Games and Linux Adoption
At Andrew Min’s blog, there’s an entry advocating game development for Linux as being crucial to wider adoption of the platform:
Finally, Linux companies also need to start paying attention to the open source gaming community. Why? It’s lacking. However, gamers can get excited about free games. They just have to be up to par with commercial games. The problem is, commercial companies pay hundreds of employees to build a game for several years, while many competing gaming projects only last several years before the developer moves on. It’s time for open source developers to start getting paid for their jobs. Who better to pay them than the companies that benefit most?
I can’t say I think it’s likely Canonical or Red Hat would start sponsoring game development, and I think the apathy of the game publishers in general towards Linux is unlikely to change until there’s a bigger audience. It’s a chicken-egg issue, but unfortunately in this case I believe we’ll have to muddle through expanding the userbase without game parity with Windows; Mac OSX has at least twice as many gamers, and they have the same problem.
