I'm carrying around the idea of resurrecting an old game of mine for some time now. Since the game was feature-complete and fully playable it would take some effort to polish and port it to the 21st century. For this reason I thought of making it a shareware project. Is there such thing as a shareware market for Linux games? I'm asking this because I just found out today that programming games under Linux is much more fun than doing only low-level driver development [smile]. After the death of Loki some years ago I thought the (semi-)commercial game market on Linux is dead. If it is, how about the Mac then? Pat.

In Linux, not much of one. Too many Linux heads have an obnoxious sense of entitlement (I WANT CODE TO BE FREE TO ME), and the ones that will actually cough up some cash are few and far between.

The Mac, on the other hand, is an excellent market for indie games. They love the attention, and will pay pretty well for it.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
In Linux, not much of one. Too many Linux heads have an obnoxious sense of entitlement (I WANT CODE TO BE FREE TO ME), and the ones that will actually cough up some cash are few and far between.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Quote:
The Mac, on the other hand, is an excellent market for indie games. They love the attention, and will pay pretty well for it.

Good to hear that, I'll need to set my focus on the Mac platform then.

Thanks,
Pat.

Insofar as the "shareware" market is now effectively software with free trials (PD and shareware libraries being a thing of the past) - definitely.

I have bought several games for Linux this way.

Specifically for Linux users, we can see how / if the game is going to perform on our distribution and hardware before actually forking out any cash.

My favourites are Chronic Logic, I've bought Tryptich and "Pontifex 2" (Now renamed BCS). I've enjoyed the demo of Gish and I will probably buy it.

Mark