Blizzard Entertainment Planning A Linux Game For 2013
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
I say: gatekeeper-free subscription gaming appliances.
There's no evidence the total Windows PC experience is getting any better or cheaper for the uninitiated, there's no evidence that Playstation or Microsoft will bend over and allow third party platforms on their consoles, and all of the new-era Desktop App Store UXes force significant technical and billing restrictions that would eat at Activision Blizzard's subscription and in-app business model and reduce their control over the game experience.
And I don't think this is a bet that desktop Linux/x86 is going to be relevant for gaming. It has no inherent advantages over classical Windows.
So I think this is a gamble that new-era quasi-consoles based on Android+Linux/ARM+x86 are going to succeed to some degree (be it the Ouya or Steam Big Picture or some Samsung Generico-Colossus that can spit out WiDi or whatever).
A keyboard, mouse, and controller capable Linux platform with no overarching gatekeeper and adequate gaming horsepower is going to be extraordinarily cheap in the near future. If Blizzard Activision gets their ducks in a row now, they'll be ready to jump into the first one that offers ten million users, a reasonable hardware target, and a bullshit-free content delivery mechanism.
The goal is to sell subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game softwares of exceeding depth and breadth that are operated primarily with a keyboard and mouse.
The Windows PC has arrived at an unsubsidized price floor of about $300-$400 and is unlikely to go lower with Microsoft charging perhaps $40-$80/unit depending on who's licensing. This market sells ~350M units a year with a total installed base of 1.25 BILLION, yet unit sales are declining, desktop Linux is doing nothing to change this, and Blizzard's flagship title is in decline.
The Linux PC cannot go lower than $300-$400 despite essentially $0 licensing costs because virtually nobody is selling or buying raw Linux PC hardware. So the platform is drafting on boutique sales, whitebox sales, and repurposed Windows PCs while still offering no benefits above and beyond standard Windows PCs. At best, it's (currently) worse.
The classical consoles are off limits. Nintendo has no coherent Internet strategy evolving and a severe lack of onboard storage. Sony has allowed a single third-party platform which has no billing support, subscription or otherwise. Microsoft has no third-party platform support. All of these consoles come with significant licensing expenses and do not support software subscriptions. All of these consoles require major rework when porting existing PC titles due to custom CPUs, GPUs, and input frameworks.
Mobile as we understand it is either completely off limits (iOS) or unaccustomed to keyboard and mouse input (Android).
So if you are in the business of selling subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game software that requires keyboards, mice, and untrammeled billing pathways, what are your options for addressing new markets?
There is one: quasi-consoles. Stationary (TELEVISION OR MONITOR OVER HDMI) Android (LINUX) Consoles (MOUSE, KEYBOARD, CONTROLLER SUPPORT) with untrammeled billing pathways (BATTLE.NET) at dramatically lower price points than the existing options ($100) that will enable less-engaged gamers (ME) easy one-click access to pre-existing titles (WORLD OF WARCRAFT).
And in order to do that you first need your titles running on a Linux stack, addressing OpenGL hardware.
Which is what Blizzard Activision is (allegedly) doing.
Ta!
Since a lot of classic video games are DOS based, they'd just have to use the Linux version of DOSBox to run them, which shouldn't be too hard. In Windows games like Doom, Dark Forces, etc run in the Windows version of DOSBox when bought from Steam. I'm imagining Steam would also port their Sega Genesis emulator to Linux and other things as well.
I'd really like to see the Linux based GabeCube or whatever they call it (SteamTV?) that doesn't require a Windows license and can play most video games from Steam.
Also, I hope they don't roll their own distro. Customizing an existing distro seems like a much better idea. Considering Steam Linux is currently targeted at Ubuntu, I'm guessing that's the distro of choice.
PSGL in the PS3 is an incompatible derivative of OpenGL ES; I would expect there to be something similar.
One of the big problems with Linux, and this is from other game developers too, is the problem of targeting a specific version of the platform. Since everyone is free to create their own distros, they can become somewhat unstandardized. That makes "targeting linux" difficult.
Add on that there are far fewer linux users than windows/mac users, and that you can play wow on linux using Wine... and there isn't a lot of reason to target even a specific distro
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA0N...
