[NTLUG:Discuss] Wine presentation

[Steve]

Steve Baker wrote:

> Daniel Hauck wrote:
> 
>>Sounds like a chicken-egg thing that might work itself out either way.


I don't have high hopes for any sort of "let's run this Windows game on top of 
Linux." Games demand a lot from code and hardware. With this type of quicksand, 
non-native solutions that even somewhat consistently perform acceptably would be 
a remarkable achievement.


> Well, we've tried the reverse - starving the Linux market of Windoze games
> to create a market for native Linux games for all those dedicated Linux
> types who won't boot into Windoze...it didn't work.


It will be a while. The economics are not yet there for the game market in 
Linux. I think it might've been Carmack who said something like: You make games 
in Windows in hopes of making some money. You port those games for the MacOS in 
hopes of making a marginal amount of money. You port games to Linux for love of 
Linux but you're not doing it for money.

A lot of people thought Loki did pretty good work, and games are one market 
where the Linux community is actually willing to pay Windows-esque prices. But 
the market isn't large enough to justify the port, and so Loki's in financial 
troubles. Some people think that Loki just had bad business sense, but I suspect 
that it's the Linux game market that's the killer.


> So - what's left?   We can't write good native games ourselves (well, not
> in anything like enough quantity) - we can't get other people to write native
> games for us - porting non-native games doesn't seem to be a good enough
> business model - so the only thing left is to make non-Native games work on our
> OpenSource platforms without having to port them...hence WINE.
> 
> I don't see any other way forward.


Or...we could let nature take its course until the Linux desktop is in higher 
numbers. One day, you'll see a small shop just make games for Linux because of 
love and enough money to at least break even. Later, the market will grow large 
enough to maybe justify a port. After that, maybe you get natives. Nothing wrong 
with this; that's how everybody else did it.

Steve