Introducing the Humble Indie Bundle 6
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it.
I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work.
I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.
please also forward this post to the manufacturer of your non-free video card, which is the most likely culprit.
Indie game development has such thin profit margins to begin with that most developers can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port that might not produce enough revenue to pay for itself.
This kind of depends on your configuration too: Sure, you may be on a modern version of Ubuntu, but what kind of GPU do you have? Does it have modern drivers that are well-supported by the manufacturer? Does it support the variety of extensions and features that a game can rely on having on Windows/OSX? 'many of the games work fine' is only meaningful here if the games all have the same system requirements and you meet those requirements. If not, the best course of action is to try and communicate clearly to the developers that there are customers who are being shut out by system requirements, to see if there are cheap ways for them to lower the requirements.
How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)
I've developed games before and I can tell you, if you're not using propitiatory platform-dependent libraries, porting your game is a piece of cake. What I've noticed is that most of the games on Humble Bundle use a library known as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer.) SDL is a library that handles two main things that aren't platform-independent: creating a window and receiving events (keyboard, mouse, e.t.c.) The rest is taken care of by the cross-platform OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. libraries.
In addition, there's an even better library than SDL called SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library). SFML is much more fully featured than SDL, and is C++-based and OOP. With both SFML and SDL, all you have is _just recompile_. And done!
So really, it's not that hard to port a game. "can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port" sounds a bit stretched. There are plenty of free libraries available for game dev (atleast 2D game dev), like Box2D, CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI), etc. so if from the get-go you plan on supporting multiple platforms use some of those libraries, and porting will be a breeze.
Many use a WINE wrapper (or a derivative, like Cider); the same goes for OS X versions. Especially for a lot of these indie games, where a small performance hit isn't a big deal as they don't tax the hardware.
Unity a closed source game framework was recently ported to linux(just the framework, not the development tools).
There is a partial reimplementation/clone of XNA called MonoGame.
If there isn't a version of a library for linux I guess they have to re-write it. If they are re-writing for mac/linux at the same time they are more likely to use(and benefit from) cross-platform libraries for those ports.
Don't advertize it as being Linux compatible. I'm not asking for miracles, just a bit more realistic honesty.
A bigger problem is developer effort/binary testing on linux. One guy ported 9 of the humble bundle games to linux by himself(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon#Humble_Indie_Bun... including Aquaria). I believe Ryan/icculus did most of the porting work as well as fixing any bugs filled on his bugzilla(https://bugzilla.icculus.org/query.cgi If you see any unreported, please report) by himself. While he is a good developer that is a lot to take on for one person.
Even more importantly many games are rushed and released/ready just before (or even a bit after humble bundle release). Even "just" recompiling for a new os with the same cross platform code requires binary testing to help find unexpected problems. A number of these bugs are eventually fixed but not all of them.
Torchlight doesn't seem to work at all, SPAZ doesn't do fullscreen properly.
Not sure if these are proper ports or running under WINE.
Shame because I've had success with previous bundles.
The windows version of Psychonauts works better under wine then the native linux port(at least for me).
It ran, but I couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes before it crashed :(
I mostly just grab the Steam keys so I don't have to worry about keeping up with new versions.
This is from the average donation amounts on the page.
I'd be curious to see the median sale prices.
Feel free to post a Mac that is 2-3x its equal though you'll be the first person in any of the times I've posted this reply that will be able to do it.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+14%26%2334%3...
Compare it to the 13" Macbook Pro (for the sake of being generous towards the Mac). It's just over half the price, has a bigger screen, more ram, a larger hard drive, and seemingly identical processor and graphics. Naturally there are give and takes on both sides (just about everything is inferior to Apple in terms of "build quality", though this is tough to put a price on), but I don't think it's unreasonable to say this is a comparable laptop, and the specs easily make up for it being $50 over half price.
I don't say this to disparage Apple, I've got a MBP myself, but whenever I look at PCs with comparable specs, I do find that they tend to be about half the price.
I'll withdraw 3x though, that probably is too high and even if I could hunt around and find one example, it's not like that would prove the point.
Nothing is stand out worse but everything is just a bit worse which when your pushing the upper edges adds up to a lot of cost. Not even counting build quality.
If you've ever had a backlit keyboard you will realize the usefulness of them. I consider them as essential as a good screen but again I just pointed out that its a worse keyboard not that the keyboard is make or break.
On release day, macs are only price-competitive if (1) quality is more important than price and (2) Apple has a product targeting your needs.
When buying a computer, you don't look at specs you look at needs.
"I need a laptop to run the Internet and Microsoft Word". PC: $400. Mac: $1000 or higher if an 11" screen is acceptable. It doesn't matter that the $400 laptop has a crappy screen -- to many people a crappy 15" screen is better than a great 11".