That portion of the development cycle can easily run to 40% of the cost of the project, that's a non-trivial area in which to throw in complexities.
I'm a big fan of linux, but I was a PM at Blizzard, I would be VERY reluctant to increase my problem surface in an unproven market.
If, over the long term, it's costing you 40% to keep the popular versions of Linux working, then you're doing something wrong. Could it hypothetically cost that much? Sure, but only if you're incompetent.
Long answer: Hell yes, especially over the long time. You've ever tried to target the Linux desktop ecosystem, you will know that it is a moving target. I'm not talking about the server/command line ecosystem, that one is relatively easy.
On the higher level, the desktop ecosystem has seen a number of major platform changes over the past years. GTK 2 -> 3, compositing, new X extensions, etc. Each change results in subtly different semantics that can break apps.
On the lower level, the ABI (not API) keeps changing. Many g++ releases change the C++ ABI, and most games are written in C++. Each glibc version adds new symbol versions.
Binaries that worked 5 years ago may not work anymore.
Which is a baffling thing to have to wrap your head around when you look at all the people who say that Linux should be treated seriously by game developers--which will make people flock to Linux! so more people can make games for it! because that will really happen!
If you say you want people to build houses in your housing development (houses that have no buyers, but forget it, we're rolling) it really sort of behooves you to not be demanding that they build a house on land that starts at "silty" and doesn't really get better from there.
A game should primarily depend on OpenGL+X+audio, and while these do change, if the program works on one distribution of Linux, it tends to work on the next.
This comment deserves a LOL WUT pear of some kind but it's not quite appropriate here (so if you'd like to think of your favorite one I'd appreciate it). Audio? On Linux? Working from one distribution to another? No way. It's a mess, it's still a mess, and it's been a mess that is doing a wonderful impression of a full-blaze tire fire for going on a decade now, especially with older--yes, closed-source, it's not going away in games--software. Closed-source Linux games from the Loki era, by and large, don't work and when they do it's through fairly herculean efforts...and they do not exactly rely on GTK or KDE version π.
Oh! And JACK sucks and is bad and its developers should feel bad. (Not game-related, more music-production related, but I felt like throwing that in there. I tried to use Ardour this week and it's made me a bit militant.)
And anyway, the point wouldn't be to support all platforms, just the prevailing ones, so I'd say your remarks miss the mark.
It's easy to dismiss this with saying "it's part of the deal" but if it takes too much effort for minimal gain it's not worth it. I'm fine with breaking changes if they improve things but there should be at least a compatibility later for some period of time.
Unfortunately, simply shipping different versions of a library is not enough to provide compatibility. There are two issues at work: 1) as mentioned before, platform ABI changes 2) ELF works with a big flat symbol table, so if you load library foo version 1, but a dependency loads library foo version 2, then things blow up.
I guess I should thank all you naysayers for the compliment.
It took a week to have something that we could use. A week!! In a couple of months we had a serious product.
This is what you get when you program with standards in place. Developers love to use the last trick of the week, with new proprietary languages but you should not let them if that means not being portable or easy to upgrade.
Even TF2 kept crashing with a cryptic error until I found the solution on some forum post.
thats a very ironic commandline option!
[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb
Speaking of which, why is a native binary better than wine? I know wine is typically associated with pain, because the app developers don't support it properly, but then native doesn't work /at all/ without developer support.
If developers /are/ going to support linux in some way, why should they support multiple platforms [distros] when they could support one [treating wine as a minor variation on their existing windows support]?
(Not trolling, I'm sure there are good reasons that I haven't had enough morning caffeine to think of; plus it might be useful for someone to make a definitive list somewhere)
Team Fortress 2 for example plays better and faster with a higher frame rate on Ubuntu 12.10 Linux than it did on my Windows 7 Home Premium on my Acer laptop.
Oh yeah check out PlayonLinux http://www.playonlinux.com/ to run some Windows Video Games under WINE for Linux. The Windows Steam Client works great on WINE and most games can run on WINE just fine as well. For some reason Civilization V plays better under WINE than it did in Windows 7. I would like to see a Linux native version of Civilization V come out, it would rock. The PlayOnLinux Python client configures different WINE versions and profiles for you and it can even install Internet Explorer from version 1 to 8, and some versions of MS-Office (not all) if you really need them.
