Any discussion about the benefits of Ubuntu usually involves the question, "How does it look with games?" For the past decade, the answer has been, "Rather limited." Purists point to Frozen Bubble, TuxRacer, or some other shooter, but hardcore gamers only shrug their shoulders and stick with Windows, because it runs all the big titles.

However, thanks to recent events within the game sector, Ubuntu is finally becoming a serious alternative. The Software Center has been selling games for some time (Figure 1), and by now it is well stocked, even boasting a bestseller list [1]. The new purchase options are attracting new developers that use the Software Center as their marketplace.

Figure 1: Commercial and free games currently hold an equal share of the Software Center market.

Start your Engines

Modern games usually aren't developed from scratch. Free and commercial game engines help developers turn their visions into working code.

The larger engines used to rely mostly on Microsoft and Direct X, but the number of commercial engines available for Linux and OpenGL is increasing, and the availability of Linux game engines has led to an increase in the number of Linux games. An ever-growing number of engines are adding or considering Linux for their list of supported platforms. Meanwhile, the free engines are also getting better: the Goodfolks game presented in the previous issue of Ubuntu User runs on the free Ogre 3D engine [2].

Valve, the company behind games such as Half-Life and Portal, turned the Steam (Figure 2) platform into the most successful distribution platform ever. The software provides easy purchase and installation of many big blockbuster games. With 50 million active user accounts, Steam is the heavyweight among gaming platforms.

Figure 2: The Steam client on Linux: the heavyweight Valve extends its feelers toward Linux, with Ubuntu playing a special role.

Gabe Newell – Valve's boss – made headlines when he called Windows 8 a "catastrophe." At Casual Connect, the gaming convention in Seattle, he said: "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well." [3]. Valve has recently ported the source engine to Linux, and the company also plans to develop the Steam Box – a game console based entirely on Linux.

Of the 2,500 games in the Steam catalog, the system only offers 62 games for Linux (among them some well-known titles). However, a Linux port for game providers is making more and more sense.

Other Platforms

Steam is not alone. Even smaller game platforms, such as Desura and IndieCity, are developing games for Linux – the IndieCity games are still in development. Both platforms are similar to Steam but concentrate on games in the indie realm. Behind them are mostly independent, small game companies – among them two-person operations – that usually produce imaginative casual games.

So-called Humble Indie Bundles (Figure 3) bundle together cross-platform indie games and sell them at a "pay-what-you-want" price. Most of these bundles earn well over 1 million US dollars each, and the large (financial) resonance dispels any prejudicial attitude about free products on the web. Linux users spend more on average for the bundles than their Windows or Mac peers.

Figure 3: The success of Humble Indie Bundle caused a stir in the gaming world, shifting the focus on indie games and an alternative payment model.

Games were a big topic at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in November, 2012, and this should have an effect on Ubuntu. Valve sent its representative, Drew Bliss, to Copenhagen, and the Unity engine developers sent dedicated Linux fan Na'Tosha Bard (Figure 4) to UDS.

Figure 4: Na'Tosha is working on a game engine with the same name as Ubuntu's desktop: Unity. (c) Sean Sosik-Hamor, CC-BY-SA 2012.

In his keynote, Mark Shuttleworth also mentioned Electronic Arts (EA), the world's third largest game company (as of 2011) [4]. EA had published two of its games, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima (Figure 5), in the Software Center. Although critics moaned (rightly) about the lack of any native Linux games, Ubuntu's community manager Jono Bacon countered that these were EA's first steps in that direction. Not much news has followed as yet, but the situation could change in 2013.

Figure 5: Little game, big publicity: EA teases with two web games in Software Center.

Even bigger than EA is Blizzard, the world's second largest game maker after Nintendo and together with Activision. Blizzard hit it big with games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. Michael Larabel, who runs the Phoronix website, has it from reliable sources that Blizzard is planning a Linux-related announcement in 2013 [5]. According to Larabel, an internal Linux version of World of Warcraft already exists. It was not released, he says, because World of Warcraft runs with Wine (Figure 6) and Blizzard considers the Linux landscape too fragmented, making support difficult.

Figure 6: Playing World of Warcraft has been available in Linux for quite some time using Wine.

Considering the increasing popularity of Ubuntu and the steps taken by Valve, the tide could turn for Blizzard games as well. On the other hand, certain speculations about Linux and game producers have proved to be wishful thinking in the past. (There is still no official Linux port of the Unreal 3 engine, for example.)

Plans for Ubuntu 13.04

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Ubuntu developers discussed several concrete solutions for better Ubuntu game support. Ubuntu already provides an experimental driver for NVidia cards, and, sometime in the future, they might come up with an alternative for the proprietary ATI/AMD driver. Players will need to install these drivers explicitly using a Jockey-like driver management tool. Canonical wants to maintain the experimental drivers after installation with the newest updates from graphics card manufacturers, thus ensuring that players get the best possible graphics performance on Linux.

Once upon a Wine…

Games on Linux – and especially Ubuntu – are not limited to the commercial distribution channels. Blockbuster games have always had a hard time running directly on Linux, but some of them run flawlessly on Wine. (See the article on Wine elsewhere in this issue.)

Wine mimics a Windows environment for a Windows program by modifying system calls. But Wine also has some issues from version to version: Just because a game works on Wine 1.2 doesn't mean it will work on Wine 1.3. For this reason, some developers have specialized in tailoring Wine to players' needs. Cedega is based on Wine and provides a fairly detailed list of supported games on its website [6]. CodeWeavers [7] provides an alternative Wine version for its CrossOver framework, which supports games such as Portal 2, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft. However, not all the officially supported programs run 100%. A detailed list at the CodeWeavers website shows how well CrossOver supports each game [8].

Last but not least is PlayOnLinux (Figure 7). Unlike CrossOver and Cedega, PlayOnLinux is free software, but it follows a similar approach. To install a Windows games on Wine only, you often have to take a few extra steps. Here and there, you have to copy a file or adjust the path in a script. PlayOnLinux provides installation scripts that not only save you work, but select the best Wine version for the particular game. The system is not perfect, but it's definitely worth a shot if you want to use Windows software. You can learn more at the PlayOnLinux Supported Apps webpage [9].

Figure 7: PlayOnLinux should make it easier for users of Windows programs on Linux.

Games via PlayDeb

The Ubuntu Software Center includes many free games in addition to the countless commercial titles. Among the most popular games are "Battle for Wesnoth," then somewhere down the list, the fighting hedgehogs of "Hedgewars."

The website playdeb.net also provides a series of games for Ubuntu, with a few interesting examples you can't find in the default Software Center.

To include this repository, go to a terminal using Ctrl+Alt+T and enter the following command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/getdeb/ubuntu raring-getdebapps games'
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.comA8A515F046D7E7CF
$ sudo apt-get update

Those in the know will immediately see that this is not the original Playdeb repository. At the time of writing, this repository wasn't available, and the mirror site had not yet updated to Ubuntu 13.04.

Gaming community

Big things are happening for gamers on Ubuntu. Besides the advances with Steam and other game engines, major companies such as Electronic Arts and Blizzard are taking an interest. But as long as some vendors maintain a preference for Windows, you might need to rely on PlayOnLinux, Wine, or one of the commercial Wine variants to run your Windows games on Linux.