

Carmack: Supporting Linux isn't worth the hassle at the moment  - speeder
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_asks_why_wine_isnt_good_enough/c89sfto

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brownbat
> "You probably can't even get an email returned if you are offering less than
> six figures to a top ten publisher," he noted. This may sound ridiculous -
> 'Who would turn away $20,000?' - but the reality is that many of the same
> legal, financial, executive, and support resources need to be brought to
> bear on every single deal, regardless of size, and taking time away from
> something that is in the tens of millions of dollars range is often not
> justifiable."

Valve is investing in the long tail with Greenlight. It might be that there's
more money to be made from platform agnostic indie games than from the best
offerings of the top ten publishers combined.

I think the other concern is that Windows isn't a sustainable platform for
gaming, since it's hard to predict what the platform will look like in any
given future iteration.

~~~
SkyMarshal
It may be hard to predict some things about future windows versions, but one
thing MS has been very consistent about is maintaining backwards compatibility
for the bulk of the software written for it. They've been acutely aware since
Day 1 that that is how an OS is made or broken, it's in their DNA, and I don't
think they're going to kill that golden egg-laying goose anytime soon.

~~~
speeder
Then why several XP era games already don't work properly on 7, and many
things don't run at all on 8?

~~~
Too
90% of the xp->vista compatibility issues stem from not running default as
administrator.

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Goronmon
The strange thing to me when it comes to game development on Linux is that
whenever the topic comes up, the discussion never seems to focus on whether
Linux is a good platform for game development, it's always that Linux is the
easiest answer to "If not Windows, then what?".

------
speeder
Too bad how they changed.

In the past Carmack and his agressive OpenGL coding and engine open source has
been one of the biggest reasons games on Linux became more possible and
better.

The efforts of the community to run his games, specially Quake iterations
(like ioQuake) were important to improvement of drivers and user space
usability.

~~~
vor_
Several companies dipped their toes in Linux gaming in the 90s, and the market
just isn't there to justify the effort.

