Adventures in Linux gaming

It has been an interesting week in the world of Linux games—really in the intersection of Linux and commercial games. First was the announcement of the release of the source code that underlies the Ryzom massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG). In addition, though, is word that the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of cross-platform games being sold using a novel method, generated over $1 million in a week's time, with roughly a quarter of it coming from Linux users. It has long been said that there is no market for Linux commercial games, but these two events may shine a light on different business models that just might be successful.

Humble or successful?

The basic idea behind the Humble Indie Bundle is to take five (eventually six) games developed outside of the major game studios ("indie"), package them together, and allow the customer to set the price. All of the games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture, and Samorost 2—the latter was donated to the bundle a few days later) are DRM-free: "Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely." They are cross-platform for Linux, MacOS X, and Windows as well. But sponsor Wolfire Games and the other game creators took it a step further and split the proceeds with two charities.

By default, whatever price is chosen will be split seven ways (five games plus two charities), but the buyer can change the allocation any way they choose. The two charities are Child's Play, which provides toys, games, and books for children in hospitals and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Assuming an even split, each organization and game developer has brought in more than $150,000 since the promotion started on May 4.

Linux buyers account for around 14% of the purchases, but, interestingly, account for 23% of revenue as reported on May 7. Wolfire Games has been a strong advocate of cross-platform games, as it believes there is money to be made from Mac and Linux games. While the success of the bundle may not be repeatable exactly, it should give hope to game developers that there is money out there for cross-platform games, and to players on non-Windows platforms that there will be more games available.

A quick look at two of the games showed them to be fairly interesting, certainly worth looking into further when some grumpy guy isn't yammering on about some sort of deadline. One of the two, Lugaru has been released as free software under the GPLv2. Anyone lacking an "anthropomorphic rebel bunny rabbit with impressive combat skills" in their life is encouraged to check out the source or the game itself.

Ryzom

The Ryzom MMORPG has had a history of, almost, becoming open source, starting back in 2006, when the Free Ryzom Campaign tried to buy the assets of the original developer, Nevrax, which had fallen into bankruptcy. Then in 2008 it looked like there might be another opportunity to acquire Ryzom via bankruptcy proceedings, but that didn't happen either. But on May 6, the current owner, Winch Gate Properties Ltd, announced that the server and client code, along with thousands of textures and 3D objects, were being released under the Affero GPLv3 (code) and Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (artwork and objects) licenses.

According to Winch Gate CTO Vianney Lecroart, after acquiring Ryzom, the company first focused on getting it up and running: "We just had 30 hard drives and we had to scan all them, buy servers, configure [them], reconnect everything, it was very hard and long process." At first, Ryzom was free to play, while Winch Gate got the billing system working, and then switched back to a "pay to play" model. After that, it spent some time making things more stable, reworking the "starting island to make it easier to understand" and adding the Kitin's Lair area for more experienced players, he said.

The reason it is being open sourced now, Lecroart said, is because "we wanted to focus first on players", and now that is done, so it could turn to freeing the code. He continued:

In addition, in just a week since the release, there have been patches submitted that Winch Gate applied "as fast as we can". The roadmap on the development portal shows a release expected in July that will concentrate on build tools and packaging, and another in November that will focus getting the current Windows-only client working for Linux and MacOS X. The current client will run under Wine and the roadmap mentions a Linux native version that has been compiled and "works".

None of the Ryzom world data is part of the release, so those who want to run their own server—already available for Linux—will need to create their own world. Existing players could be harmed by the release of the world data as it would give others a potential leg up on the locations of interesting places or, more importantly, loot. There might also be a "spoiler" effect that could take away much of the fun of playing the game. But lack of world data does make it rather difficult to get started. Another problem is that the world building tools are all Windows-only and, because they use Windows-specific libraries and APIs, will be difficult to port. Currently the roadmap shows those being available as web-based tools in June 2011.

Winch Gate has put up a small instance of the Ryzom server, OpenShard which is free to "connect, tweak, and hack [on]", Lecroart said. In addition, the current state page lists various community members who have the server up and running. "It's now up to them to add some content or do what they want on their server", he said.

The Free Software Foundation, who had pledged $60,000 to the original Free Ryzom effort, applauded the release and suggested ways that free software developers could get involved. The 13G of textures and 3D objects was of particular interest because they "can be adapted and used in other games". In addition, the FSF suggests that making Blender and other free software 3D modeling tools work with the Ryzom engine would be a worthwhile effort.

The "Help Us" page does not mention any kind of copyright assignment being required, nor does the Developer FAQ. Given the history of Ryzom—bouncing around from company to company, typically via bankruptcy—it's good to see that there won't be any organization that can make a proprietary fork. The AGPL also ensures that anyone using the engine to provide a service—game world—is required to release their code changes back to the community.

Linux and games

It is clear that Winch Gate hopes to gain some publicity—and Ryzom players—by freeing its code. It also seems like it is genuinely interested in what the community will do with the code, artwork, and objects. One would have to guess that the Ryzom player community is fairly small, given the various upheavals along the way, so the risk to Winch Gate is quite low. In the meantime, the community gets a chance to play with a professional MMORPG engine; it's anyone's guess where that will lead. Perhaps Winch Gate is hoping someday to run contract servers for a game world created by the community.

The Humble Indie Bundle has certainly raised the profile of Wolfire and the games that were included. World of Goo has made something of a name for itself in the Linux world—perhaps partially because Ted Ts'o mentioned it during the ext4 delayed allocation mess—but the others were flying under the radar. No more. It will be interesting to see where that leads as well.