I see in the next five years a move to Linux as the next big gaming platform by major video game makers. The reason being Linux runs video games better than Windows, and does not cost as much as an Apple Mac OS X gaming machine. Microsoft is really killing themselves with Windows 8 and Windows RT, and software companies are considering moving to Linux as a result.
I think the outcome is clear: some of these games will make a lot of money. Big publishers and devs will want a cut of the pie.
Of course everyone evaluates the platform with the planned obsolesce of desktop machines and the walled gardens.
Lets hope to see some A class titles on linux in 2013.
Steam just needs to allow for trading/selling of used games, and it would be even better, but I'm sure the publishers have a lot to say about that. Hopefully the EU forces that feature on them.
> Nvidia has announced a huge increase in Linux gaming performance for their GeForce R310 drivers after almost a year of development alongside Valve and other game developer partners.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/11/06/204238/nvidia-doubl...
After how much trial & error?
I realize Linux users are not Windows users, but how well would WoW have sold if the installation was as painful as a Wine setup can be for Joe User? If the install-to-run experience is a pain in the arse, this is a barrier to adoption. In commercial terms, this has financial ramifications.
Not defending Wine as an excuse for native ports though, don't get me wrong.
Nothing to see here.
He's comparable to a gambler who by the Roulette table repeats the mantra "It will hit 12". Eventually he'll be right, but that doesn't make him a credible source when it comes to predicting what number the ball will hit.
Big companies like Valve and Blizzard have a ton of different projects that never see the light of day. In the case of Linux clients it's most likely because the man hours needed even to support them doesn't pay back in new customers.
The bankruptcy angle is being played up as the decision-makers are trying to ram a sweetheart sale through to ensure their own lucrative exit from an increasingly-difficult business. (Instead of actually considering competitive bids or seriously seeking funding to cover them until the money starts rolling in again.)
A group of shareholders has just filed suit over the issue.
In any event: there's no chance they stop making games and thus having an interest in the current platform upheaval.
Can someone explain why? Can't a game be run in full-screen mode anymore? Would there be technical issues during the installation of the game? Privileges issues? No more Direct X?
"The belief in the development community is that Microsoft will make Windows 8 a closed system, an operating system that seeks to more stringently control, much in the way that Apple does with Mac OS X and the iOS platform. This would allow Microsoft to better monitor the quality of applications running on its platform, but it will also wall off the most widely used operating system in the world from myriad developers. PC game makers use Windows because of the openness of the platform and its ubiquity. If Microsoft takes that openness away, what will developers do?"
Ref http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/blizzard-agrees-with-...
It may become more difficult (or just less convenient) for the consumer to select software that falls outside of the "Windows App Store" (whatever it may be termed).
This type of distribution model (Steam being another example) would be counter to Blizzard's apparent philosophy on the matter.
So I don't know that "Windows 8", the operating system, is bad for Blizzard. But maybe "Windows 8", the direction, is.
Again, 100% speculation. No necessary basis in fact, just ideas bounced around.
That's the impression I get from both Apple and Microsoft's recent OS/App Store directions.
A few years from now the apologists for each will be saying "Well hardly anyone but super techies ever used those options to disable verification anyway, so I understand why they turned them off".
No, because that would be fantastically stupid of them and none of them are stupid. Not even Microsoft--I mean, I think the Metro slop is a joke, but no, they're not stupid enough to do that. What you are peddling doesn't even make sense because precisely what the fearmongerers (see, this goes both ways, think about that next time you call me an "apologist") because it is fairly unlikely that anyone is ever going to be writing native applications from an iPad so it really does follow that they need a mostly-unencumbered environment from which to make the software that makes the whirly buy-the-iPad-buy-the-apps wheel go around.
Which, as it happens, is what Apple has said for quite a while that they're doing: iOS is the daily-driver car and OS X is the do-work truck. Which, though I don't use iOS myself anymore, is a completely reasonable division of labor for the majority of computing tasks.