After a long struggle to survive, THQ finally belly-flopped and its corpse promptly rushed to the chopping block, where its bits were auctioned off to an assortment of scavengers. Most of the big names went quickly, but until this week a number of these properties still remained unclaimed.

“What happened to Homeworld?”, was a common phrase on forums and the like. And now we know!

For a reported measly $1.35 mil, the Homeworld IP now belongs to Gearbox. I have trouble writing this without gagging a little, but am trying my best not to be too much of a dick about it. Here are my thoughts.

Let’s start with the positive. I tried to buy a downloadable copy of Homeworld 2 about a year ago, since my own box is long gone, and could not find any digital outlets that sold it. Gearbox have said that they will make the original games available again. This is great news.  Soon we might see them on Steam or GOG, so us nostalgics will have a chance to experience these great games again. And with any luck they will make the OST available too.

I am also tremendously glad the bid did not go to teamPixel – seriously, what were you fools thinking donating money to that?

They have also created a forum to ask players what they want from Homeworld. Discussions on there range from earnest requests for future Homeworld games, to bile-filled posts telling Gearbox how much they suck and how terrible this new development is.

I’m a cynic, so I’m leaning more towards the dung pile in my assessment of things, but I’d like to think it’s not without reason. Gearbox have made a career out of shooters. Worse, their recent output has included the stinker that is Aliens:Colonial Marines with the abysmal Duke Nukem Forever not trailing far behind. Between those we had Borderlands 2. This game bored me to tears. It just tries so damn hard. For some, the loud and bombastic nature of it appeals, but even so – it’s the opposite of what Homeworld is.

Homeworld is poetry. When you look around you at those magnificent skyboxes, you get a sense of scale that makes you feel tiny. As you send little scout ships out to explore, it feels far away. The story unfolds at a well-measured pace, balancing the epic battles with the desperate reality of being adrift in space, far away from your home – away from anything you know. Underneath it all, you have a soundtrack made up of wailing middle-eastern sounds and an assortment of earthy tones and acoustic instruments. All of this adds up to a sort of melancholy that causes you to empathise with the fleet, even though very few individual characters are explicitly developed.

This is the thing I can’t see Gearbox pulling off, not if they simply stick to what they know. Can they do subtle? Can they do emotion? Or at an even more basic level… can they do real time strategy with good AI? The shitty AI in Aliens:CM tells me no.

I imagine a creative meeting there goes something like this:

“Woah, bro… you know what would be badass!?!? If we make gunships that like shoot 100 missiles that each launch like 100 fucking missiles man. Is this gunna be an FPS? Cuz like maybe we can have gore splatters in zero-G. That’ll rock! Fuck yeah! AI? Who gives a shit about AI… people just want to blast shit, so we give ‘em shit to blast and bigger guns to blast it with. Who’s this chick plugged into the wires? Maybe we can make it so we see more of her tits. This is gonna be awesome… can you pass me another beer?”

I am not optimistic at all, but am hopeful. Maybe they can still do something worthwhile with it, but before they do that they really need to take a step back and discover what it is they bought for $1.35mil.

I leave you with this:

“We just don’t give a shit any more”, said an EA spokesperson, “People will complain no matter what we do, so now we just do whatever we want. Fortunately for us, people are still dumb enough to give us their money”. And they showed us yet again how much they believe this, by finding a new and devious way to milk the consumer for more money.

And they do need more money.

This year they will be investing millions into new technologies to change the numbers on their box-art to reflect the new releases of the previous year’s titles. They have also made great strides into combating piracy. First up, the latest PC release of Hacky Sack Hero; Hacky Sack Hero 2013, will come with a mandatory hacky sack USB dongle. And they predict a 0% piracy rate on the PS3, by not actually even releasing the game for PS3.

“It’s not just for ourselves that we need to make this much money”, said our source, “we serve a greater master that lives deep beneath the ocean and will one day rise up to destroy everything”. The EA rep notes that their dark lord’s chosen disciple is none other that CEO John Riccitiello, which is an anagram for ‘Inject Chilli Roo’, “although I am not sure what that means, but we must keep feeding him. He’s just not happy feeding off the souls of terrified kittens any more”.

