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pelle75 -> other platforms (11/15/2008 8:12:38 AM)
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Have Matrix (or one of the companies that develop games Matrix pubilsh) considered releasing some game(s) also for other platforms, like Linux or FreeBSD?
The market for strategy games isn't exactly saturated on these platforms, and I'm probably not the only one currently struggling with dual-booting to Windows or running games in WINE. It is quite annoying when you know that the platform-dependent parts of almost any 2D (even 3D in some cases) strategy game could be an insignificant part of the code.
Several (most probably) commercial games that exists for Linux (quake series, neverwinter night series, unreal tournament, etc) don't come as a separate version you buy. You have to buy the Windows version of the game, then download a small linux executable to install and run the game. Some games even force you to first install the game using WINE, since the installer is just a setup.exe, but I'm quite happy with that as well, and I can see how it makes it even cheaper to support some extra platforms.
Of course a good idea would be to do what others have done, only support Windows and MacOS officially, and let users help each other out on the forum when someone has problems getting the game running on some weird linux distribution you never heard of.
(I have to add though that I am happy that the Matrix games I have bought do run fine in Linux, with WINE. I did have some problems with TOAW3 in the past, but with recent versions of WINE it runs quite fine. Still the experience is less nice than it would have been to be able to run it natively. [8D])
(Not to say that there aren't millions of possible problems as well. That is why I said 'some game(s)'. I would be happy if there was just one game (engine) that it happened to be worth the effort to port. Perhaps mostly for the PR, not so much the extra actual number of units sold.)
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