Are Linux gamers a profitable crowd?

[samjh]

I think it is already viable and far more than an alternative, nothing than directx10 do can't be done with openGL, it is just that microsoft always pushed directx and because windows is widely used game developers develop games using directx for convenience.

You're confusing Direct 3D with OpenGL. DirectX can do a heck of a lot more than OpenGL. OpenGL is only a graphics library, whereas DirectX does graphics, sound, input, networking, and more.

A better comparison is SDL (with OpenGL) vs DirectX.

[@trophy]

No. We're like 3% of the market, and as this thread shows, not all of us are gamers, and of the few who are, some simply will not pay for anything. It would be suicide to spend any time or money porting anything to Linux.

Hopefully that situation will change.

Oh, and OpenGL won't do everything DirectX will. DirectX does sound, joystick, etc as well as graphics. M$ has made it very easy on programmers, and it may be very difficult for them to wean themselves off of DirectX even if they decide that moving to OpenGL is a good idea.

[frodon]

DirectX can do a heck of a lot more than OpenGL

Proof of your claim ?

Because all studies tend to prove that both have pretty much the same power.

About the rest of your post i am talking of the rendering which is the main thing which makes a porting difficult so i'm not sure who is confusing what. That means using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) instead of HLSL (High Level Shader Language used in directX) if you wish to be accurate.
If a developer use GLSL to develop his game then it is painless to make a MC/linux version.

[Extreme Coder]

Proof of your claim ?

Because all studies tend to prove that both have pretty much the same power.

About the rest of your post we are talking of the rendering which is the main thing which makes a porting difficult so i'm not sure who is confusing what. That means using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) instead of HLSL (High Level Shader Language used in directX) if you wish to be accurate.
If a developer use GLSL to develop his game then it is painless to make a MC/linux version.

They're just saying that DirectX has support for stuff other than gfx too.

Sadly, the author of that game postponed the idea of a port untill later: (from http://www.bit-blot.com/forum/index.php?topic=13.90)

Issues:

1) Small and Angry Audience.

2) Case sensitivity annoyances, would require a lot of work and would end up with Linux users bitching at Windows users even more for not making their mods compatible. Windows users wouldn't care.

3) Audio library would require a recode / extra money / extra time and effort. EIther it would take a lot of time, or it would not support the audio as fully as the other two versions.

4) Some way to protect game files (we have ways on Win/OSX, but not Linux)

5) Support. (Have a fair idea of how to support Windows, Ambrosia will help us support Mac... Linux? No idea)

6) Another full testing cycle. (Ambrosia will help us test OSX. But for Linux we'd have to get beta testers, and they'd probably be 90% of our potential audience!)

Now is it worth taking time out to deal with all those issues instead of:

A) finishing the game

B) possibly porting / spinning off the game to consoles, which would have a large game-friendly audience

C) creating new games

Either A, B or C are far more interesting and valuable to us than dealing with picky issues that shouldn't even be coming up in this day and age to support a niche audience that I'm still not convinced would even be interested in buying the game, let alone playing it.

And the overriding reason?

I just don't care about Linux anymore. This thread has crushed any interest I had in working on a port.

[forrestcupp]

No, I love linux because it is open source, its just you, the code and the ubuntu forum that keeps you alive when you screw everythign up real good.

I wouldn't but the game. Ever. No matter how cheap. Call me a ****.

Then you love open source, but not necessarily Free/libre software. According to RMS and the GPL, it is ok to sell software. So I guess you don't totally get the heart of it.

Proof of your claim ?

Because all studies tend to prove that both have pretty much the same power.

About the rest of your post we are talking of the rendering which is the main thing which makes a porting difficult so i'm not sure who is confusing what. That means using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) instead of HLSL (High Level Shader Language used in directX) if you wish to be accurate.
If a developer use GLSL to develop his game then it is painless to make a MC/linux version.

It may be true that opengl can do anything that Direct3D 10 can do, but no one even should have to argue that opengl can't do everything that DirectX 10 can do. OpenGL can't do audio, joysticks, etc. Nobody is making any claims against the graphics side of it.

No one even programs games in straight DirectX or OpenGL anyway. They use game engines that utilize those libraries. It is possible to program a game that can utilize DirectX and easily port it to Linux. Ogre3D is a cross platform 3D game engine and with one line of code, you can tell it whether you want to use DirectX or OpenGL. With only a few lines of code, you can test what platform it is running on to tell it to compile for Linux or Windows and decide whether to use OpenGL or DirectX. There are cross-platform audio, physics, and input solutions, too.

I'm not saying that everyone should use Ogre3D; I'm just pointing out that it is possible to do things in such a way that there is practically zero cost in porting. All that would have to be done is compiling under different platforms without even changing the code.

The main hurdles are changing the mentality of there only being one platform to program for, and creating the new game engines with cross-platform in mind. If we could change people's mentality, the rest wouldn't really be that hard.

[tcpip4lyfe]

Windows just reclaimed my roommates because they wanted to start playing WoW again and they have ATI cards. I told them it works fine, just takes a while to set up. I even offered to set it up for them. They wanted none of it. They just wanted to play. Until linux games are easy to set up, it's not a profitable crowd. For some reason I'm a little upset by this switch. One of my roommates said, "linux desktop isn't ready yet," I kind of wanted to punch him. I don't know what I'm more upset about. Them using windows, or the fact that I'll never see them again because they play WoW. I hate that game btw.

[Kowalski_GT-R]

They're just saying that DirectX has support for stuff other than gfx too.

Sadly, the author of that game postponed the idea of a port untill later: (from http://www.bit-blot.com/forum/index.php?topic=13.90)

I think Ubuntu is slowly (crawl pace) changing things.

User friendly --> good
stable --> good
large support -> good

how do you see Ubuntu in the future?

[7Priest7]

I believe that if enough work is put into anything it can be profitable...

Linux is free...

Windows is not...

I however would not pay just as much for Linux as Windows...

I am cheap... I don't think software should be sold!!!

However Say an RPGWO port for Linux came out I may pay $10-20

I think Linux can be almnost as profitable (in price per software)
However Windows has more users thus causing loss of profit...


Alex

[samjh]

Proof of your claim ?

Because all studies tend to prove that both have pretty much the same power.

It is common knowledge among game developers, and many gamers, that DirectX includes much more functionality than OpenGL, due to the fact that DirectX is a conglomeration of game-related libraries. Only two of those libraries fill the same roles as OpenGL, and the most competitive of the two is Direct 3D.

About the rest of your post i am talking of the rendering which is the main thing which makes a porting difficult so i'm not sure who is confusing what. That means using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) instead of HLSL (High Level Shader Language used in directX) if you wish to be accurate.
If a developer use GLSL to develop his game then it is painless to make a MC/linux version.

You didn't qualify the context in the post I quoted. Instead you wrote about OpenGL and DirectX in general terms.

I do understand the context now, though. And I agree with your opinion about OpenGL and Direct 3D.

[Mazza558]

It's profitable, solely for the reason that there is almost no competition for sales. Companies could make a lot of money selling to emerging markets.