Truth is, EA can’t really justify their behaviour with any of this since there’s no proof of the existence of their dark lord, although we have our suspicions about Riccitiello. Nor have they been able to prove that this “piracy” problem is not just something they made up over a long lunch break.

What other money-milking plans do they have for the immediate future? “Well, we just spread some bad rumours involving pubic lice about Capcom, which caused our stock value to rise by 2.8%. Our permanently employed financial rumourologist did a stellar job on that one.”

The company has also recently been granted patents on the letters X, O and D on control pad buttons, and will be litigating soon. They also filed for patents on the letters Y, M, C and A – but those got rejected. Some believe this is part of an aggressive strategy to enter the console market with an Origin console. There will be 7 games available for it.

“I don’t really mind”, said EA fan Josh Riccabello, “I have bought every EA title since like ever and plan to continue supporting them. I’m happy to help, even at times when I can’t play any EA games because I have been booted off the system for breaking a rule in their absurdly complicated EULA. I’m a bad person for breaking the rules, and I must be punished. Punish me EA, punish me some more.”

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

Right then, here’s a list of things to consider, in no specific order:

Linux desktop users might already be Windows gamers.

Yeah, so? This is actually quite a loaded little bit of info. It requires little research to verify and says a lot about marketing strategy. With so little to choose from, many Linux desktop users have kept a Windows partition around for gaming. For some it’s the only reason that Windows partition exists.

If you want Linux gamers to buy and play your game on Linux, then make sure to release it for that platform on day 1, or at the very least giving them a clear idea of how long they have to wait for a native version. Because if you don’t, they likely just end up buying it on Windows.

What’s so bad about that? Well, for one, you get a poor representation of what the market split is. Your sales info will tell you that the Linux version sold hardly anything when you finally get around to releasing that.

You might think that you are making and selling games, but indirectly your task is also to nurture a market.

Case in point: I have been keeping an eye on Crusader Kings 2 in Steam/Linux’s Top Sellers list. The newly-released “Republic” expansion seems to be almost consistently higher in the list than the base game. To me this says that many Linux players of CK2 already own the game, previously bought on Windows, but now that they can play it in their operating system of choice they just pick up the new expansion/DLC for it.

Flibit: So here’s something I’ve found in my experience: When you sell games via a cross-platform network, particularly Steam with SteamPlay available, a Linux/Mac user never thinks of buying that Windows version on Steam as buying the Windows version; they’re really looking at it as an investment in the future port. Like right now: The Cave probably got a ton of sales when they announced OSX/Linux support, even though right now it’s not marked for Linux.

Communication with your customers is important, but it’s a two-way street; you cannot have genuine communication in any aspect of game development unless the customer is able to provide feedback.

Whether or not you release a Linux game on day one, it’d be great if there were a system that allowed customers to explicitly mark which platform they intend to play it on. Whether it’s “Linux natively, when they port it” or “screw it, I’m playing it in Wine,” having this information would be really good to have.

We kind of get these stats from Steam, but only when the platform support is there. I don’t think we have _any_ Mac/Linux stats for Waveform before July 22, even though we were openly talking about port work as far back as April. The best I’ve got is people telling me they bought it so they could download it as soon as it was out, or so they could use the content to run my test binaries.

Talk to the users as much as possible, but provide a system to let them talk back.

Steam dedicated gaming hardware.

This is a key element in market growth. It’s Linux gaming for non-Linux users. However, much like the release of any new console, potential customers are going to care less about what OS it runs and more about what games they can play on it.

There will be some confusion. People will think that “Steam” means that their entire Steam library will be available for it. Far from it. At the moment there are just shy of 100 available games, with a similar amount on the immediate horizon. It’s a good list, but not good enough to convince many potential buyers.

Furthermore, games that will succeed here have to be controller & couch friendly.

Despite Valve’s popularity and track record, it looks like many studios are still hesitant to jump in. We’ve heard very little from Valve about what their plans are to get more studios/publishers to jump in, and we can only hope they have something up their pipe.

