Rasberry PI -> Viable platform for commercial games ?

[Tarek]

Do you see the Rasberry PI as a viable platform for commercial games ?

Do you plan to release an AppStore for games for PI ?

[jamesh]

Tarek said:


Do you see the Rasberry PI as a viable platform for commercial games ?

Do you plan to release an AppStore for games for PI ?


Well, it has the power to run Quake 3, or Angry Birds at decent frame rates, so decent coding and it could be done. Whether it woudl make money in that respect, I don't know.

But no, no App store for Pi.

[spamel]

It would be great for people to write programs for different games and have a central place to download and try them out and to give feedback. Would that be a possibility if they are not sold?

[PiOfCube]

spamel said:


It would be great for people to write programs for different games and have a central place to download and try them out and to give feedback. Would that be a possibility if they are not sold?



I think that there will be quite a few sites sprouting up to fill that demand. There are already many games that will be able to run well on the Raspberry Pi but having games specifically written for the R-Pi would be even better.

At some point after the R-Pi is released, I will be starting my games design workshop series which will include development of the R-Pi. One of the focuses with regards to the R-Pi games/software development series will be adding support for a range of hardware additions. There will be many add-ons developed and it would be nifty if games could be written to support some of them.

Also, it would be a good way to encourage people to start learning how to program as well as delve into the hardware side of things.

As for a site for Raspberry Pi only software/games, I might do one myself. If I do, there won't be any mass-adverts or other nasties to worry about. I was going to set up a site to support the tutorial videos I'm publishing under PiOfCube so it wouldn't add too much to list Open Source games specific to the R-Pi. I would not be setting up a sales system as I already have enough on my plate right now so on mine the software would have to be free and not ad-supported

[Nightpath]

I can see emulators being applied to the Pi

Be fun to have SNES and all the others in one small place

[gruetzkopf]

Applying openpandora.org's libpnd for single file binary distribution would work.

It should also allow for games written for it to run on both platforms.

[Prometheus]

gruetzkopf said:


Applying openpandora.org's libpnd for single file binary distribution would work.


I can attest that LibPND works nicely. There's more information here, for any interested parties.


It should also allow for games written for it to run on both platforms.


Would that work? The Pandora has an ARM Cortex-A8, which is ARMv7. Isn't the RPi using an ARM 11 core, which is ARMv6? I must confess to not knowing a lot about this - does it have NEON? I know that some notable Pandora software uses that.

[spamel]

I would love to see games developed with the playability of old games such as R Type, Jet Set Willy and other Spectrum and Atari ST type games. That statement dates me somewhat, doesn"t it?

[fireraisr]

Nightpath said:


I can see emulators being applied to the Pi

Be fun to have SNES and all the others in one small place


That's going to be my primary goal with the first one. I have a projector that my xbox is hooked up to. Since I don't want to mod my game system to get emulation the pi will be very happy with the available composite input. I'll probably spend a few weeks reliving my childhood

[gruetzkopf]

Even if you can't get apps to be binary compatible- libPND is quite easy to make multiarchitecture aware (but my own patches for x86 a LOWEST quality and for a really early version of it.)

So you can slap a ARMv7+NEON binary and a ARMv6 binary and a x86 binary all in the same PND if you want to.

[Prometheus]

^ True, true.

[Jessie]

The more R-Pis get sold the more viable it will be as a gaming platform.  Unless there is some way for commercial developers to protect their IP I doubt you will see many commercial titles on it.  I'm positive we will see some good indie titles and of course emulation of older stuff.  I'm sure that I will be dedicating at least one R-Pi to emulation, if I can find a nice way to integrate it into a joystick and have a good joystick compatible front-end then I will probibly make a few and gift them to friends.

[OldManArmy]

Well if this is going to make its way into schools and in the hands of students I see this as a great option for educational games/software.

[Klaus]

If a country such as Britain, Germany or France was to adopt the idea of giving a RaspberryPI to every child for educational purposes, it would be the most important games platform of all times over night. Console manufacturers would sacrifice their firstborn for that sort of guaranteed reach.

It would define the perception of an entire generation about what a game is and how games are purchased. And not just games, but software itself. Right now people grow up with closed platforms, perceiving them as the default state. The Raspberry Pi could radically shift perception towards perceiving open source as the default state of things. Whoever gets his game into the default distribution will probably live comfortably off selling merchandise. The rest would fall to services such as Gaikai.

The only weakness of the RaspberryPI is that is still requires a mouse, a keyboard and a monitor and that is probably how $100 tablet initiatives from closed platform developers will attack the PI. By creating a device you do not need to hook up to anything and looks more SciFi.

[Manabu]

If our innovation promoting mechanisms remunerated more game makers the more people played and enjoyed their games, we could have a flood of PS2, Wii and similar ports, or maybe even PS3 (I'm not sure how raspberry pi hardware compares to the latter). The main point is rewrite the engine to use OpenGL ES.

But as it is, we don't have the source code, and they will probably want some sort of DRM for physiological reasons (even it never working for it's intended purpose), so it is difficult...

And I don't think the fundation will want to ship non-educational games in the default SD card... or else kids won't get much programming done. XD

But yeah, if this gets big, indie developers and networked games developers may start targeting raspberry Pi devices.

Any joystick will plug into the USB. Linux kernel supports even the wiimote (IIRC)!

[Motley]

Note that Unity have ported their game engine to the Roku2 boxes - maybe they could be convinced to move that work over to R-Pi too?