"super fast dev box": PC: $800, Mac: $2500 (and the PC is considerably faster)
"great gaming rig": PC: $1500, Mac: ????
For the others I'm going to need to see examples.
It's also about 90% of the market. Macs have a significant share of this market -- sold to those who care more about design, stability and/or status more than price.
$800 should get you an i5 2500K, a solid motherboard, 16 gigs of RAM, a small SSD, a nice case & PS. No ECC, but it's considerably faster than a Mac Pro.
For the 1500 machine, add a killer graphics card, a secondary HDD and a Windows license. You'll even have some money left over to sub in one of those silly "gamer" cases.
That's BYO. Prebuilt stuff is generally about the same price, but comes with lower quality cases, power supplies & motherboards.
Again, posting what you should be able to get is all fine but if you're comparing to a mac pro then until you post me a parts list for a workstation with the same quality of parts put together already then you're not really making your point.
You're not going to do that though because its time consuming and difficult to match up. Also you're ignoring the cost involved in the effort of finding/getting and assembling those parts. To be a fair comparison you'd have to go off one of the PC manufactures lists or at least add overhead for the labor.
If there are Windows users that already have them then chances are there are Linux users that already have them (for their other [other ...] OS partition).
First, quite a lot of indie games build an engine and then numerous variations of levels to support a plot. Braid, Bastion, Iji, Super Meat Boy, Gish, World of Goo, and many more where those came from follow that model: impressive engine, pile of well-designed levels, plot. In those cases, the ability to create more levels and add some technical variations can nicely extend the lifespan of a game.
Second, and even more importantly, the much broader space of design ideas in indie games means many more interesting components with unusual variations. Braid has a physics engine that supports time-based mechanics. Super Meat Boy has an extremely impressive record-and-replay mechanism (used to great effect at the end of each level to show you all the ways you died simultaneously). Several indie games have very impressive lighting models. The Bit Trip games have music syncing engines. Many indie games have impressive dynamic-content-generation engines. The more of these components that become readily available, the more impressive the starting point for any future indie game.
I'm not sure to what extent these things can be recycled(other then for ideas).
Actual advantages I see:
Fixing bugs/maintaining long term/packaging. This allows people to spot bugs easier, contribute back code, and generally maintain the game better(fix anything that break thanks to old platform assumptions).
Porting to other platforms(especially arm, maybe android these days), many who open source games allow you to use a copy of the data for one platform on any platform.
It makes more sense just to buy the stuff you want directly from the developers. Or wait for another sale.
Most of the games business is a high risk, high reward gamble. New IP much more so than working with an existing franchise. This is in no way unique to a game like Rochard, it'd apply equally much to $0.99 iPhone games or AAA games launching on all platforms and needing to sell 3 million copies to break even.
In this case the original target market was the PS3 store, and my understanding is that the very highest selling indie games there have lifetime sales in the half million unit range. And the sales figures are likely obeying a power law, with the median sales in the thousands of units. It does seem like a pretty horrible place to be selling to.
For Rochard, we can try to make a rough estimate of the cost. First of all the studio making the game was formed for an overly ambitious project (Earth No More), which was scrapped after several years. Mostof the team dispersed, but a skeleton crew started on a new game, and shipped Rochard around 1.5 years laters. The credits show 15 people, but I doubt they would all have been on the project full time. So let's guess 10-15 man-years of work.
On the funding side, clearly they won't have had much if any money left at the start of the project. Early on they sold some part of the rights to the game to an outside investor for 400kEUR.
Even if we ignore overhead, the cost of things like voice acting, and assume Finnish pay levels, it seems clear that the team wasn't working for full market salaries. Maybe they just really wanted to work on games rather than CRUD apps. Or they all had significant equity, and were hoping to hitting it big with that 1% surprise hit.
Judging by Rochard not appearing on the top 20 most sold lists on the PSN, it seems like a fair bet that it did not make a profit there. I don't know whether it flopped completely or had mediocre sales. For the purpose of making money, it doesn't really matter. There's a good chance that they'll make more from the Humble Bundle than from PSN. Even so, it doesn't look like a project that would have broken even for the investors, or for anyone working on it at below market wage.
(Edit: Which is a shame. It was one of my favorite games last year, and I certainly didn't mind paying for it again as part of the bundle).
Would it be a dick thing to do to pay $0 for this bundle and promise myself to pay a lot more for the next bundle (even if the games suck)?
People paying a lot less are also already factored into the average and I see no specfic factor driving low payers to be greater in quantity than usual. Hence why I love this approach.