I suspect most people won’t mind if a subset of the games run via a WINE wrapper, tailored to run on the system, as long as their playing experience is not any worse than they would have had playing on a rival console or their own PC.

I can think of a good reason to buy this hardware regardless of how much you can game on it though. It’ll likely be subsidised. It can be used as a regular PC and you can install any OS on it, so if you want a decent small sized PC at a discount, this is it.

Sony used to let you install alternative operating systems on the PS3, but they did a 180 on that and have made this very difficult. This is money talking. People buying PS3s to build super-computing clusters won’t be playing games on it, and therefore Sony won’t be recouping the money of the hardware they sold at a loss.

With any luck, Valve will remain true to their initial promise of a platform that’s not locked down.

Flibit: This is one I was thinking about earlier this week, and while I think the technical stuff can be talked about to death (read: “Sure, the boys in Ryan’s lab can make it hack-proof. But that don’t mean we ain’t gonna hack it”), but I found the business end to be far more interesting. Not really the “omg the implications of the Steam box will end the universe!” part so much, but how the non-technical people running the industry will look at it.

Here’s the thing: when a console comes out, a publisher yanks the leash that’s carrying their developer and they go “Hey, you: you’re making that game thing for this magic box thing. I dunno a thing about how it works, you figure it out.”

We, the customers, or just gamers, know it’s Linux. But as far as the people in the board room are concerned, you’re just programming for another console.

360 SDK? PS3 SDK? `sudo yum install gcc-c++`. Same crap, isn’t it?

Because of how GNU/Linux works (in a legal sense), it’s the only desktop OS that we can take and re-fit it for consoles. Valve could never _ever_ get MS to greenlight something like this, and obviously Apple would rather ship Apple TV or the Mac Mini themselves while pushing the App Store.

So here we have a console that devs build for like any other console, except that the OS is actually a desktop OS too! This is how Valve intends to get people making games for Linux. They don’t have to convince people to develop for the OS, they just have to get people to develop for the console. Same thing, hugely different impression to their potential partners.

Just do. Don’t play wait and see.

It’s like a party full of introverts. You want to dance, but nobody else is dancing. So you wallflower along with everyone else. It’s a shit party. But if someone makes a move and just gets out there shaking their arse, then you will get others following. The more people see a reason to be there, the more they will dance. And the more people dance, the more people will feel comfortable doing so.

Flibit: Even more important than being the brave one is simply not giving a damn about what the others think. Sometimes you’ll get on the dance floor and begin to walk the dinosaur, and nobody will join in. They may very well point and laugh. But if you end up having a better time than they do, what does it matter? “Oh, sorry, I can’t hear you laughing through the soundproof walls that I was able to make for this money fort I built!”

Serve the environment, and the environment will serve you.

A game like Crusader Kings is not likely to be very big on the Steam console, being very much a “PC” game. Some games will do better on the console than on the desktop. Both sides are Linux, but they are two distinctly different groups with a bit of crossover. But both groups need to exist, and the more of one group exists, the more it makes a case for the gaming platform to exist, and by extension feeds the other group.

It’s the party again. Some want to slow dance, some want to flail their arms about like the kraken rising from the depths. It’s important that there is a dance floor, that there is music and people participating.

If your game is on Steam/Linux, but perhaps not selling too well, either because it’s a game that has been around for a while, or just because it has not had much exposure, it’s still valuable for it to exist within that ecosystem. It keeps the party going. And later on when a sale comes along and your game gets included in an indie bundle or something similar, you’ll be glad.

Flibit: I think my favorite ports during the time that I was getting all these ports done were the ones that had already been released for Windows ages ago. Blueberry Garden and Eversion were released in 2009 and 2010 on Steam, respectively. Really old in the world of games! However, I liked them both enough to want to port them anyway… they weren’t huge sources of income at all, but my customers have looked at those games again, all these years later, and my clients have definitely noticed this. Like an expansion pack, fixing platform support is a good way to get everyone to pay attention to your game again. Getting that attention all at once with a simultaneous release? Well, look at The Cave again…

If cross platform development is hard for you, you’re doing it wrong.

