the uncertain future thereof is well known. While Intel are trying hard to fix it, they are going to be making changes which everyone else needs to keep up with. Graphics drivers are immature, while Intels latest efforts are indeed great, nVidia's are starting to lose out a bit (and then run into issues about GPL licensing and such of kernel memory stuff that they want to share etc.) AMD's are somewhat of a joke. Sound is even worse.

 

So the solutions to a lot of this are binary blobs - well, we were always going to have that with the games themselves, but if you expect their kernel drm module to be anything but a pain in the ass in time. How much you linux guys love all that stuff eh. How long do you think distros will care about Steam's inevitable constant breaking, once again excluding issues that games might pose (because who does the QA there eh?). A massive hurdle is simply that of expectations management, and that's something you'll never see talked about.

 

Not too long ago Gabe Newell said in an article 'No to Linux' basically. Guess something changed.

 

It's entirely about Steambox, they hardware partners(note : s) are already quoting huge prices and they want to lower them by cutting out the costs of a Windows license; Which in itself is a completely valid move. I would not be surprised at all if they fork debian/ubuntu and start releasing a Steam'OS', similar to Android.

 

While Valve are playing with the gloves on at the moment, when they finally offer that sweet sweet cashing-out IPO and gaben gets to walk away looking good, that's where the underhanded corporate involvement shows up. The subtle art of do-no-evil-we-love-linux. Once in the control of their own destiny and distro, how long will your 3rd party platform support remain? Steambox 2, MIPS? ARM? surely not the expensive x86 :)

 

I'm not saying it's Valves fault, I'm saying that the nature of mainstream gnu/linux is extremely likely to /force/ their hand into making better business choices, which do not align with the idealism of many.

 

So maybe he's right and avoiding it for now is the best road. Maybe a Steam distro would bring the stability and support required for both hardware and software QA. But the here-and-now? That's for companies and gamblers who want to lose to the house.

 

Or maybe I'm just a jaded, conspiracy-prone hermit, shouting my delusions to the sky.

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I think that after the, I'd say, wild success of HIB sort of showed the world that Linux is a viable option- bigger companies started realizing that Linux isn't just a plaything for the nerds and the "misguided", it's a real thing- ergo- a real market.

 

I agree.

 

HB and other indie game house, are a good demonstration for this. As example we can see Frictional Games gamehouse. They are indie, they do 3D FPS (survival horror genre) game, and from day one they port all their games also for Linux. I don't think that a couple of guys can create a complex 3D game from scratch (and also the engine and the editor!), managing to port all their works without problem to Linux, and a multi-megabillion dollar software house cannot afford the (very little, compared to all the size of the company) investiment to make a Linux version of a game that, it's sure, will sell (if the game it's good, of course).

 

So the problem, as said by Carmack, it's economic. Of course Carmack is an expert in the game industry so he knows what he say, but IMHO he always talk about the mega scale game industry and not the average medium or indie companies that raises every day in the worlds, so his vision it's completely distorted.

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I don't like games not opening themselves to Linux, but it strikes me as a very characteristic opinion for Carmack ... up there with "games are like porn, the story is largely pointless." and "procedural generation is just a crappy form of compression." He's a brutal realist on things like that, but maybe he's not wrong in that it's a lot of extra work for a market that doesn't care much, and it's been successful for him.

 

I still disagree too though. I like games with Linux, stories, & procedural generation. I'll admit my opinion isn't mainstream (but then the market proved him wrong on stories & procedural generation if games like Walking Dead and Minecraft are any indication).

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Heh. Everyone of us have bizarre conceptions about some facet of the reality. Who was right and who was wrong at the time will decided later.

 

On the failure of the porn analogy:

Think about the Mass Effect -games. Without the plot, the universe, the well-written characters and dialogue, what is it that is left? Some mediocre shooting with unwieldy controls. I don't think the games would have been as popular if they only had the shooting parts.

 

Or Portal only as a puzzle jumper, without GladOS dialogue and the story?

 

A good game is a whole that is more than the sum of their parts. I suspect this may be the very reason why good porn does not exist: it only has one facet!

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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its funny how Valve/Carmack have changed places over the past decade. Carmack used to promote cross-platform software. I recall him saying something like "I want Quake Arena running on every capable device with a net connection".

 

As for Valve, I'm really surprised that Steam for Linux is real and available now. I'm also surprised that they ported even Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike (original) to Linux. The mod for Half-Life I played the most was TFC, and that seems to have died out years ago sadly. There are almost no humans playing it now.

