Showing headlines posted by jacog

When a platform exclusive game is announced, for Windows users this is the difference between buying/playing via one store or launcher vs. another, but for a Linux user, it's a whole other bag.

A new report shows Linux experience is in greater demand - and, hiring managers say, harder to find - than in past years.

The word on the street seems to be that Linux is set to be a commercially viable gaming platform. And the way it looks right now, this might actually prove to be true. There's still some uncertainty amongst both developers and gamers though. At the core of a lot of it is this: Developers are hesitant to make games for a market as small as this, and gamers are hesitant to adopt it as a gaming platform because there are so few games for it.

I asked Ethan Lee if he had anything to add to what I wrote, so I have included his view on the various topics.

Not only has the immensely popular Crusader Kings II from Paradox gone on sale on Steam, but Double Fine has announced that their adventure game disguised as a side-scrolling platformer, The Cave, will also be on sale on Steam from the 23d of January. With any luck this sets the tone for the rest of the year.

The Steam beta for Linux has been running for little over two months now, and there has been a slow trickle of new titles being added to the list. Here’s a look at a few titles.

Many of the current games are ones that featured in the Humble Indie Bundle previously, so I imagine sales figures for those would not be that great, but it is nice to now be able to have these games as part of Steamplay, the buy-once-play-anywhere feature of Steam.

A simple truth. A consumer-demand driven system like Kickstarter using Linux as a lure for crowd funding of games, means there must be consumer demand for Linux games.

Broken Sword, the three-parts-so-far adventure that started more than 15 years ago with an American tourist named George Stobbart chasing a clown trough a sewer, is returning for another instalment. Charles Cecil, creator of the original has turned to Kickstarter to seek $400,000 funding. The series has always been popular, as is evident by the fact that one day in it’s already 25% funded. They plan to finish development by April 2013, and will initially be releasing for Windows, Mac, Linux.

Uber Entertainment have added the promise of Linux support to their Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, and not as a stretch goal. Platforms now confirmed are Windows, OSX and Linux.

A what-if piece over at Rock Paper Shotgun suggested the idea of Valve making a SteamOS. While a nice idea, I’m going to go with no. Some words from Gabe Newell in an interview with GT.TV lead me to think that my earlier speculation is closer to the truth, but not quite right either. Valve is not making a SteamOS, nor is it making a SteamBox. All they’re doing is enabling hardware manufacturers to build Steam-enabled custom hardware, whether it be “Steam Certified” desktop PCs or settop boxes.

Over the past few months, some of the most disruptive news in gaming has been from Valve. The company seems to be making a baffling sharp left-turn into completely new territory. On the surface it shows a few basic components of its master plan, leaving us to only speculate on what the rest might be. The most ambitious of these revelations, is the announcement that they are planning to try and get the entire catalogue of 2500 games on Steam ported to Linux.

Na’Tosha and Levi, the two developers at Unity3D who are working on the Linux publishing support of their company's popular game engine share a few thoughts on why they are supporting Linux.

Version 4 of the Unity 3D game engine will have native Linux support.

This shouldn't come as a big surprise since the Unity game engine coming to Linux has already been brought up previously and we've known it was being worked on, but now with Unity 4.0 it's finally materialized.

[not to be confused with Canonical's Unity or Unity Linux distribution]

Garnet Games is offering their puzzle game, Puzzle Moppet, free for 24 hours. Linux version available.

The third Humble Indie Bundle has gone live. As with the previous two efforts, again it would seem that the average Linux user is donating three times as much cash as Windows users.

The second Humble Indie Bundle is now available. Get five indie games, and pay however much or little you want. Some of the proceeds go to charity. The bundle includes the exciting Linux debut of the award winning puzzle-platform game Braid.

"For the past few weeks, I've been publishing an ongoing interview with Keith Curtis, an ex-Microsoft employee who walked away from a several-year gig at the software giant with a surprising conclusion: Microsoft's proprietary software development model is doomed, he says, and destined to be replaced by community-created open software."

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and... freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them (Not a Linux story, but it certainly falls in the "neener neener" category)

A series of punctuation marks used to convey a wink in text messages - known as an emoticon - has been trademarked in Russia, says a local businessman. Entrepreneur Oleg Teterin said the trademark for the ;-) emoticon was granted to him by Russia's federal patent agency.

The patent in the dispute, number 6,108,703, deals with a global hosting system that "allows a content provider to replicate and serve its most popular content at an unlimited number of points throughout the world" and was originally awarded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.

"That is why Microsoft is handing out $100m checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu-ray," he continued. "They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."