Ed Hewitt Yet another Tech & Gaming Blog!

Getting Gamers on Linux

Continuing on with my series of posts from my articles in Full Circle Magazine. The next article is about how we can get gamers on to Linux, this is taken from Issue 22.

Linux is great! We all know that, but there are two major things I believe need resolving before we can say Linux is ready for the mainstream. The first is video editing and the second is gaming. Gaming is a very important part of the success of Linux, so there is much work to do before we can safely say that Linux is the platform of choice for gaming. In order to achieve this, I believe there are three key areas that need addressing: games, distribution, and services. Each of these areas is important for gamers, especially PC gamers.

The number and quality of games available for Linux is probably the most important area. Although it has many great games, it needs more games from major developers, such as EA or Activision. The big PC games need to be ported to Linux, such as World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, Battlefield, and Call of Duty. These are the games that all the gamers are playing. There is no point in trying to move gamers to Linux if they can not play the games they love. Linux does have ways to make it easier for people to switch from Windows to Linux, thanks to great work from the Wine team. Games like Counter Strike do work in Linux. However, the support is not perfect. I much prefer native games to games played using Wine. It's important that we try to convince developers to develop games for Linux, and to port games to Linux. Hopefully, as OpenGL gets better, it will be easier for developers to do this. We may be able to help, by making the transfer from DirectX to OpenGL as easy as possible.

So, you may be thinking, now that we have these major games for Linux, how will we get our hands on them? The best solution for Linux is digital distribution. I do not see Linux games ever being in shops. It would be far better to have a website or online store from which we can download Linux games. I believe a service like Steam is the best solution to getting games onto Linux. This solution is looking likely to happen, since Steam is apparently coming to Linux!

The final area is the services. There are many services which PC gamers use on Windows. These mainly consist of communication methods. The two major services are the gaming networks and the VOIP services. The gaming network is heavily used by gamers for talking to friends, joining games with each other, and for clans/guilds. The biggest network is Xfire, with over twelve-million users. It is important that this service is accessible for gamers on Linux. Luckily, there is a plugin for Pidgin, called Gfire (gfire.sf.net). The second major network is fairly new: Steam. This online store now provides a social networking side for gaming, which is used in a similar way to Xfire. Sadly, there is no way to use the Steam community feature yet, unless you use Wine. The VOIP services are very important for clans/guilds to use during a match. The whole team needs to be in a VOIP channel to be able to talk about tactics during a match. The two main services are Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Teamspeak has a native Linux client, but Ventrilo does not. However, Ventrilo does work very well in Wine.

If we are able to achieve success in all these areas, then we'll have a platform for Windows gamers to move to. I believe it is possible to achieve the last two areas, because we can develop these services within the Linux community. The difficult part is getting the developers on board. Apple is having a hard time trying to get the developers on board with their platform, so it is likely that Linux will have a bigger challenge.