 

People can say what they want about Valve's policies, but at least they support their games continuously. Back in the day, we got lots of patches for HL, incorporating lag compensation, VOIP, etc.. and they're still providing new "features" for it.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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last year the dominant reason for Linux's lack of success on the desktop is quite simple: Consumers do not install operating systems.

 

It's hard to comprehend for someone like me, since I'm doing it all the time... ...but when I think of it I do not know too many people suffering the same desease. I am confident my friend next door will continue using XP even after the expiration date or simply buy a new laptop.

 

There are quite valid technical arguments against Linux in its present state as a gaming platform. It's a fragmented hell along both, the diachronic and the synchronic axis. We have competing desktops with and without compositing, distributions that differ in general design (upstart or systemd, eg.) and each one comes with a unique ultimate package management system. Even if you examine a single distro you will find it to be a moving target: APIs and ABIs change and break, new inventions will change the core design of the system.

 

This is Linux as we know it. And love it. But all those quirks do not even qualify as a deal breaker for the intended gaming platform, when you consider who is affected by them: Those few nerds who actually do install an operating system on their computer.

 

A viable business model surely does not target those 1%. So the interesting part will be watching how exactly Valve intends to create their platform. The key is selling hardware with a preinstalled OS. There is more than one way to do this.

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Android/Google OS is the distro that solves the Linux fragmentation issues.

 

People simply forget that this OS is really a Linux distro.

 

It doesn't get more mainstream than Android...

 

Any sufficiently "mainstream consumer friendly" Linux distro would generally have the same fate except perhaps Ubuntu who

have a confounding name and wear "We are Linux" on their sleeve. That, of course, seems to be their stumbling block too.

They cater to the GPL community's demands rather than the demands of "Grandma" or "Joe Consumer" therefore

continual upheaval there...

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  • 3 weeks later...

Linux has been in the "not to be considered" area for the longest of time when it comes to gaming, because what most people hear about Linux is that it's just software that pirates and pimple-faced geeks use that want to "fight the system" and that it has no real value.

Most of all, and the thing I've heard often, is that people refuse to even entertain the idea to sell software/games for Linux because they automatically think that they can't. Linux is free so of course the software on it has to be too, no one sitting on a free OS is going to want to pay for games and/or software.

 

I think that after the, I'd say, wild success of HIB sort of showed the world that Linux is a viable option- bigger companies started realizing that Linux isn't just a plaything for the nerds and the "misguided", it's a real thing- ergo- a real market.

 

The fun fact is that this day more people are playing on "linux", than on Windows. Every Android device is linux underneath. And gaming on mobile is huge.

 

And it is only a matter of time before mobile + tablet sales dwarf laptop + desktop sales. If you throw blu-ray players, smart TVs and media players and every sat HD-receiver into the mix, which are all now "app" compatible, and Linux underneath, anyway (even tho they are not (yet) Android), you can easily see that more people game on Linux then anywhere else, followed closely by iOS.

 

Just because these people don't play shooters like Crisis doesn't say much. And it is only a matter of time before gaming consoles will either be Linux (probably Android, tho) underneath, because nobody can justify maintaining a different OS just for one type of device.

 

--------------------------

Edit: Here are some numbers:

 

From http://bgr.com/2012/...op-sales-2016/:

 

"In October, Gartner noted that global PC sales volume actually declined by a staggering 8% in the third quarter of 2012."

...

"In the U.S. market, the ground zero for the tablet phenomenon, PC unit sales crashed by an astonishing 14% during the third quarter this year compared to autumn of 2011"

 

Compare this with http://www.mobilemag...leader-in-2012/ which says that market for global smartphone shipments grew 42.7% (from 490 million units 2011 to 700 million in 2012) in one year. Now percentages don't mean much if the absolute numbers are far away, but:

 

"That means the total number of PC sales will fall from 352.8 million last year to 348.7 million by year end." (A prediction in mid-2012).

 

Compare 350 mio PCs sold worldwide with 700 mio smart phones sold worldwide. The writing is on the wall. Q.E.D.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Not too long ago Gabe Newell said in an article 'No to Linux' basically. Guess something changed. I think he must've realized that any market share lost is market share lost. They already were halfway there anyway and had many customers asking for the support.

 

But he also said they weren't going to make their own console, and now it looks like that's exactly what they are planning, especially after he saw Win8.