I almost feel like I don’t have to explain this one. I don’t feel that “making games for Linux” should be the final goal here. The key is adjusting your development strategy so that your third party tech and toolchain does not get in the way of your ability to deliver to multiple platforms.

Conclusion

We’re living in a time of change, and it’s important for developers to remain agile. That is all, kbai!

Crusader Kings II

I was just going through my Steam library to get an idea of its contents and how much of it stands a chance of being ported to Linux and what it would take. Almost half of my total library is made up out of games from Paradox, thanks to a ginormous publisher bundle I picked up on a Steam sale two years ago. Didn’t think we would see anything from Paradox, aside from perhaps titles like Magicka. See, I was going on the assumption that the newly announced Steam hardware would be the main motivator for big publishers looking to port games to Linux, and since Paradox’ titles tend to be interface-heavy and not very couch and controller friendly, they would perhaps not be enticed.

Seems I was wrong. Crusader Kings II plus a hunk of extra content went on sale on Steam yesterday. It’s a popular title that has been around for going on 1 year now. Conquer the world by warring, politicking, plotting and conniving. It’s a typical Paradox grand strategy title in that it offers depth and complexity, with a bit of a learning curve upfront.

Note, some people with ATI graphics cards have reported some issues. If you are one of them, be sure to bug Paradox for fixes.

This launch trailer shows one possible scenario you might encounter.

The Cave

Ron Gilbert’s first game since going to work at Double Fine with his former LucasArts colleague. It looks to be hefty doses of Gilbert humour, telling the tale of seven characters each with their own motivations, and a talking cave. The gameplay is presented as a side-scrolling platformer, but at its heart is an adventure game. It goes on sale on 23 January, published by SEGA and you can pre-order on Steam. Trying very hard here not to grump about SEGA and their recent stupid patent lawsuit as I am a big fan of Double Fine and Ron Gilbert’s work.

Double Fine seems to have grown into a very Linux friendly company, despite it being a new thing for them. It began last year with a Humble Indie bundle, and their Kickstarter, and we saw continued support for them from Linuxers during their first public Amnesia Fortnight jam which produced a bunch of Windows-only game prototypes. And now it looks like they are continuing on this path. I hope it pays off for them!

Good times. This indeed looks like it’ll be a grand year for Linux gaming.

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. Interestingly Amnesia: The Dark Descent seems to still be topping the best sellers chart, despite having been around for a while. Anyhoo, here are a few more:

Team Fortress 2

Valve’s first full-blown port of one of its own titles. A hat-peddling free-to-play title that continues to be massively popular and it runs like a dream in Linux. It was originally assumed that Left 4 Dead 2 was to be their debut launch title, but I suspect the choice of going with TF2 was largely due to the fact that it’s free-to-play and that the smallish sample of beta testers would all be able to try it out. I suspect we’ll be hearing news of more Valve titles soon, since they just announced their plans for a Steam/Linux based console.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/440/

Serious Sam 3: BFE

This is how first-person-shooters used to be. Less emphasis on plot, cover mechanics, RPG-style features, “realism”, etc. and more focus on mayhem and run-and-gunning your way through hordes of monsters of all sizes.  The developer, Croteam, has spoken out quite a bit about how they feel about Windows 8 and why they are serious about supporting Linux.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/41070/

Killing Floor (plus a myriad of DLC)

A co-op survival horror game. Similar to SS3:BFE, the emphasis here is on mayhem and a pinch of ridiculous thrown in for good measure.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/1250/

The Journey Down: Chapter One

This was just added a few days ago, but it has been available on Desura for a while. It’s a high-def remake of a free game from Swedish studio Skygoblin. The engine was built in-house and they have had a Linux version since the beginning. It’s a charming surreal tale featuring characters with faces modelled after African masks (but with Caribbean accents), and follows the tale of two guys about to discover the truth about the fate of their long lost father.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/220090/

The Book of Unwritten Tales

A comedic fantasy tale that pokes fun at common RPG tropes with a mostly non-existent fourth wall. The humour mostly works, and the graphics are gorgeous. A prequel, “The Critter Chronicles” is also available, but not having played it myself, can’t comment much.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/215160/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/221830/

