From Jellybrn in The Barracks: "The game last time i tried works fine in Linux through Wine. So good in fact it loaded the game quicker and gave better FPS than in native XP...Think about it. A heck of alot of Linux users, all of which are limited to the games they can play. most are more educated and into tinkering with their PC's than most people...A possible good influx of subscribers for a little bit of tweeking?"

It costs money to support an additional platform, it costs money to maintain an additional platform and it takes developer time, and with the case of something like Linux - well that's a pretty nebulous term there. Which Linux? KDE or Gnome? Do we support Linux emulation mode under *BSD?

Linux is pretty much the antithesis of gaming development. Why do game developers love consoles so much? Because most game developers enjoy creating games, not writing nitty gritty fancy software. When you write for a console, you can test every user's configuration with as many systems as you can hold in one hand.

When you write for Windows, it starts to get sloppy. Game developers took a long time migrating from home computers like the Commodore and Atari machines to DOS until certain corporations established some solid standards (e.g. CreativeLabs, Diamond, etc) for sound/video. They took even longer to give up DOS for Windows because driver interfaces and graphics APIs were a chaotic mess, until Microsoft introduced certain APIs and then bam.

Lets take a look at what the "Downloads" page for a popular, non-GUI, Windows/Linux application looks like (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#downloads)

        * Windows
        * Linux (non RPM packages)
        * Linux (non RPM, Intel C/C++ compiled, glibc-2.3)
        * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 RPM (x86)
        * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 RPM (x86)
        * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 RPM (x86)
        * SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 RPM (x86)
        * SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 RPM (x86)
        * SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 RPM (x86)
        * Linux x86 generic RPM (dynamically linked)

When you introduce the graphical, sound and hardware (joystick etc) requirements of a game, Linux is an angry, snarling warthog. We love to slam Microsoft for attempting to foist Vista's unnecessary changes on us, but Linux distros change window manager, audio system, critical system paths etc at the drop of a hat. Most users don't notice this stuff, but most developers do...

But game development hasn't taken off for Linux because the demand isn't there. Of the estimated 1% desktop marketshare held by Linux (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8) of the even smaller percentage that represents home Linux users, most will have a different platform for gaming - either a console or an installation of Windows.

Besides, Linux users are used to free. So: Costly development and maintenance overheads + specialist coding hires + limited market share + spender-apathy = ?

If an investor was willing to fund the development effort, we might be interested. When we've fielded that before the response was "OMG! WOOT! Ok, let me, uhm, just get my wallet... <FX: Sound of feet slowly shuffling away>".