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Comment by adamors | Hacker News Reader

The thing about Carmack and Linux is, that everything he says is based mostly on the QuakeLive port id did a while back (edit: he says this here http://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=45m26s). The port was released as an afterthought and quite a while after the Windows version), it wasn't publicized anywhere so naturally, people ignored it. From this experience he concluded that Linux isn't financially viable and/or there are no people interested in gaming on the platform. Now I'm not saying that Linux is financially viable, I don't know that. I just think that

- a lot of people do pay for games on Linux (look at Humble Indie Bundles, look at the indie titles or the recent titles on Steam)

- I know people who pay for games but are stuck on Windows because they play games. My guess is that these people would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if their games were playable under Linux.

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The dualboot issue is important here. Since most people who go out of their way to install linux on a computer are probably savvy enough to setup a dualboot it removes a lot of the economic incentive to port games to Linux.

This is because they know that most serious Linux using gamers will probably dual boot anyway so a Linux port of a game is a "nice to have" but won't stop somebody buying a game.

Well to be fair, some data is better than no data, regarding how financially viable linux is for gaming.

Oh but there is data. Linux users on Humble Indie Bundles constantly pay more per head than OS X or Windows users. http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/281...

My point is that Linux users are willing to pay for games, if they know about them.

To play devil's advocate - Linux users may pay more for the Indie Bundles, but there are only a few tens of thousand Linux users paying anything at all. The proportion of Linux users who buy the Humble Bundle is probably much much higher than the proportion who would buy a AAA game (for a number of obvious reasons). Games like CoD need to sell at least hundreds of thousands of copies for it to be worth the support costs.

I don't think it would hurt the game industry to do more projects which cost less than $50 million to produce, and sell for less than $60. Deer Hunter and Barbie type games (accounting for a huge proportion of US sales) sell for more like $20. And iOS games sell for more like $1-$5. But for some reason the latter causes people to ask where they can find the opportunities more than to sit around complaining about how iOS users are cheap and their data doesn't count because they aren't paying $60.

Are you referring to this quakelive.com? He said it's a failure as a free 2 play game online. What does that have to do with Linux? I don't think it even works on Linux, actually.

There is an offical, native Linux client that no one knows about. It was released in 2009. And because no one actually bothered with it, he concluded that the WHOLE platform is disinterested. http://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=45m26s

That isn't all he based it on. id games used to be available on Linux, with ports produced by Loki or with unofficial binaries by staff. They never brought in enough money.

He says "We have made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with the QuakeLive client and that platform just hasn't carried it's weight." Watch the video I linked to.

That the latest foray didn't carry its weight doesn't imply the earlier foray carried its weight.

And if Loki hadn't died around 2002, there would be many excellent Linux games to sell on Steam today, which is a much better platform for promoting, updating and DRMing the games. Bad timing.

I can't remember the exact quote but he said something a long the lines of "we tried porting quake live to linux and nobody played it". Which I'm sure is true, but the way he said it seemed to imply that this was adequate evidence that supporting Linux was probably a waste of time.

Quakelive worked under both Windows and Linux last time I checked.

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