FTL: Faster Than Light

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, FTL has won many awards and has been well received generally. It’s one of my favourite games of 2012, and is now available on Steam/Linux. This is what “emergent gameplay” is all about. You’ll find yourself living a different story with every new ship and crew you play with. Not to mention cursing at the sky every time a mistake you make gets one of your crew members killed, or if an unforseeable situation crops up, with similar-fated results.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/

Unity of Command: Stalingrad Campaign

This is a fresh entry into the turn based strategy genre.  The historic setting might seem fit only for serious strategy war game neckbeards, but it has a way of getting its hooks in you and soon you will be repeatedly saying “just one more turn”. Gameplay is deceptively simple, but the encounters can be balls-hard.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/218090/

Waveform

Hypnotic action-puzzler. You manipulate a waveform to guide a signal along it. There’s a plot about a dying galaxy but who cares about that when it’s just so damn trippy. Great soundtrack too.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/204180/

Trine 2

Released on Linux mid 2012, this gets my vote for most gorgeous game of the year. It’s a puzzle platformer featuring three characters; a Rogue, a Mage and a Warrior and lots of physics puzzles. Can be played single player or co-op.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/35720/

The list of available games right now is still small, but there’s some quality stuff on there in almost every genre. Game-porter Ethan Lee (@flibitijibibo) keeps an up to date list of Steam/Linux titles at http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/ and it’s worth noting the long list of titles that have native Linux titles, but not on Steam yet.

There is also some indication that we might be seeing a native Crusader Kings II soon, for which I am rather excited. And I just had a look in my crystal ball, which might be in need of a buffing, but I am putting my money on some Double Fine ports in the near future, perhaps even in the shape of a DF Humble Bundle.

The Linux gaming market right now is smallish, and a lot of developers first want to wait and see if the market grows before committing to it. But the market is not going to grow if nobody is making games for it. So to me, these people who support Linux despite the market being small, are the real heroes of the hour. Them and those who support them by buying games.

So yeah, support some developers. Buy some games, ya losers!

And indeed here it is. Darksiders, Saints Row 3, Metro 2033, Red Faction: Armageddon and Company of Heroes with a few expandalones. Windows only, with DRM (except for the soundtracks). Charities on the roster this time are Child’s Play and the American Red Cross.

If you are a smart person with your ear to the ground, some foresight, and a few bucks to spare, you’d have used this opportunity to buy THQ stock. Its value has risen almost 38% since yesterday.

THQ is a company with some well known financial woes. Troubled by staff  layoffs over the past year and a reported $50mil. debt that they are defaulting on. It has been reported that the company has gone into a forbearance agreement with Wells Fargo, temporarily protecting them from any steps taken against them for their debt troubles, but also giving them until mid January to actually prove that they can recover.

This Humble Bundle seems to be part of that strategy. Money from the bundle itself is highly unlikely to result in a complete bailout for them, but it might aid them in honouring this agreement with WF. The aforementioned stock price is the other factor. It would appear that for a short period at least, the company will look attractive to investors.

There’s only so much one can do to combat poor management though, and I have to wonder if this is just delaying the inevitable. As far as publishers go, THQ ranks fairly low on the evil-o-meter, so with that I am hoping this works out for them.

Humble is taking quite a bit of abuse for this though. And it’s easy to see why. This bundle is the exact opposite of anything one might associate with a Humble Bundle.  It’s a AAA publisher, the games are Windows only and come with DRM. It’s undeniably a good deal, but some are expressing concerns that this might harm the Humble brand. It’s basically a Steam sale with pay-what-you-want and a charity component. I guess we’ll know when the next indie bundle is released if this “cool experiment” of theirs did any harm to their brand.

I’m looking at it this way: How different the market has become, that people from AAA-ville are now coming to people from Indie-ville for help. Good or bad, things are not how they used to be.

