It is perhaps something that has not been addressed before in other places or that I personally have not seen elsewhere. A controversial issue in which I want everyone to put their own point of view, no matter how strong the opinion they have on it (yes Courage, you can run away with total calm 
).
Delicate but interesting ... There are several factors that I think are the possible causes of companies such as EA, Valve, Blizzard, etc. Don't carry your games to Linux, which I would divide into two branches:
The technique.
Drivers. Perhaps the least valid of all but with its weaknesses, such as that free drivers are not very competent for games and that some owners AMD Catalyst are considerably inferior to their counterparts in M $ Güindous MS Windows. And we have to be honest, even Nvidia, which gives very good support, does not finish giving everything and nobody wants to release the code of its drivers so that the community believe competent free drivers (although Nvidia has released CUDA, or has done it half). But it is something that can be overcome if a Linux gamer market starts to grow because that would force these manufacturers to move in favor and AMD said that the future for them was only Linux, Windows and I don't remember what else ...
Licenses and libraries. Another point that I heard echo around the web, technical as well, is that there are libraries that are not compatible with Linux for licensing reasons or because they are not ported. Ok, valid point in favor, but easily refutable; since almost anything can be ported to Linux, much more if it is C or C ++ (the best and most common used in the creation of games, although python is already eating them way 
) And because of the licenses, the truth is something that can also be easily overcome.
The "banana" reasons
And I say banana because they seem so ephemeral and silly that they make me laugh ...
"There are no potential players in Linux", which breaks my balls, I am one, one of many who love to play in our spare time or give hard-gaming when we see a minimum hole in the routine, and I am sure that many geeks-gamers would run riot to Linux (knowing what they know and being TRUE GEEKS) upon learning that large companies develop for Linux, and I know why many of my friends love to have a pc / console, they avoid a lot of expense and have it all in one. So, freedom, security and… Games? Utopia!
"If they are not free they will not play them" And the one who said this, what the hell was he stung? Where does it say that those of us who use Linux would not use something closed source like a game just because it is not free? Go fuck you, asshole ... I don't use proprietary applications relevant to my work because I think of my freedom, but a game is different, it's not easy to earn a living giving away games that have been in development for so long, it's a different market, very different . Also, as long as I don't have to compromise my data or make me download backdoor-type auto-executable things, that's okay, I want to play and they won't tell me that playing assassin's creed, offline, in story mode is going to steal my data and enslave me ...
But I can perhaps add my own opinion to the Taliban style:
There is a plot between Microsoft and the big game companies 
. It sounds crazy, crazy and unlikely, but I just had to say, something may happen out there, but why can't I find a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed anywhere? And see that it was doing well in sales ... Maybe some kind of anti opensource deal in the style of let's kill the Java licenses by the Dark and True Sith Lord / Sauron Oracle… I don't know, what do you think?
Editor's note:
Article written by dwarf en our forum. Any complaint, suggestion or verbal abuse, please send it to soynano@queteden.com.
I really see it from a purely commercial and development aspect. Almost all the latest generation games use directx11 or 10, that would imply switching the engine to opengl, crazy ..., just think that for example if you try to play a video with gl output, with an ati (catalyst), you will trash the video ..., the second thing is the little market share of linux, think that now they are starting to release some games for OSX, which has a 7-8% market share, imagine for Linux ..., I just hope that more good games come out like amensia the dark descent.
In fact, it is possible to port DirectX to linux, it was planned, but something stopped them.
Converting the game to OpenGL doesn't seem so crazy to me, currently almost all games if they come out for PC will also come out for PS3, and PS3 uses OpenGL ES, so it shouldn't cost them much either.
But well, I see more of the reason for marketing, it is true that Linux geeks like us, or at least most of us, are gamers, but I also think that our race
tophas a population that is too small in comparisonto other less evolved life formsto the ordinary citizen. If there is not as much public as they want, they do not bother ...interesting story
it would be appreciated if someone could put something like "top 10 commercial games compatible with linux" or something like that
I am creating a list as complete as possible in the forum, maybe they will upload it to the blog.
