Friday, December 8, 2000

Carmack on Linux -- 4:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack made a post on Slashdot giving The Official Position on why they chose not to have the Linux binary on the Quake III: Team Arena CD.:

We are going to continue to support linux in future products, but unfortunately it doesn't look like a strong business case can be made for it. The mac version outsold the linux version by quite a bit, and even that didn't hit 5% of the windows sales. Mac versions are still valid business cases, because the support is way easier than on either windows or linux platforms, and the sales numbers amount to something noticeable.

There is no way that a linux box will hit the shelf at the same time and have the same price as a windows box, assuming the publisher is making a maximum effort for the windows box. If this is truly a gating factor, linux boxed games just won't succeed.

Loki wants to get away from making games "convertable" between platforms, to force linux players to buy the linux boxes. I have issues with this. Not making executable binaries available online sucks. I hate binary patches, and requiring either patches from different versions, or the installation of all previous patches. Just releasing a new executable is so much easier.

Our options from here are to move towards a hybrid CD and pay Loki for official support (which makes linux support look like an expense, rather than a benefit), make a hybrid CD but leave the linux version in an "unsupported" directory, or just make unsupported linux executables available online like we used to.

It is going to be quite some time before DOOM ships, so we can't say anything definitive at this point.

Thanks Blue's News.

Case in point: when The Master and I bought an extra copy of Q3A to run a dedicated server with bots, we had two options. We could try to find an online dealer that had it and pay $49 for it or we could go to Best Buy or some such place and pay $25 (on sale) for the Win32 version and download the binary. Since we are on a tight budget, it was a no-brainer. As much as I want to support shrink-wrapped versions of Linux games, my pocketbook can't justify the cost difference.

News for 12/08/2000

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