Elite was a leap in gaming that happens quite seldom these days. It was a technological marvel of its time. The first truly 3D game. An open-world game with a persistent player profile at a time when publishers demanded a short playtime, three lives and a score. They also managed to cram a huge universe of planets, each with an economy and political system, into computers with as little as 32KB of RAM. Ki-lo-bytes. At its heart it was basically a reputation grinding game, with no real goals beyond that. You got a universe to play in, things that you could do in that universe, and the stories you experienced beyond that point were your own.

For me, a kid in his early teens, the game had a certain cozy vibe to it. I was taken away from being an awkward kid in school and got to escape to this other place where I got to be frickin’ Han Solo. I sucked at trading, and hell I still am clueless with money, but damn was I good at blasting pirates. And those Thargoids, man. Scary things at first, but eventually I got a cocky grin every time my hyperdrive failed and I got dumped in witch-space, because I knew I’d get to pop a few of them.

Some years later, Elite II: Frontier landed. It was bigger-better-more, but ultimately could never hope to achieve that same leap that the original gave us. Arguably, few games ever have.

So today rolls along, and suddenly we hear that Braben is Kickstartering a new Elite game. Why am I not happier?

The immediate culprit was the lack of a pitch video. Even in cases where I have backed before watching the pitch, the video was there for me to watch after. On top of that, the blurb on the front did a poor job of telling us what was to be so great about a new Elite. Sure there’s mention of the procedural generation techniques going “further”, but not much of value beyond that. What does “further” mean? What details will star systems have? What’s the extent of the supporting economic and political simulation? Will it be Dwarf Fortress with space ships? (my ideal game, if you must know – give me $2 mil. and hell I’ll make that ma’ dayum self)

It’s easy to dismiss the lack of a sales pitch, perhaps that one would follow later. But it feels as if instead of working to sell this to us as a thing we should want, instead it’s a call-out to all suckers. It seems lazy, and as one of the aforementioned suckers, I feel a bit insulted.

The size of the funding target is also a concern. Elsewhere was stated that the money they are asking for would not be nearly enough to cover development of the game. If true, then this ups the chance of non-delivery. The cynic in me, which I fear today is the entire me, says that it’s just a passive statement to encourage people to pledge more. The game supposedly has been in development in some way or another for over a decade. One would think there’d be more to show for it by now. It’s making Duke Nukem Forever look downright dandy by comparison.

Then there is the company. Frontier Developments have not produced a single thing worth crowing about. The last game that might have been worthwhile, was The Outsider, a game that never made it out the door. The company is also burning through absurd amounts of money, and likely to go belly-up in a year or two unless they could come up with a bail-out plan. This Kickstarter pitch seems to be that bail-out. So why don’t we all just band together and help those folks out in the same way we did for Double Fine? Go to this link and click on the “Key Financials” tab. £1.25 mil. is not going to fund a game at that company that’s only going to be released in 2014. If that downward trend continues, the company will be bankrupt before the end of next year, even with the Kickstarter funding.

If you suck at managing money, just shoot a few pirates.

My other concerns about what the game might be, whether it could live up to its name, my feelings about how David Braben might have possibly screwed over Ian Bell, or anything else is moot. Heck I might be wrong about all this, what do I know? They might pull it off in the end, but right now my confidence in this is low.

Of the UK Kickstaters so far, I have backed Simon Roth’s promising-looking Maia and will soon throw a few coppers at Big Robot’s Sir, You Are Being Hunted. These projects both have big potential and if funded will both deliver – I have not a single doubt or any reason to have any.

For my open world space game fix, I am looking forward to X: Rebirth next year. I do not need Elite. I played Elite already, it was great but it’s in the past.

My taste in toys started to shift around the time I was about 10-ish when I got my first computer, a weird little piece of kit called a Sinclair ZX81. Man that was the shit. I spent hours learning how to write little games in which you did things like steer a letter V to avoid an oncoming  flood of letter Os.

I discovered store-bought games when I got upgraded to a ZX Spectrum, much to my parents’ dread. The games on that were sold on cassette tape. Unreliable, prone to stretching, and sometimes the tape player would totally mangle the tape. Thankfully they were easy to copy. A smart gamer would make a copy of a brand new tape, and then just use the copy.

