Topic
What would it take for Blizzard to port SC2 to Linux?
|
Edited by Fluke on 31/07/12 19:22 (BST)
I just thought id ask and hopefully a Blizzard representative can weigh in. Recently we heard news that Valve has been working to port steam and their games to Linux, we also have been doing fairly well with the humble bundles and technology wise Linux is just as good as windows for gaming. The issue we have always been told was numbers do we have the interest for games and we have proved that there is an interest there.
You guys already have SC2, D3 and WoW on the Mac. So this is the perfect time to ask the question what exactly do we need to do to get SC2 (or even all Blizzard games) ported over. Like can we get a poll of SC2 players who want it or something? I can point to a TL thread recently http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=348917 that got 112 votes if you do the math that is $7840 of people who paid for the game who want this (actually its more than this because not everyone is on TL and not everyone seen the thread so you can take that with a grain of salt). So going by that evidence you can deduct that there is interest here for it and it already probably paid for itself if you hire 1 developer to maintain it which is probably what it would take to port it in a year just for SC2 but id say the numbers for all games would be able to pay for a team of 5-10 ish at 50k a year and still be fine if the interest im guessing is there is correct. As for logistics if you just deploy on 1 distro lets say Ubuntu which is the most popular you would have a pretty easy target to start with and then you can move on to the other distros eventually if the demand was there. To be honest here for a minute, speaking as a Linux lover I would prefer to never use windows, I am much more comfortable on Linux the interfaces are all much better than the Windows interface and more convenient, I use Linux for everything else but SC2 and SC2 is the only reason why I have a Windows partition. I am 100% sure im not the only one who is like this. Its pretty frustrating. tl;dr: It already paid for itself pretty much going by the circumstantial (but id say fairly solid) figures of Linux users already playing or people who are interested in a version on Linux, deploy on Ubuntu since its the most popular, no reason not to do it since you already have SC2 ported to Mac. NOTE: I don't want this to become a Linux isn't for gaming thread, there isn't any good reason why Linux isn't a good gaming platform. Most game companies agree that the reason why they choose any platform is solely a business decision and not about what perceived notions of what platform is better. NOTE 2: Id presume someone will mention WINE so ill add a note about it. WINE isn't as good as playing natively, it doesn't work for all users, its fiddly and I would say going by how many frames I get that you couldn't get above gold league on the fps that you get using WINE (I get 30 fps under WINE and I found it very frustrating because you can't micro well like that). Native is better and natively Valve have been able to get 300 fps on Ubuntu which is staggeringly good. |
|
Edited by FeralWorgen on 31/07/12 20:11 (BST)
There is still a possibility that Blizzard would think about Linux as a viable platform. If you ask me, I believe they'll first want to see how things go with Valve.
I would certainly support a Linux client from Blizzard. Windows 8 is not looking very pleasant at all, and this is coming from the mouth of someone who has been an advocate of Microsoft technologies for a long time. Just wait, be patient. In 2013, 5% of all PCs and laptops released on the market will come with Ubuntu pre-installed. Because of the fact that the likes of Valve are starting to involve themselves in the Linux world, we should expect to see better quality drivers from AMD, and better driver installers from Nvidia (command line is not exactly fun for end-users if they want the latest drivers, Nvidia!). As it is now, Blizzard is already struggling to keep their Mac clients working on-par with their Windows clients, because they've been trying too hard to support no-longer-supported versions of OS X due to stubborn users not willing to upgrade their OS's. Because of this, their support policy for OS X has recently changed if you read the new support article and thread on the technical support board. When StarCraft II was released, performance on Mac was horrendous, same with Diablo 3's release. I can imagine that right now, they might struggle a little more with a Linux client when it comes to performance optimization. I'd say that as it is now, Ubuntu is a very user-friendly operating system. One of the major factors holding them back are games, and one of the major factors holding games back are questionable graphics drivers from big hardware manufacturers. The situation with them, though, is obviously improving quite a lot if you ask me. At the moment though, what keeps me stuck on Windows is games. I write C# code, but I do so in MVC4, which is fully supported in the Mono Framework. I don't need Windows for that. I do word-processing a lot, I tweet a lot of cynical stuff on Twitter, I play around with networking. This is all what I love doing on the computer, and Ubuntu is more than perfect with everything except playing games (due to lack of support by the game developers). If I could just have WoW and SC2 ported, that would be enough for me to make a complete changeover, even if the FPS is slightly lower. |
Well I think its already been hugely successful in terms of PR alone like every single shred of news coming out about Valve has been getting huge excitement. Like even a tweet linking to a piece of news about Windows 8 and the reasoning behind Valve porting from a VP at Blizzard got 200 articles in 2 days. Although I can see why it would make sense for Blizzard to sit back and watch id hope that they would at least look a little bit ahead and even get some work done to investigate it before they are a year behind the wave (if Windows 8 flops and Linux becomes a "gaming platform").
