Now I see what may have happened.

Carmack posted this back in April 2012:
"I heard it ran fine under Wine. No plans for a native linux client."

It's been recently taken to reddit and a discussion started. And so it seems Carmack replied on Twitter but I still don't get his point about lobbying and hate. Having an oppinion contrary to his is lobbying or hating?

I would discourage anyone buying games to play on Wine, you have no support so you shouldn't give them your money. The game might not play or stop playing through and you don't know that before you try it. Doesn't Carmack know this or is he happy selling games without support? An awful attitude.

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Quoting: HamishTo be fair, it was not so much trolling as asking a question. There is a difference. I would not head the Twitter comment that much as everything on Twitter is borderline troll by it's very nature, but that was definitely not the way it was presented on reddit.

The Carmack message:
"Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate?"

I don't know what triggered this message. Who's lobbying? Which hate? I understand this can generate negative reactions.

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Quoting: HamishCarmack is discussing things with businessmen though, which part of the problem. See the quote I highlighted. Taken in those terms I can understand why he has decided upon the direction he has taken, even if it makes me dislike the Zenimax acquisition even more. I can also understand even more why TTimo jumped ship.

Still, as a side note, has anyone else here read David Kushner's excellent book Masters of Doom? I think that should be required reading for anyone before they attempt to make a character assassination of either Carmack or Romero.

If I had to choose official GNU/Linux releases or open source code releases I'd choose always the later. I'll only play Rage when it's released that way most probably. I understand that position and I think that nothing negative would be said about him if he didn't publish statements that work like trolling. It's his trolling that's getting him angry reactions. I don't think Zenimax can be made accountable for that.

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This comment from Carmack just proves he's thinking like a businessman, the big numbers is all that matters and we haven't still proved we can reach them:
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_asks_why_wine_isnt_good_enough/c89sfto [External Link]

He focuses on GNU/Linux alone, avoiding the much broader picture of multi-platform development for a variety of Linux based systems. Users and developers would highly benefit from a standard multi-platform library layer, that layer can't be Wine and he doesn't really seem to be interested in such thing at all.

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It's surprising seeing someone so technical as Carmack saying that, although maybe not that surprising since he's been praising things like Direct3D. He sometimes seems more commercially focused than technically.

Wine is a wrong idea for anything serious simply because is a reverse-engineering project. It will always lag behind the real product and will fail to be a perfect replacement. It does very weird things to try to work around some serious challenges with no optimal solution.

In the past, Carmack gained a reputation as someone pushing the envelope for technical excelence, now this comment makes him look bad. Problems with AMD drivers? Did he stop developing Quake2 or Quake3 because of drivers problems or did he stop using DirectX when it didn't work? No, he pushed for these to work better.

What about Rage for the iPhone? It sounds like a joke, but he did it.

He used to say that making cross-platform programming helped find issues in the code and fix them, so it made better code. Maybe he's found better ways to do that but I think going multi-platform is working for many indie developers, it's maybe easier than ever, it's profitable, it helps your sales in a world no longer dominated by Windows and with several Linux based systems emerging. Doesn't he see that?

For me it's just that he doesn't need it, he already earns lots money supporting the most popular platforms and some others per request. He goes where the big money is. Good for him but I don't see the need for excuses.

I don't play Wine games, I used it for some old games but now I prefer to play native games and support developers that care about their product quality and user satisfaction.

Limbo started with problems but they finally fixed it. It plays really well for me and I didn't mind doing an exception since I had already bought it, but I wonder if they wouldn't have been better doing a native port. Maybe it wouldn't have been much more work and wouldn't have looked like a hack.

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Do they plan distributing the game out of Steam? Thru Desura or others?

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One minor thing. Many times I'm browsing the site from my netbook and the new one doesn't stretch to the size of the screen so I have to scroll horizontally everytime to the main area. I think the old site also overflowed the screen but it wasn't a problem because the widget column was in the right side and the main content left.

Congratulations!

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Is there are chance these games can be bought without Steam or do they sign exclusivity deals?

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Sorry, I was always referring to the developers. I only mentioned the HB team because I think they could take over the developers in the ports they do, but it's not that they are required to. I hope I haven't messed it up even more.

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Quoting: "Cheeseness, post: 7468, member: 122"Since urkle only recently became an employee of Humble Bundle (as I understand it), then only the titles from the last bundle would fit that description.

I don't think it's wise to put responsibility on the porters. Ultimate responsibility has to lie with the developers - if they themselves aren't interested, updates won't happen. Post bundle, they're the ones calling the shots, handing out the money, and setting the general attitude. Contractors generally don't have a lot of control over what they do and don't do.

If that's how it works then there's more reasons to be more strict about quality and bugs being fixed in time, they (the developers) should be held accountable for that while possible.

My guess was that some ports could be somewhat licensed to the HB. I'd like to see that for titles sold in the bundle from devs not interested in our platform and keep selling them after the bundle. Maybe I'm going too far.

EDIT: Minor clarification.

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