Later I would move on to a Commodore 64, for which I managed to eventually get a used floppy disk drive, and then later an Amiga, which made use of 3.5 inch disks. By then, publishers were already old hats at trying to make games as copy-proof as possible. Amiga games were seldom made that they could be installed on a hard drive. You popped the disk in, rebooted and waited for the game to load. Making backup copies of disks used to involve the use of software that made byte for byte clones of  disks.

I sometimes wish I had kept all those systems, and the games I had for them. But I doubt any of the original tapes and disks I had would have survived this long. It has been almost 20 years since I got my last Amiga, an A1200.

These days my collection seems to be mostly in pure digital form. Sure, I have about 50 to 100 PC games on CD/DVD, but it’s far outweighed by the 200-ish DOS/Windows/Linux games that live on Steam, GOG, Desura and Humble Store. How many of these will I still be be able to play 20 years from now?

Is a collection really a collection if it has an expiry date? How many people collect exotic milk? Yeah, didn’t think so.

There’s value in preserving games. We must! 110 years later and we can still watch Le Voyage dans la lune, or read and be terminally depressed by the works of the Bronte sisters. Games are important enough that we should also preserve their legacy.

It’s not that easy, however. Games have dependencies that must be dealt with before they can become truly immortal. Often this means they need to undergo a slight transformation. A reincarnation. Much like how you’re not likely to be watching Le Voyage dans la lune on film, but rather on an archive web site or YouTube you’ll not be likely to run games in their original form many years down the line. Physical media degrades, and operating systems are a constant moving target. We can’t expect OS makers to keep up backwards compatibility indefinitely.

For game cartridges, disks and tapes, we have emulators and the ROMs/disk images. For DOS games, we have DOSBox. Sometimes games are made using an engine that is separate from the game assets. This allows us to play SCUMM games like old LucasArts titles using the open source SCUMMVM. Similarly, id had the foresight to open source their game engines, allowing people to keep the binaries for DOOM, Quake, etc. up to date for modern systems.

A case could also be made for porting WINE to platforms other than Linux, including Windows itself. It’s a lot of work, for sure, but in future this might be the only way to play older Windows games. Having the longevity of your game rely on open sourced runtime environments gives it a far better chance of a long healthy life.

What will you be digging up to play for old times’ sake 20 years from now? Not Diablo 3, that’s for sure!

It is sad, but some circumstances make the collectibility of a game nearly nothing. Multiplayer games where all the servers are in the hands of the vendor, always online DRM… Heck any form of DRM can make the future of a game  uncertain. Will you be able to activate a game online in 20 years? Probably not. MMOs? Possible, but  for the most part unlikely. There’s also the litigious side of it that I’d rather not get into. Modern publishers would rather have full control over consumer behaviour than to let people just buy a product from them and keep it. “Games as a service” is more than just a buzz phrase, it might well become the norm.

It’s perhaps not something most people think of when buying a game, but ask yourself where your favourite past and present games will be many years from now.

Linux gaming is seeing some much needed attention of late, and a lot of this seems to come from Kickstarter projects. There are some trends however that raise a few questions for me, and perhaps a gripe or two.

When support was always in the plan
Sometimes support for the platform is promised pretty much off the bat, as was the case with the Double Fine Adventure, FTL and Broken Sword: Serpent’s Curse. These are usually companies that either already had Linux development talent in-house, or were already using tech like Unity3D that can deploy to multiple platforms.

Double Fine’s promise of Linux support seemed a bit random and new for them, but later it surfaced that they were already deep in the process of getting Psychonauts ready for the Humble Bundle via Ryan C. Gordon. They eventually settled on a write once / deploy many solution for their new game in the form of Moai.

Coming late to the party
This swings in one of two directions. Upon realising that there is a demand for Linux support, some projects will take it upon themselves to make that happen, without demanding any additional funding.

Others however, will use it as a big ol’ dangling carrot, offering Linux support only after certain stretch goals are reached. These stretch goals often exceed several hundred thousand dollars. I’m looking at you, Shaker a.k.a “Old School RPG”. For projects well into their development cycle with a lot of tech that needs to be ported, I can understand this requirement. But for ones where not a single line of code had been written yet, this seems like a tacky way to try and boost support for a project and raise additional money. If you choose your tech up front with multi-platform support in mind, you don’t need quite so much extra cash to achieve it.

