Canonical-sponsored UT3 give-away?

[ceil420]

This thread is inspired by this one (http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=581057) on the Epic Games forums, specifically this post:

Now, if the folks at Canonical (Ubuntu) were to give Epic a truckload of money to run a promotion like this, I would imagine it might happen, but it's certainly not something I would expect Epic to do on their own.

And to quote myself from another thread (http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=579998) on those forums:

Sucks that the installer won't be in the box, but hey, when they put the installer in the box for the GOTY/ECE/Special Edition or whatever, put Tux on it! Epic, please actually show to the public that you support Linux, and when people see how popular your game is, and how much that little penguin drives sales, maybe, just *maybe*, other programmers (hardware vendors, software vendors, game makers all) will follow your lead.

People say there's not enough money in producing games and software for Linux? You can change that now by showing your full support for the operating system, and letting people know that there *is* demand for Linux support in this day and age! On that icculus page, Ryan said that you never released the numbers for Linux or Mac players of UT2k4 (just that we outnumbered the Macinites). How about releasing the data to show that people are indeed gaming on these platforms - and releasing the same data for UT3 in a few years to show the growth rate of these OSes amongst gamers. Hopefully other programmers will be surprised at all the business they're missing out on, and Epic can be the game company that spawned the age of full Linux support from third-party vendors!

So yeah. +1 for Tux on the box.

So yeah, I just wanted to know what people on this forum thought about it :p

[KhaaL]

I think UT3 will be rated 18+ (or 16+?) so it's not suitable for everyone. And Epic will get dirty rich by the release of the next UT game (in ut2k4 they had a "win 1 million & a unreal engine license contest - make something unreal) so whatever Canonical come up with, it will prolly be peanuts in comparision.

Another argument would be "We don't need another FPS!" but if UT3 would be half as moddable as UT2k4, then we'd be looking forward to a very flexible game.

What would rock is if canonical would port games, like old loki, and sell them. But if they'd sponsor specific game developers, they should go for iD software since they're more active supporters of open source than epic is.

[bbarcelo]

I'm all for this. I love Ubuntu and, though I haven't gotten to try out the newest version of Ubuntu yet, I'm sure UT3 in Linux would be a hell of a lot better than playing on my Windows box.

Btw, awesome ->http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/5695/tuxut3ch6.png

[handy]

The growth in the popularity of the *nix type OS's is quickly obvious to anyone who has a look at the hit number on DistroWatch. They may not be 100% accurate, but they surely give valid overall indication regarding the general popularity of the listings.

In 2004, Mandrake was number one, with an average of 1,457 hits per day.

Over the last 12 months Ubuntu, has averaged 2,615 hpd, BUT all the other distro's & there a new ones on the list too, have been getting heaps more hits as well.

Over the last 7 days Ubuntu, has averaged 4,272, & I bet most of those have happened in the last 24 hours due to the Gutsy release.

The IT world is changing really fast, the quality of our preferred type of O.S's is improving every moment of every day, a snowball of popularity will be what will cause the commercial vendors to look where we want them to, & it will just happen as the number of users grow.

It's all good.