We will 😀
No, you leave me to my old man, so you have time to find a new girlfriend
Or they leave it to me, I already have a girlfriend and they are in charge of looking for a girlfriend and hating things respectively XD
Hi Elav. While reading the article, I felt something strange: it was not your way of writing, plus there is a paragraph full of spelling errors. Maybe he was sick when he wrote it, I thought. In the end I understood. It is fine to share what others write, but at the beginning of the post it appears as if it were you who wrote it. I think you should create a blog account like "guests", because clueless readers (which there is, even I could have been one) could take it as words in your name and commit. In this case it is not serious, but in others it could be different.
I thank Nano very much for sharing the information. Of course, I recommend that you review the "Drivers" paragraph because it is the one that is full of cohesion and spelling errors. If you dare to write more, remember to always review what you have written, after a break or the next day. For my part, I encourage you to continue writing and sharing with the readers of Desdelinux; I imagine that Elav and Gaara are open to the participation of other contributors for the articles.
Greetings to all.
Haha thanks Carlos, I was going to take the text from dwarf and publish it here on the blog, but first I was going to explain a series of details and others, in such a way that it would be understood that it is a text from a member of the community and such, but elav He went ahead and gave me no chance 😀
And of course man, for our part we are more than open to any kind of help, whoever wants to publish something lets us know 😀
regards
I don't know how much a possible lack of "commercial agreements" between the companies that develop these types of games with possible interlocutors in Linux also influences. I think of it this way: If a video game company wants to offer its products in Linux, it would seek to establish agreements that guarantee technical and operational conditions to explore that market. For this it is not surprising that they prefer to seek institutional interlocutors, which would exclude strictly community districts. Now, in the case of commercial distros (like Redhat or Suse), these are server-oriented, which would only leave Ubuntu, Mandriva and perhaps OpenSuse as distros with the institutional backing necessary to make those deals. And I don't know if they have been done. I think that the future integration of Paypal in Ubuntu Soft Center could respond to negotiations with that type of companies that develop applications (and games) which could lead to seeing more software of this type for Linux.
All of the above I say in a totally abductive or speculative way. So more than a statement it would be like a question to know what they think about it and if that could be a factor or flat it has nothing to do
regards
When I said that commercial distros are server-oriented, I meant that they are aimed at both server and business use, to emphasize that they are not intended for "home" use.
I also agree that the Microsoft platform for games (XNA and Directx) is shielded, closed or whatever you want to say. And it is now that it integrates desktop, phone and XBOX, what they call an «ecosystem». I say that Android needs more to integrate with its older brothers to form that, and that is where I see it difficult, I say because of the number of distros.
Well, I was reading about the output of Kernel 3.3 from Linux and Android, it is already integrated.
It's unfortunate ... I like to play so much ... and before I had a laptop with mint and ati and as the article says, the support of ati is disgusting ... now I have an asus with nvidia but for work issues, I am obliged to use windows ... (damn program garbage) .. if not, I would return to my linux mint to enjoy the best program in the universe -> radiotray xD
Your article is interesting, but you need to detail certain aspects that the comment of @ pandev92 and the response of @Demenus, if they take into account. It's more about money and imperialism aspects, since Microsoft and Apple are leaders in the software market and many people refuse to use technologies like Linux. More than anything, being capitalist machines, what they seek is to absorb precisely that: "the market." And at first glance it jumps out that it is an imperialism, since even AMD with ATI / AMD Radeon and NVIDIA, have shown their interest in bringing the market to Linux using and supporting free software drivers, but how money and influences move In this business, it should not be difficult for Microsoft and Apple to try to "negotiate" (perhaps even a kind of warning), that they only develop games for their platforms, since it is more optimal due to its huge market shares and together with that it has to favor the market share that Linux has, since they use it as a tool to show game developers that this market is not viable and they believe it, but finally there are them, they lose a market share of about 5% and a Linux usage quota of about 24% worldwide, they let go of at least 50 million users.
Also a great idea [utopia] would be to release the graphics engines of games, such as Need for Speed, Max Payne, among others, so that developers can make modifications and with themselves develop applications / games, it would not hurt ... Don't you think? ??
migrating from directx to opengl is complicated and a security of return on investment is needed, that is, the certainty that the game will sell a decent number of copies on linux, that's why the games are not ported ...
This is starting to change luckily although there is something that I do not think will ever happen, that they sell assembled (dell, bangho, lenovo, exo, etc) because linux is not a system for a person who is going to use the basic pc or for someone who does not understand anything about systems, and precisely this monopoly is one of the worst problems
A long time ago I had been asking the same thing, and finally I found a place where they think exactly the same as me ... Thans you very much