[mdlug] An Idea inspired by....

[Ron Blanchett]

For gaming you have to have the market share first, the same goes for
hardware driver support, and almost everything else you can think of.

You have to have the market share first after that everything else will follow.
Look at it from the Games dev studio or hardware manufactures point of view.
They are in it to make money and if there is not enough market share
to justify the expense in development time then there is no point in developing
an item.

To keep it simple lets say it costs $10,000/platform to develop a game.
After you run the numbers you find out that on Windows you will make $100,000
after you recoup the $10,000 you spent to dev on that platform. And you find out
if you dev for Linux you will end up losing $5,000 because the market share is not
there. Now you might say that you are still making $95,000. But keep in mind that
you are in business to make money not lose it so knowing that you won't dev for linux.
This is what happens every time any company in the world starts looking at dev'ing for 
Linux and sees the sales figures for whatever they are trying to dev for linux. This mostly
only applies to commercial software but might apply to some hardware.

On the note of why I switched from Windows to Linux exclusively.
Yes, exclusively not a single windows box in my house, not 
even in a VM. I was sick of reloading windows every few months 
due to instability cause by just about everything that got loaded on
any of the windows systems I had. Windows update caused it, loading
an Office suite caused it, loading games would cause it. Linux has been
way more stable for me than Windows ever was. I still play games but not
unless the Dev house makes a Linux port available. In most cases you
still have to buy the windows boxed version in the store but you just need it
for the license and some of the game files off of the disk. ID is great for Linux
support, EA doesn't offer it so I don't buy there games, other dev houses are mixed.
If a games doesn't have linux support I don't buy it. Same goes for hardware, no Linux
support I don't buy it. For that reason I use NVidia almost exclusively due to
ATI's poor linux support and slow release cycle for updated drivers.



Using Games as an excuse to switch back to windows is a poorly vialed excuse.
-Ron 

----- Original Message ----
From: Wolfger <wolfger at gmail.com>
To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Sent: Monday, January 8, 2007 5:03:42 PM
Subject: Re: [mdlug] An Idea inspired by....

On 1/8/07, Ron Blanchett <rrcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
It isn't that there are not enought games it is that there are not enough of a market share.

You have to win one battle at a time.



Chicken vs. Egg... 



You have to start with getting people to use Linux on there desktop and then you move on 

to the Hardware makers, the Game Developers, and the like to get them to publish drivers, games and such for Linux. You have to have the market share before you can get everything else.





If you have market share, you get everything else. If you have everything else, you get market share. The problem is, how to get one or the other when you possess neither. Do you seek an egg to grow a chicken from, or do you seek a chicken to lay your egg? Games will not support Linux until Linux has market share, but Linux will not have market share until it can play games that are in demand. It's a dismal picture. 


When I reinstalled Windows, my initial idea was to dual boot, and only use Windows for gaming purposes. However, this did not happen for two reasons:
1) Dual booting is a royal pain in the buttocks.
2) Virtually everything I want from Linux (except stability and freedom from worrying about virii) is available (or has a work-alike) on Windows. I even got an EXT2 driver so that I can access my Linux data partitions. Does Windows still frost my shorts? Yeah, fairly often, but it's getting better as I discover more tools that make it more Linux-like. And a lot of it is F/OSS.


-- 
Wolfger
http://randomsynapsefiring.eponym.com/
AOL IM: wolf4coyot
Yahoo!Messenger: wolfgersilberbaer
Skype: wolfger88
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