Linux Majority in ET:QW?^H – Nope!
January 24th, 2008 by A08A reader, A08, pointed out the statistics for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at splatterladder.com:
Often enough companies are claiming, that the amount of people considering Linux for gaming is rather low. If you check the splatterladder for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars you will see in the live statistics, that the number of Linux players is just as high or higher as the number of Windows players. In this very moment the percentage of Linux players is 54%!
I don’t know how splatterladder derives their client OS data, but as of this writing the breakdown is still split in favor of Linux (57% to 43% Windows). This is rather surprising, as, if memory serves, id Software games usually have around 5% of players using the Linux clients. I wonder if this is an artifact of the server breakdown, which is a more understandable 60% Linux to 40% Windows.
At any rate, there certainly are many Linux ET:QW players, which is gratifying to see. Besides splatterladder and the official stats site, there’s the ET:QW Stat Reader, which will generate a table of performance data from your player name.
Edit: Thanks to Timbo for providing additional data that makes this look very unlikely: the open source first-person shooter Tremulous, which is included in some Linux distributions, has Linux clients making up around 16% of their total playerbase.
Edit #2: Thanks to r00b for pointing out this comment by Splash Damage‘s Gordon Biggans which explains the stats:
It’s players on linux servers.
January 24th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Who knows.
http://stats.enemyterritory.com/profile/linux23dragon
January 24th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Even if it’s only 15-20% like it really seems to look like- that’s compelling.
MacOS was claimed to have only 10-20% of the market and they were allowing games to be ported or they had studios making specifically MacOS games at that level. It’s a threshold level and I think it’s part of why we’re seeing Intel open their drivers, AMD giving out technical data to drive their GPUs without NDA and we see NVidia giving us the time of day as good as they give the Macs and Windows machines.
January 25th, 2008 at 1:42 am
This came up on the community forums, Splash Damage said it was the number of people playing on Linux servers not the number of Linux players.
January 25th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
So how do you know if you are playing on a Linux server or not?
January 26th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I don’t know of a way to tell offhand :(