EA and Ubuntu, for & against discussion

[JDShu]

I would say that it is a combination of casual users and people who spend large sums of money. I think that claiming many people spend ten thousand dollars a month on a video game is a little dramatic. Profitiblity can depend on a number of things.

I decided to look it up, and yes admittedly the people who spend over $25 are very important too. 10k is not a dramatic number though:
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/201...virtual-goods/ in fact it underestimates slightly.

To give an idea about how importan the people with money are, I first learned about this from the CEO of a company that makes it's money from helping social game companies analyze social media data and scout out the big hitters. The same CEO also said that the company they're working for told him that they operate exactly like a casino.

Go into a local software store sometime. You will notice many pre-paid cards for ten, twenty, and twenty-five dollar denominations. I've seen people pick up a copy of The Sims 3 Pets and a FarmVille pre-paid card at the same time. Claiming that a end-user who plays a web-based game will only play a web-based game is too much of a generalization. Humans are unique individuals with many different tastes and hobbies. Sure, a game can be supported by 'whales' as you call them. They could also be supported by many users who simply enjoy the game and spent ten or twenty dollars every few months; they don't care it is a web-game, they just think it is fun.

The important thing here is that high demand for Farmville on via USC does not translate to high demand for Call of Duty on Linux. Imagine you were an analyst for EA... if you learned that hey! there are these Ubuntu using hedge fund managers who are willing to drop thousands of dollars buying virtual goods, would you claim to your boss that this is indicative of an untapped customer base that could be captured by porting Call of Duty to Linux?

[KiwiNZ]

@ JDShu I see you not not want any of the game producers looking at or considering Linux and you really want to stay with a +/- 1% OS.

[JDShu]

Seems as if we're back to false dichotomies again. Why can't casinos make money off of small spenders and big fish alike? Why can't gaming companies make money off of $2-spenders and $10,000-spenders alike?

They can, but where the revenue comes from will greatly affect company policy.

Rovio didn't get rich of one person spending $10,000 on Angry Birds.

Rovio is not the same genre. They make money selling paid-for apps and selling merchandise.

If EA has web-based games and also other games, they're able to make money on both of those types with various kinds of customers.

Yes, but my original point is that the success of web-based games doesn't influence EA's decision to port desktop games.

[JDShu]

@ JDShu I see you not not want any of the game producers looking at or considering Linux and you really want to stay with a +/- 1% OS.

Well if you asked me personally, I don't really care what % share Linux on desktop has anymore. But on the more general point, I'm just not convinced that any outcome from this "experiment" will convince EA to start putting in effort porting desktop games to Linux. I just see it as a cheap low risk way to get some more people to play their game and hopefully catch a few spenders.

[KiwiNZ]

Well if you asked me personally, I don't really care what % share Linux on desktop has anymore. But on the more general point, I'm just not convinced that any outcome from this "experiment" will convince EA to start putting in effort porting desktop games to Linux. I just see it as a cheap low risk way to get some more people to play their game and hopefully catch a few spenders.

Of course they want to make money from it

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I hope everyone here has actually watched Richard Hillman's talk at UDS. It covers a lot of the concerns raised here. The gist of it is that EA can and will support a platform if it makes sense. Making sense involves some calculations. For example, they need to know how news spreads, what kind of audience they have, costs for ongoing support and maintenance, and, generally, how things work on each platform. It isn't just about building code for Linux and releasing it.

To me, this looks like they're testing the waters in an obviously cautious way. I, for one, am glad they're doing that instead of some ill-informed, expensive and quickly abandoned AAA port that barely runs on five percent of Ubuntu systems. With this approach, there's hope that it might actually be done right. Step one is communicating. We shouldn't delude ourselves here: our platform is not an obvious choice for a major publisher like EA. If we want to see that fixed, we need to build the bridge.

[Face-Ache]

These rant threads should just be closed..

Agree. Or at least moved to Recurring.

I can't see a big gaming company like EA expressing interest in Linux as being a bad thing, no matter how insignificant that interest appears to be. I don't find these games being browser-based as insulting, whatsoever. To me, EA are simply a big company who are dipping a toe in the water.

I wonder whether part of this rhetoric is because people actually want Linux to stay as a "1%" - is it a sense of geeky entitlement to keep it non-mainstream?

I also don't buy the 'self fulfilling prophecy' stuff; if EA didn't want to get involved in possibly producing games for Linux, we wouldn't even have these browser-based offerings.

[JDShu]

I hope everyone here has actually watched Richard Hillman's talk at UDS. It covers a lot of the concerns raised here. The gist of it is that EA can and will support a platform if it makes sense. Making sense involves some calculations. For example, they need to know how news spreads, what kind of audience they have, costs for ongoing support and maintenance, and, generally, how things work on each platform. It isn't just about building code for Linux and releasing it.

To me, this looks like they're testing the waters in an obviously cautious way. I, for one, am glad they're doing that instead of some ill-informed, expensive and quickly abandoned AAA port that barely runs on five percent of Ubuntu systems. With this approach, there's hope that it might actually be done right. Step one is communicating. We shouldn't delude ourselves here: our platform is not an obvious choice for a major publisher like EA. If we want to see that fixed, we need to build the bridge.

Thanks for the link. The key point I feel is being implied from Hillman's talk, is that in his opinion (and there are probably people in EA who disagree with him), the gaming space is moving away from native apps, and moving to Social and Mobile. That is, he's seeing a trend where the money is no longer in selling boxed titles, but financial models like that of Zynga and Playfish which we were discussing earlier. EA's strategy then should be to make the best quality farmville style games that they can, which works on as many platforms (combinations of hardware, operating system, and browser) as possible.

Technically, that means stretching HTML5 to its limits and working with browser organizations and operating systems to make sure they work. In other words, it sounds like we can expect webgl accelerated MMO games where perks are purchased with real money.

[rasmus91]

I have never had one bad experience with EA.

Battlelog BF3 most buggy, annoying, useless piece of bullcrap i have ever seen.

But I do agree that it would be nice if they actually made some games for Linux. I, however, already have my favourite game from my favourite developer natively running in ubuntu, namely NwN from BioWare.