Greetings! My name is Eskild Hustvedt (aka. Zero_Dogg), and I’m a junior developer and community manager at Linux Game Publishing. This is the first of hopefully many (community-related or otherwise) blog posts from me. This time I’ll be writing a bit about the LGP community.
One of the great strengths of Linux in general is the strong communites that has been built up around it. Linux gaming is no exception, and we at LGP are very proud of the community that surrounds us, not merely because it is the community that pays our bills, but also because it is very friendly and helpful, and as such a great motivation while we are working on bringing great commercial games to Linux.
One of our most active community communication channels is IRC. We have one rather active IRC channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC network, namely #LGP, our general chat channel. Recently we have also started a channel for our new PenguinPlay games matchmaking service on the same network called (quite obviously) #PenguinPlay. The latter is still in its infancy, and as such not as active as the primary #LGP channel. In both of them you will be able to communicate with other members of the community, as well as numerous LGP employees. You will find our beloved dictator CEO Michael Simms (as lgp-michael), and yours truly (as Zero_Dogg) idling there pretty much 24/7, and most other LGP employees regulary (pretty much daily) stopping by, not to mention the large croud of friendly regulars that are usually more than happy to help, or just chat (about Linux games of course, though we *cough* some times tend to drift somewhat off topic). IRC is also a great way to quickly get support concerning our games (although it should be noted that it is not an official support channel). Not only is our IRC community helpful in answering questions about our games, but it also deserves our gratitude for assisting us. Just this week we recieved numerous reports about our recent Candy Cruncher patch breaking sound for many players, as a result of this we were quickly able to diagnose and subsequently issue another patch that fixed the issue.
Another good example as to how our community can affect our decisions is how we treated the community reactions to our announcement of the addition of DRM to our new games. The community had strong feelings and opinions concerning the subject (and rightfully so), but we felt that at this point adding a form of DRM was something we had to do. What followed was a storm of feedback from our community, which we greatly appreciated. Because of you we made large changes to the DRM scheme, in order to ensure that the rightful owners of our games would not be blocked from using their own game, even during very long periods of no internet connection. The input was received primarily via e-mail and on our public IRC channels (but also partly through comments on articles concerning the subject).
In the end, the community and our love for gaming in general, and on Linux in particular, is the reason we keep doing what we do. Without all of you, there would not be any LGP.
If you have any input, suggestions or questions for me, feel free to ask them here in the comments, on IRC, or via e-mail (to eskild at the domain linuxgamepublishing dot com).
