April 18, 2001, 3:24 PM —
It's been a long, hard winter. The chill that swept through the tech sector like a scythe these past few months hit the Linux players particularly hard. Stocks plummeted. Doors closed. Grown men wept. Someone needed to stand up like Chance the Gardener and say, "As long as the roots are not severed, the garden will bloom again in the spring." One of the Linux firms that felt the pain last winter was Loki Entertainment Software, now in its third year of porting popular games to Linux. There were rumors only a couple of months ago that Loki might have ported its last game. Developers were leaving. Product was late. It did look gloomy. I spent some time recently discussing that situation, and other aspects of life as a Linux firm, with Loki's founder, Scott Draeker. The good news is that spring is here, and it appears that Chance the Gardener, the character Peter Sellers played in Being There, was correct.
About those rumors of Loki's demise, Scott told me:
A lot of that, well, all of that, is speculation, things that people have posted online on newsgroups, or some online forums, and they've been speculating on events. For example, delays in shipping Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC), or delays with other products. And obviously it's public that some of our developers have moved on to other positions at other companies. So, given that little bit of information, people have speculated as to what may or may not be going on. The answer is really simple. This has been a tough time for the tech industry. It's been a tough time for the Linux industry. It's very difficult right now to get investment dollars. It's very difficult to do a lot of the partnerships and get into a lot of business relationships that we've been pursuing because people are clamping down.
A lot of big companies have been working on Linux-based projects but those projects were not core to their strategies. So at the first sign of a slowdown, those projects were the first things to get cut. We had scaled up to a point, anticipating a certain level of growth, and anticipating a lot of new products coming out. The slowdown caught us by surprise. It caught other people by surprise, too. Now what we've done to address that is we've scaled down through attrition, we've hunkered down. Now we're ready to start releasing products again.
To get a feel for what the rest of the year might be like, I turned the conversation toward game consoles and the growth of the Linux desktop, which influence the PC game and Linux game markets to one degree or another. Draeker had some interesting observations on both.
When I asked if game consoles like X-Box and Playstation II affected the PC game market, Draeker said, "Oh, absolutely, and it's a lot of fun to watch." He views the console versus PC saga -- and the predictions of the PC's demise -- as a cyclical thing, but notes that, "PC game sales are still growing year over year." With PC game publishers focusing more on the X-Box and Playstation II platforms, Loki has become the biggest fish in the Linux space.
Draeker said that the desktop Linux market has grown since Loki entered it, and the general slowdown doesn't worry him. It won't make Linux gamers stop running Linux and there is already a large enough pond for Loki to swim in. He said the typical Loki customer is male, age 14 to 35, usually with both a higher income and a higher degree of "technical savvy" than the norm. Draeker told me, "They're also the people who buy a computer, delete Windows, and install Linux just for fun. That's always been the core of our market and it continues to be the core of our market."
Not that Loki wouldn't benefit from a sudden surge in users of the Linux desktop, you understand. But certain things are needed before that can happen, Draeker believes, and not only are they not present today, he doesn't see them appearing anytime in the near future. What are those things? According to Draeker, before Linux can become mainstream, it must have a basic suite of applications and interoperability among them.
