If Electronic Arts ports it, they will come

[VorDesign]

Want to see wholesale migrations from Microsoft OS to more economical alternatives?
When you see one of the big toys ported to Linux, like EA Games, running natively with just the CD and your favorite distro. No Wine configuration headaches or CrossOver Office investment.
I'm guessing that people would even pay a little more for the Linux port since they would be saving on the overhead imposed by the current release of Microsoft's desktop offering.
Hey EA? Are you listening?

[Vergil83]

• For any game there are a limited number of users that will like any single game. Only a certain number of these are linux users.
• A number of these will just use it on windows.

So for EA it only makes economic sense for them to create a linux port if the money they would make from linux user that won't purchase the windows version or extra money they would make if the linux version cost more.

[techieMoe]

Simply put, EA couldn't care less about Linux, and I doubt they ever will. They make money hand over fist by churning out derivative sequels to popular franchises for Microsoft Windows and various consoles. Linux is a niche market, and Linux gamers are a niche market within a niche market. It simply doesn't make financial sense to a monster like EA (the Microsoft of games) to take that kind of risk.

[benjamin20]

ok, everybody comes up with these ideas of "well, if you port it to linux then linux users will use it" well thats not true. linux useres are small in number and many of them are not gamers. also it has to integrate well into the linux environment, which often doesnt happen.

the only way linux will get games on it is if it is almost no programming effort to do so. such at ut2004, or doom3. the reason its so easy to port is because of seperation of engine and game. the engine developers use linux and mac (and 360, and ps3, and wii) ports to make a marketing point, because game developers will see its a quick and easy way to get a larger user base.

but for a game developer to take on the full responsibility to port their game, wel, they would rather just pass it up. this is why other software isnt ported, because therre is no real standard cross platform library that would take kare of all the porting costs.

this is probobly the reason why mono is such a big deal. all the marketing work from microsoft can be.. well.. hijacked to allow those programs to work on just about anything.