The Linux Gaming Issue - Patriot

Yesterday I told you some stuff about latest Cedega and my opinion about emulating stuff (a review of latest wine will be add on friday, so the collected version of the issue will be available on Sunday). Today I'll write some facts about native games - this will havey depend on the tomorrow's episode, so you should read both ;-)

We should use native games.
Why should we?
Because they are better performing.
Why do they performe better?
Because they are running on Linux.
Why are they running Linux?
Because you do.

That's actually everything I'd have to say about native Linux games, waving that commercials mostly suck, or aren't that awesome.

So let me differ into 2 categories. The commercial ones and the OSS ones. While the commercial ones have to be sold, so that the company doesn't have to close the doors and go begging, the OSS ones don't have to be sold and therefore they are maybe produced under less pressure (dunno whether this is that way).

The majority of commercial games suck, because they are low-budget productions coded in 2 weeks (including design and story). Why are they available for Linux? Because they have to sell as much as possible to be productive.
Though not all low budget games are bad.
Let's take Darwinia as an example (at least I think) it's a low-budget game, though it's one of the best games I played within the last 12 months. It's (like any low-budget game) available for all 3 major platforms and performs on all 3 quite well (though I've tested only 2). If you search a good game for lonly hours, I can really promise you - Darwinia will give you great entertainment. Drawback: it's short fun (very normal gamer needs about 8 hours for finish it).

There are also commercial high budget games though I probably have to tell you about them.
Quake 4 -> awesome atmosphere + awesome graphics | limping story
Doom 3 -> awesome atmosphere + awesome graphics | limping story
NWN -> awesome story + good graphics | usable but not awesome atmosphere
....

We see they all missing a major part (at least of the major parts I currently thought of). They are great for graphics freaks or for story freaks, but they don't have the right balance of them.


The 2nd group mostly consits of "short fun games" (at least I think they are not playable for hours and hours)
Those are including the games shipped with KDE or GNOME as well as such as GL-117 (which is actually a game you can play for various hours) or planet pinguin racer (which is exactly the opposit).
No doubt that they are fun for 10 or 15 minutes, while downloading amaroK 1.4 beta1 (shameless ad). But most people (and I mean really most so somewhat 99%) can't play them for various hours without becoming insane. Though there are good games which are playable for quite some time e.g. FL117, Battle for Wesnoth, Nethack, Nexzuiz etc.
Though those aren't much more than I've wrote, that's sad but would be no problem if commecial games whould offer a wider range than just shooters.

So where are the problems, that companies aren't porting their games to Linux?
Well, I use to attend to a business school, therefore I'd have no problem to write quite some pages about that.
It's actually all about money, companies wanna make money, that's the point nowadays - making money. Now if you use 3D-Frameworks like OpenGL for your game, it may not run well -> which causes less sales -> which reduces the profit. That's the reason why game developers use to built their software upon DirectX, since the changes that it's faster are quite big -> developed by MS, like the main market's desktop system - can't be a disadvantage.

And as long as they build their software upon the non-portable DirectX there is no change for Linux Gaming. Another problem that companies don't wanna port their games to Linux are the lame drivers - ATI's is famous for the not integrated or not working features and the awesome crashes for various reasons - Nvidia's is better but also not perfect afaik, so why would people buy a game if they can't play it? Again less profit, since porting is expansive. Actually I think the way Unreal Tournaments gets shiped (Windows and Linux version) is a quite good solution, people who are able to play on Linux can use it there, and all others will have to use Windows.

So let's sum up: companies use DirectX because MS pushes it's performance on Windows, graphic card vendors produce sometimes unusable drivers for unknown reasons and cause a unplayable state. Without this disadvantages Linux Gaming could be hell awesome and awesome performing also.

Tomorrow we will check whether everything is lost,
in the geared apachelog: The Linux Gaming Issue - The Hope