 

I think their push to Linux comes exactly because of Win8 - Win8 means that MS will tell you what app you can release, for what price etc. Android and IOs are more open than Win8 in that regard, and Valve probably don't like to bet their future on the goodwill of Microsoft.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I was expecting MS to "come out swinging" during the Windows 8 launch, by making some big-name games exclusive to Windows 8. Then again, they tried that before with Vista and it didn't really help them. If they wanted it to be a success, they should have made Halo 4 "only for Windows 8 metro".

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Compare 350 mio PCs sold worldwide with 700 mio smart phones sold worldwide. The writing is on the wall. Q.E.D.

 

Only half of those smart phone users are actually willing to pay for apps. You may read more numbers here. So atm this alone cancels out the advantage in sold devices.

 

If you compare further: Someone who buys a classic PC setup and invests in capable graphics hardware is more likely willing to actualy buy and play some real games there. So it's not just the sales numbers but also what people actually expect the device to deliver. Mobile devices are hitting some hard limits in regards of power reastraints and user input. Fine for casual gaming, but there will always be the thriving ecosystem for the big AAA titles.

 

The upcoming PS4 has some interesting hardware specs there, sony goes x86 to make it easier for developers to provide their content on both the PS4 and the PC.

 

As for Linux gaming I wouldn't count Android as being part of it. The kernel doesn't make the OS, any Android game is technically trapped in there.

 

Valve's approach is far more open at the moment, they build upon Xorg and proprietary drivers from nVidia and AMD so Steam for Linux can run on a variety of distributions -- Xorg being the standard graphics stack.

 

Meanwhile the Ubuntu camp started work in underminig a common Linux graphics stack by last week's announcent to develop their own graphics server. Opposed to a former announcement in 2010 they have no intentions to use Wayland, which was commonly considered to become the successor to Xorg among all the major distributions.

 

The lame excuse to ditch Wayland was it wouldn't fit their requirements. Those Ubuntu people have visions about a unified operating system that runs the same code across all the devices -- PCs, TVs, Tablets, Phablets, Phones and toasters.

 

In case they succeed and the rest of the linux camp adopts their display server (both not likely) this would be an interesting platform for gaming of all kinds.

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Only half of those smart phone users are actually willing to pay for apps. You may read more numbers here. So atm this alone cancels out the advantage in sold devices.

 

It is true that the "free" stuff spoils people, but I don't think you can interpolate from that someone bought a smartphone and doesn't want to pay for apps *now* that instead they will buy a PC or console and THEN pay on top of that for games.

 

Increasingly the typical household here in Germany has one (aging) PC that is used less and less while every household member has one smartphone and the family owns one tablet. The poor households are tailing behind, but even these started to switch to laptops (which are not good for gaming in most cases). The PC is simply dying a slow death.

 

If you compare further: Someone who buys a classic PC setup and invests in capable graphics hardware is more likely willing to actualy buy and play some real games there. So it's not just the sales numbers but also what people actually expect the device to deliver. Mobile devices are hitting some hard limits in regards of power reastraints and user input. Fine for casual gaming, but there will always be the thriving ecosystem for the big AAA titles.

 

The upcoming PS4 has some interesting hardware specs there, sony goes x86 to make it easier for developers to provide their content on both the PS4 and the PC.

 

As for Linux gaming I wouldn't count Android as being part of it. The kernel doesn't make the OS, any Android game is technically trapped in there.

 

Valve's approach is far more open at the moment, they build upon Xorg and proprietary drivers from nVidia and AMD so Steam for Linux can run on a variety of distributions -- Xorg being the standard graphics stack.

 

Meanwhile the Ubuntu camp started work in underminig a common Linux graphics stack by last week's announcent to develop their own graphics server. Opposed to a former announcement in 2010 they have no intentions to use Wayland, which was commonly considered to become the successor to Xorg among all the major distributions.

 

The lame excuse to ditch Wayland was it wouldn't fit their requirements. Those Ubuntu people have visions about a unified operating system that runs the same code across all the devices -- PCs, TVs, Tablets, Phablets, Phones and toasters.

 

In case they succeed and the rest of the linux camp adopts their display server (both not likely) this would be an interesting platform for gaming of all kinds.

 

The way I see it the "PC + real os (whatever flavour) + expensive games" becomes a niche - casual games are more than enough for a lot of people and at what point do you justify spending 100 mio on an AAA title that then can only be sold to a limited number of people?

 

It is all speculation, tho.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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