EPTStarcraft 2 on linux, why not? - Page 4
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EximoSua
171 Posts
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On January 09 2010 00:11 Chuiu wrote: That's not what I've seen. I know many people that dual boot their systems or have two computers, one for Linux and one for Windows and gaming. Sure there will always be those who only use Linux or don't game or both but most of the people I know aren't like that. And from a business perspective, Blizzard makes no money off those people. If they have another Windows box or dual-boot, the lack of a Linux version will not drive them away from Starcraft 2. The only customers they gain from producing a Linux version are those who run Linux exclusively yet still pursue the gaming hobby, which is an extremely small fraction, as you said. | ||
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JohannesH
Finland1364 Posts
And theres some market of Linux users who dont care that much about games but might buy this when they just want some game without worrying to technical side. But it must be pretty small. | ||
520
United States2822 Posts
On January 09 2010 05:51 EximoSua wrote: StarCraft 2 on Linux: Why? You know how much potential money they could make if the huge number of Linux gamers out there (face it, most people who use Linux are gamers or were gamers at some point in their life) actually bought their game instead of pirating it? | ||
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On January 09 2010 09:19 JohannesH wrote: And theres some market of Linux users who dont care that much about games but might buy this when they just want some game without worrying to technical side. But it must be pretty small. lol Linux users are all about worrying about the technical side! Otherwise they wouldn't have spent the time to figure out Linux.  On January 09 2010 09:36 scintilliaSD wrote: You know how much potential money they could make if the huge number of Linux gamers out there (face it, most people who use Linux are gamers or were gamers at some point in their life) actually bought their game instead of pirating it? Again, the number of people this would affect the purchase decision for is small. Just because a large portion of Linux users are/were gamers does not mean that it affects their purchase decisions. For most people, either they were going to buy the game to begin with, or never had an interest in buying it. Do you really think the number of people in the camp of "I will only buy this game if there is Linux support for it" is significant? And I'd be very interested in how you think using Linux has anything to do with software piracy. Certainly, I doubt that deterring piracy on Linux is any more a useful endeavor than deterring piracy on other systems. | ||
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Aim Here
Scotland672 Posts
And I'd be very interested in how you think using Linux has anything to do with software piracy. Well, compared to Windows users, far fewer Linux users are running pirate copies of their operating systems. Most likely none at all, outside of the SCO group and a few router manufacturers and the like... Other than that, I can't think of any likely correlation. | ||
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arcticStorm
United States295 Posts
On January 09 2010 10:25 Aim Here wrote: Well, compared to Windows users, far fewer Linux users are running pirate copies of their operating systems. LOL, is it even possible to pirate linux? | ||
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butter
United States785 Posts
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Rea-Rea
United States42 Posts
On January 08 2010 05:39 Puosu wrote: Blizzard could take a huge leap forward if they were the first big company to do this, although I am not informed on how difficult it is to make a game compatible with both platforms it seems like a hugely profitable investment. Epic Games made sure that Unreal based games could play on Linux systems. UT '99/GOTY needed a .run file off a website, whilst UT2003 and 2004 had the .run files on the CD's. Regardless. WarCraft III, as well as the regular StarCraft can run fine under WINE on linux. It all depends on configurations, if they're correct, proper, etc. It doesn't just revolve around wine, we're talking it also revolves around your kernel, and other basic configurations. Debian or Ubuntu always ran fine for me in that factor, even gentoo did, running on the gnome panel. However, under other distributions, I had issues. I had to rework kernels, rework configurations to get things right. Sure, it would be beneficial for blizzard to make a linux installer, I mean hell, they DID make Mac versions of Starcraft and all of that, right? (Even though it was made WAY before OS X). They should be perfectly able to make a linux version of Starcraft II, with ease. Since starcraft II should be for the Mac, they should be able to make a linux version. Because I mean, really, it is posix compliant and has a XNU kernel. (Darwin). And you can't tell me the people at Blizzard don't know how to program and work with linux, anyway. I can guarntee many of them know how to do that. I mean shit, come on, if they're planning to have StarCraft II for Mac, they can EASILY make a linux version, right? It makes sense. | ||
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ven
Germany332 Posts
On January 09 2010 13:08 arcticStorm wrote: LOL, is it even possible to pirate linux? Of course. Why shouldn't it? | ||
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meeple
Canada10211 Posts
Hrmm... I think he's talking about it being generally open source. But I beleive there are pay versions of linux out there that aren't free. | ||
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Aim Here
Scotland672 Posts
Okay, since there's a little bit of confusion here - most parts of most linux distros are usually open source, and every Linux user does have the right to give away the open source parts to their friends, as well as change their own software, and distribute their own, modified versions. So it's very difficult to be using linux in violation of the license agreement - you basically have to supply it to people in violation of the rather liberal, licenses, for example by redistributing it without offering the source code to the parts covered by the GNU General Public License (every Linux distro has at least one part - the Linux kernel itself - covered by that license). Some companies have managed to do that, or other, more obscure ways of breaking their license agreement, hence my joke about the SCO group and router manufacturers. But I beleive there are pay versions of linux out there that aren't free. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not open source, or they're easier to 'pirate' than, say, Ubuntu. Buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux is actually rather expensive (it's the 'support' that costs the money - businessmen are happy to pay $lots for someone being on the other end of a phone who will give out bugfixes and fix problems) but people still have the right to make copies and give them away to their friends. In fact there are versions of Red Hat out there that contain almost exactly the same code packaged up with a different name and downloadable for free over the internet, like Centos and White Box. | ||
