[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: Games on Linux (was: Wine presentation)

cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com cbbrowne at cbbrowne.com
Fri Nov 16 14:02:10 CST 2001


On Fri, 16 Nov 2001 11:24:13 PST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Steve <steve at cyberianhamster.com>  said:
> How about this? Can you find a starving musician and or artwork guy at 
> the local big-ass college? There are always some. What about overseas? 
> Maybe you can tell them, I can't pay you upfront, but I will give you a 
> cut of all the software proceeds. Or I'll pay you a little upfront and 
> the rest is a cut. At the very least, they get something on their resume 
> (if it's a successful product, it'll be worth more than the amount they 
> get at that level). They're starving; they're open for negotiations.

Starving folk need to have _some_ of the money now...  If the
negotiations are centred around the notion that "you'll be spending
time on my project, and be _worse_ off it it doesn't fly high," that's
_not_ going to sell well.

> Maybe you could ask for donations from your users. Tell them that
> you will make 0 economic profit for yourself (but still cover your
> costs) to find good people. If you have tens of thousands of
> interested users, can you squeeze an average of $0.50 from each to
> fund initial development for a game that will be released to the
> masses for free?

See <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/freeeconorg.html> for info on a
discussion of this very sort that took place some time ago on
gnu.misc.discuss.  Some people were pretty astounded by the notion
that it would even be _plausible_ to have a way of sponsoring creation
of games.

The problem is of getting some money out of people up-front, and
that's a tough problem.

> > So why do you think there are Mac games but (virtually) no Linux games?
> > 
> > IIRC, there are more Linux users than Mac users out there in the world.

> I hear this a lot, but could somebody point out a source for these
> numbers? I would also like to see the criteria.

> But let's assume it's true. Just because Linux has more users
> doesn't mean that there's a bigger market out there. If I am selling
> luxury goods, I can target the tiny but affluent suburb or go into a
> poorer part of town but with many more people. I will probably be
> better off going to the affluent suburb. It depends on what you're
> selling and who you're selling it to. Let's assume that there are
> more Mac users out there, a product for
> insert-enterprise-software-here probably won't sell that well on the
> Mac side as the folks who need this probably don't use Macs to do
> it.

The MacOS folk are accustomed to paying a fair bit of money to get
software; that makes them a fairly different "culture" than the Linux
"culture," where vast quantities of software is available "for free."

> I think it's same with the current Linux user composition. There
> just aren't enough people out who either (a) want to play these
> games on Linux or (b) want to pay for these games to justify a port
> or (c) something else I can't think of on the top of my head. It
> could be (b), but I think it's mainly (a) and wil cover my ass and
> say some (c).  Again, I think this will change as time goes on.

I'd have an easier time buying (b), personally.  (Read that sentence
several times, interpreting the context differently; it's full of
horrible puns...)
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc@" "sirhc"))
http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
"Of course 5  years from now that will be different,  but 5 years from
now  everyone  will  be  running  free  GNU on  their  200  MIPS,  64M
SPARCstation-5."  -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992.




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