Why not develop for Linux too?

I am curious why developers do not develop mainstream games for Linux as well as Windows. Reading a discussion on DIgg about it. Many gamers would love to drop Windows (especially since Vista came out) but have to keep coming back to play their favorite games.

Is it merely a resource issue (time, money, etc…) or is it a piracy issue?

I imagine it’s a resource issue. Adding a third platform to support to satisfy a tiny number of potential customers is not resource efficient. It may also be that whatever language Positech’s game engine is written in does not make for painless transitions to Linux. Maybe Positech just doesn’t want to deal with the ‘fun’ of Linux game compatibility with the often spotty/sketchy/hackish hardware drivers.

Hi. I use my own engine and it was written to use directx on windows. I quite enjoy graphics coding which is why I didn’t use a 3rd party engine, but shifting to openGL would be hell, and the size of the market doesn’t (yet) make it worth doing. Apparently Democracy 2 now runs fine on WINE if that helps.

BTW cool avatar, garak is my fave DS9 character, alongside Weyoun and Quark.

Fellow Trek fan, cool.

I think you need to have a partition for linux. You can create new partitions if you happen to have unused space (space that is not used by any of the partitions on the hard drive), or you can split current partition into 2. If you have, for example, a partition a size of 90gb empty hard drive space, you can split it into 60 and 30 gigabytes, so you would operate the windows on the 60 gb partition and the linux on 30. I’m not an expert so correct me if I’m wrong

[quote=“galactus2099”]
I haven’t seen a computer that uses Linux in quite some time. What percentage of computers use Linux as their OS? I think the reason why they don’t develop any games for Linux if because there isn’t enough computers out there to have good sales on that platform. I’m sure that is disappointing news for all Linux users around the world.

Dual booter here. Fedora and Windows Vista on my laptop. Each has their uses…but the vast majority of the games that I’ve got are on the Windows side. I’d wager that’s why most people who are dual booters haven’t completely made the switch to some flavor of Linux.

That galactus guy was some pathetic human spammer, typing any old crap to get his post count high enough to let him slip through moderation before he tried to pimp crappy registry cleaning software, which is no doubt virus-strewn.
God I hate spammers.