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MamiyaOtaru
United States1687 Posts
On January 09 2010 05:31 Proleter wrote: A lot of games that are ported to Mac OS also don't have OpenGL support. They use 3rd party libraries which emulate the DirectX API with OpenGL and other libraries. Right, they may not be written against OpenGL, but still use it through those libraries you mentioned. That's how Wine handles Direct3d apps for instance: by translating the calls to OpenGL. So those games do end up using OpenGL, even if they aren't written against it, which might not say much for the ease of programming for it, but certainly doesn't speak against its capabilities. And good call mentioning "other libraries". The obvious difference between OpenGL and DirectX is that DirectX does more than 3d graphics. OpenGL doesn't do sound and input etc. You'd need something like OpenGL+SDL to replace (or emulate) DirectX. | ||
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HeartOfTofu
United States308 Posts
On January 09 2010 09:36 scintilliaSD wrote: You know how much potential money they could make if the huge number of Linux gamers out there (face it, most people who use Linux are gamers or were gamers at some point in their life) actually bought their game instead of pirating it? You're probably going to have to buy the game if you have any hope of playing on Battle.net anyway... As for those that don't care about playing on Battle.net, I doubt offering a Linux version of the game is going to affect their decision as to whether or not they will download a pirated version. Also, there's really not a huge potential for profit in the Linux market. The amount of people that use Linux is miniscule and the amount of those users that would refuse to buy Starcraft 2 solely because there is no native Linux client is probably close to non-existent... It's simply a cycle. Until there are enough major game releases that run natively on Linux, the majority of gamers will never switch over to Linux completely. They will continue to either dual boot or keep second gaming systems. On the other hand, until there are enough gamers that use ONLY Linux without dual booting or having second boxes, game developers will never have a financial incentive to start porting a significant amount of their major releases to Linux. Essentially, the only way for Linux to become a serious platform for gaming would be if the game companies themselves decided to turn it into one and quite frankly, there's no financial reason for them to since that would mean they have another platform to worry about. It makes more sense from a business and development standpoint to keep your gamers consolidated on a single platform. | ||
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obesechicken13
United States10467 Posts
 Can't you run something on linux that makes the computer think it's using windows? And if you're enough of an expert to be using linux, wouldn't you have two computers; one for windows? | ||
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rredtooth
5461 Posts
On January 08 2010 06:59 muse5187 wrote: yeah when i was running linux i used cedega and sc ran without any problems. could get on abyss (iccup) but couldn't get lan latency to work so it was worthless. worked fine for lan play though.I had the same problem, then i stole cedega off torrent and never looked back at the mouse slowdown issue. | ||
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rredtooth
5461 Posts
On January 10 2010 12:34 obesechicken13 wrote: first question: no. unless you are talking about virtualbox or vmware which doesn't do 3d graphics very well.I'm using linux right now Can't you run something on linux that makes the computer think it's using windows? And if you're enough of an expert to be using linux, wouldn't you have two computers; one for windows? second question: no. what kind of logic is that? | ||
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-fj.
Samoa462 Posts
Honestly, from a market point of view, whether you consider money or user statistics (money) then making it so that it can easily be ported to linux is just stupid. BUT In my opinion, money and statistics are a really shitty thing to have driving your life. Sure, maybe that only makes sense on a personal scale, but companies are made up of people, aren't they? I would much rather see something like blizzard releasing it's iron fist grip on their matchmaking service. No lan? Are you kidding me? No one in this world is trying to make something good for those who want / need it, we are all to caught up in making something that someone will buy whether they need it or not, and in the digital realm, making something that must be bought to be used. IMO, something as great as BW can only be replaced by a product produced to meet standards of excellence, not to sell well. So I'm saying blizzard shouldn't make so much money. So what? It's their duty to do as they please, but It's not like making bank gets them or the people working for them anywhere. You can't buy happiness. The only thing it's good for is that it holds them together and gives them a common goal to work together towards: making a profitable game. But it's not necessary, and I'd much rather see them working together to make an awesome game, as a "company" held together by the love of the art. TL;DR fuck capitalism, lets make games because we want to | ||
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keV.
United States3214 Posts
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On January 10 2010 14:39 -fj. wrote: He means having a windows partition, I think? Honestly, from a market point of view, whether you consider money or user statistics (money) then making it so that it can easily be ported to linux is just stupid. BUT In my opinion, money and statistics are a really shitty thing to have driving your life. Sure, maybe that only makes sense on a personal scale, but companies are made up of people, aren't they? I would much rather see something like blizzard releasing it's iron fist grip on their matchmaking service. No lan? Are you kidding me? No one in this world is trying to make something good for those who want / need it, we are all to caught up in making something that someone will buy whether they need it or not, and in the digital realm, making something that must be bought to be used. IMO, something as great as BW can only be replaced by a product produced to meet standards of excellence, not to sell well. So I'm saying blizzard shouldn't make so much money. So what? It's their duty to do as they please, but It's not like making bank gets them or the people working for them anywhere. You can't buy happiness. The only thing it's good for is that it holds them together and gives them a common goal to work together towards: making a profitable game. But it's not necessary, and I'd much rather see them working together to make an awesome game, as a "company" held together by the love of the art. TL;DR fuck capitalism, lets make games because we want to Then there are a million ways they could please a larger portion of their customers at a lower cost, some of which you listed here. Even from the perspective of creating the best game possible, porting the game to Linux really isn't a good use of their time. | ||
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