Offer it on a platform, and you will get support from people who use that platform and are interested in your game. That’s it. Give and you shall receive.

Obsidian had their Linux support as a stretch goal initially, but shortly afterwards announced that they would support it regardless, likely after they decided to use Unity3D. The latter decision no doubt as a result of talking with their pals over at InXile, who also had Linux support as a stretch goal for Wasteland 2 – fully expecting to spend a lot of effort on it, but with Unity’s recent push that effort obviously fell away.

Gripes aside, Kickstarter is a platform where project funding is driven very directly by consumer demand. The fact that Linux is used as a lure for crowd investment means there is definitely consumer demand for games on our every-day-less-obscure platform.

To those developers and studios offering tri-platform support right out of the starting blocks, you are making the right decision. Your stats won’t be skewed, because you will see how much support you get from Linux users outright. And for those users who decide to change to another desktop operating system, they get to take your games with them.

Also, penguins don’t eat carrots!

A cursory glance at the comments system reveal a few trends among participants mostly missing the point:

Headdesk #1: People asking for AAA titles
Within just one page I see requests for Battlefield 3, I am Alive, Battle For Middle Earth, Fable 2 and Angry Birds. AAA titles need no help from the public to have their games included on Steam. If their titles are not already on Steam, it’s likely due to reasons outside any of our control.

Headdesk #2: People asking for console games
It’s amazing how many commenters are requesting for games to be ported from consoles. It’s  just not the place for requesting such things – ask the developers of those titles instead.

Headdesk #3: We need “real games” not “indie trash”
A feature specifically created for indie games gets flak for being exactly what it is supposed to be?

Headdesk #4: Fake submissions
The submission system is easy enough that pretty much anyone can submit their game. The result is multiple people posting Half Life 3 or other joke entries (or maybe they aren’t joking). It causes  the perceived amount of submissions to be rather a lot larger than needs to be. Valve is fairly quick at deleting these, but unfortunately they are outnumbered.

It saddens me because the above groups are likely to downvote games just because they are not Call of Duty or God of War. How can an indie dev with hopes of being on Steam have any hope of getting a fair chance?

What’s worse is the potential negative effects of the mob mentality that often rears its ugly head in gamer culture. Sometimes gamers band together for good, but mostly we just hear about it when the trolls gather to sling hate-speech at someone for being female/gay/whatever. It’s just as likely for angry mobs to downvote games for reasons other than the actual quality of the games in question. Or the usual groups of *ists that will instantly balk at and shoot down any game that might not fit into their narrow mindset.

I see comments all the time of people who actively label all indie games as rubbish. When they do elaborate on their reasons it usually becomes clear that they have just dismissively chucked all indie games in a mental box and given it labels like “hipster”, “pretentious”, “fugly”, or whatever else they can say to make them feel like they are in line with whatever the current trendy thing is to hate on. And yet they get to take part in ruining the fun for those who do like indie games.

In government elections there are usually some basic requirements for being a voter. Usually nothing too complicated; you must be a citizen, and you must be over a certain age. Steam account = citizen: check. The logic of the latter being that you need to be mature and (heh) sensible to be a voter. Nothing like that exists here. Anyone with a Steam account gets a voice. “It’s just games”, one might argue, but why should a developer’s livelihood depend on masses of people who can’t fathom why Minecraft, Guild Wars 2 and Diablo III are not on Steam?

Developers themselves also need to keep in mind that this system is not intended as a promotional tool. They need to do their own promotion to drive people to their Greenlight pages to vote. The downside of this is that the average socially awkward developer who has been slaving away quietly for the past two years to create some fantastic little gem of a game, is less likely to get noticed among the masses of submissions.

Let’s hope that Valve can refine the system to perhaps make it a bit more fair. It’s not an awful idea, but I fear that for a system put in place to manage the standards of indie titles that end up on Steam – the system itself needs some way to manage the standard of people that gets to have a voice.

Until then, I guess there’s always Desura.