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Monday, May 10, 2010

Why there is a Market for Linux Games

Linux users are starved for quality games - there is no doubting that. Bring up the topic of a Linux port on most gaming forums and you will typically see responses about the market share of the operating system, that Linux users are cheap (thus why they use a free operating system) or there are too many package formats to support (which really is a non-issue). I'm not even going to bother trying to argue the point of market share, we all know Windows is a large majority and Linux is the under dog - lets leave it at that.

Lets stop and think about something for a moment - nowhere near all of those Windows users are gamers. In fact with the world we live in that is so heavily populated with consoles I would be surprised if even half of the people using Windows are the type that go out and purchase the latest and greatest PC games (or even play casually). Linux users on the other hand are typically a more tech savvy bunch and tech savvy people more often than not tend to gravitate towards being gamers.

Alright - enough speculation and assumptions, lets look at some cold hard numbers. Two recent games that had successful Linux ports would be 2DBoy's World of Goo and Frictional Game's enumbra Series. 2DBoy reported that since they released their Linux port of the game 10% of their total game sales have been for the Linux platform. Frictional Games reports a similair statistic - in fact 12% of their sales for the Penumbra series up to this point are for the Linux operating system.

Still need more convincing? If you have not been made aware of it yet as of my posting this there are still two days left to participate in the Humble Indie Bundle experiment. The Humble Indie Bundle offers your five games (including World of Goo and the first of the Penumbra series) at what ever cost you can afford. All five of the games are fully cross-platform (Windows, OSX, Linux) and when you make your donation you are asked to mark which operating system you are purchasing the games for. Take a look at the following statistics up until this point from the donations they have received:


Judging by that pie chart Linux users appear to make up almost 25% of the donations and their average donation amount is almost double that of the average Windows user donation. This means that of the 571,048$ donated thus far 142,762$ is from Linux users. But remember Linux users are cheap and their is no money in Linux game market - right.

Games that already exist on only the Windows platform need ports as well. In fact there is so much demand for some of these games to run on Linux that Codeweavers has a business commercially supporting many of these titles on the Linux operating system (it's not perfect - but for now it works).



Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac



Wine 1.1.44 vs Vista Benchmarks

Dan Kegel has been running some DirectX and OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu + Wine and Windows Vista, Here is the results of Dans recent benchmark test.

Yagmarkdata now has data from five different benchmarks: 3dmark 2000, 2001, 2006 and heaven2_opengl, d3d9, and running on a semi-whimpy e8400 dual core box with an nvidia gt 220 card, on both Vista and Ubuntu+Wine.

First, the good news:
the OpenGL version of the Heaven benchmark achieved 99% of the expected framerate on Wine, not bad, and it looks good, too. The 3dmark* demos look good in general.

And now the bad news:

in general, Wine's D3D version achieves only half to three-quarters the performance of Vista's. The Heaven D3D benchmark doesn't look right in quite a few ways (and one regression is very recent), requires more video ram than on Windows, and hangs at the end. 3dmark2001 has a strange water problem in the nature test at 30 seconds. 3dmark06 lacks shadows in the firefly forest.

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Sunday, May 9, 2010

Wine 1.2 Release plans

Wine 1.2 release plans were sent to the wine-devel mailing list from Alexandre Julliard the Wine project leader. Here is the release plans and Alexandres email to wine-devel.

Folks,

The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release.

Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June.

As usual the code freeze will become more and more drastic as we get closer to release, so if you have major changes to make, now is pretty much the last minute.

I'd encourage everyone to look through the list of nominated 1.2 bugs, and also to check the regression reports for anything that might be in your area. We should strive to have as few regressions from 1.0 as possible, so regressions fixes will have priority during code freeze. And of course changes that don't impact the code, like translations or test fixes, can go in until quite late.

--
Alexandre Julliard