Yeah ive heard some good news recently about Valve working with Intel to improve their drivers and Nvidia's drivers have always been good and thankfully Ubuntu makes it easy to install them without any commandline crap. AMD is pretty bad but are always improving so fingers crossed that with new interest from gamers AMD and the others step their game up a bit.
This is a platform problem really Apple deprecate stuff and breakages occur while actually Linux is pretty stable at least for the moment its pretty stable until wayland comes in to replace X but that is the only big change and im sure ask any Linux company to help and they would jump at the chance. I help out with tech support for a game called HoN and they didn't have a Mac and Linux developer for a year and while Linux stayed stable and working apart from slight work arounds needed for different things. While Mac was broken a few times and actually didn't even have sound for 6 months because of a deprecation of something.
Hmmmm well maybe having more *nix developers would benefit Mac too and like I said above if they get it optimized once they won't need to babysit the Linux version too much. Also im sure Canonical and maybe Red Hat would help support it with packaging and would notify them of changes that may effect them so they can target their platform since it would be good business for them too.
Well im an Ubuntu developer too and I used to work at Canonical and they are open to suggestions about how to improve performance and usability of things and id say they would be open to fresh eyes if the games industry wanted to weigh in too. So the more the merrier and all that. As for manufacturers they will row behind it too if we could get Blizzard on board because then we would have what I would class as the 2 biggest PC games companies around supporting the platform. The graphics stack is already good enough to run the games and if we had big native games and more users that would be free to switch im sure that it will get even better than it is currently. |
|
I was at Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Paris 2008. They had a Q & A session with the World of Warcraft developers and I got the chance to ask them about a Linux port of WoW.
Unfortunately I don't remember the exact wording anymore, but the answer was a quick dismiss saying that they certainly wouldn't do anything like that. That was in 2008 though! |
|
Edited by FeralWorgen on 31/07/12 20:59 (BST)
Well, the thing you need to remember is that Blizzard never actually says "never" to anything. They usually word these things like "we have no plans for x, y, or z". This does not mean they'll not eventually rethink the possibilities of these matters, it means that it is currently not on their agenda. Blizzard has often gone back on what they "currently have no plans for," and this is why their PR chooses their words about these subjects carefully when addressing the public. The world of technology and gaming changes so rapidly, that they cannot afford to dismiss every single possibility as an outright "never, not in a million years." |
what would it take for blizzard to port sc2 to linux? money. |
|
Agree, it's money. By that I mean they will only dedicate people to it (which costs them money via salary + dev equipment) when the market share is high enough for them to make that money back. So if it is going to cost them 10% of their dev / support cost to add linux support then there needs to be 10% gamers using linux before they even start working on it. And the problem is there's not enough games on linux to start with, but if Valve can change that and bring the gamer market share of linux up to a profitable level then it's not just Blizzard that will start adding support, it will be everyone.
|
|
Up! I understand it's a money issue, that's the reason why the greatest sw companies (and I'm not talking about games alone) haven't been developing on linux, 'cause of small numbers. Well this is changing of course and, no matter what anybody else's gonna say, the credit goes to Ubuntu and Ubuntu alone! The time when Linux was just some "supergeek stuff" for people who had either time to waste making common tasks work seamlessly or some 200 IQ is now over, Linux is taking off as a good alternative to MS, user-frienly, fast, rock solid, light on resources and, most of all, supported by a thriving community. When Valve announced a Linux porting for Steam it was great news, so, let's wait and see what happens. I posted just because if you need to figure out how many gamers would welcome a Linux porting as wonderful news I thought I'd let you know I'm one of those, and I'm dead sure there are many others out there.
|
