Feel free however to grab these to great titles from our resellers who still have stock available.

As Michael mentioned, I’ve been involved in Linux gaming for many many years, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Games have always been a passion of mine and working on and with them possibly more so. I’m so excited to be at the helm of a company that I’ve loved for so very long and a company whose future I’m certain is bright.

I’ve delayed posting this greeting message for a few days, because one of the most common remarks I have noticed since Michael and I began discussing this transition is that LGP hasn’t given enough feedback to the community. I wanted to see the responses to Michael’s resignation and of course the announcement of my arrival so that I can answer questions I saw being posted on various forums, news sites and this very blog.

I have great plans for Linux Game Publishing. Since some of them coincide with queries that people have posed either directly to me in our IRC channel or in comments online, I will respond to them now:-

Regarding Michael: He is not disappearing completely, but will be working with me for some time in an advisory capacity – his knowledge and experience in the Linux gaming world is unparalleled as I’m sure you’d all agree. As well as working with me, Michael will occasionally be contributing to new and old titles. Linux games are still a huge passion of his and I don’t think we’d be able to keep him away from the code, even if we were crazy enough to want to ;)

Digital distribution channels: This medium certainly has a strong future and is only going to grow. I personally have accounts at online stores such as Steam, GOG, Desura, Gamer’s Gate, Gameolith and others. Expanding digital distribution is definitely a priority for me. I have already had tentative discussions, begun setting up and getting ready to distribute through a few big names in Linux digital distribution.

Our current shipping of physical CDs and DVDs: We’ve admittedly had problems with this and it’s something I’ve been working on in the background since Michael and I started having discussions around his handover. Once our new distribution channels are in place, those of you that have seen delays in delivery shouldn’t ever experience that again.

We’re going through a period of transition at the moment and as much as I’d love everything to happen “right now”, there’s a lot of work to be done. I’m very aware that there are unhappy people out there – you are my primary focus right now. Linux Game Publishing is a great company, with massive potential and I’m truly excited to be a part of its history in the making.

As for new games: Yes, we have some in the pipeline! With all that has happened, there have obviously been delays. We have two announced titles that everyone is aware of, namely Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy and Bandits: Phoenix Rising. I’m happy to say that there will be an announcement regarding one of them soon. There are also other unannounced titles we’re working on and I’m really looking forward to reaching the point where we can announce those to you.

LGP has a strong team of great programmers, that have stood with Michael and worked with him through the years. Some have been around for a while and we also have some new faces. I am incredibly grateful to our team for the hard work that they have put in, contributing towards what we currently have and will be producing going forward.

Keep a keen eye on us here at LGP, you won’t be disappointed ;)

Clive Crous
CEO – Linux Game Publishing

These last 12 years have been, to coin a phrase, “interesting”. There have been highs and lows, great times and bad times. But always fun.

The last year or so, LGP has been quiet, too quiet some have said, and they would be right. I will hold my hand up and say, ‘My bad’.

You see, 10 years of working 7 days a week had taken its toll. You can’t continue on a high energy rampage for 10 years without something breaking, and in the end I burned out. I started letting things slip, and I started to neglect the companies.

I take no blame for this, it was bound to happen, as anyone knows when they work so hard they neglect social life, sleep, proper eating habits, the outcome is inevitable. I have put in a massive effort into Linux gaming, an average of 60-80 hours a week for 10 years and an investment that totals close to half a million pounds out of my own pocket, so I consider blame to be the wrong word. Probably, responsibility is more the correct word.

It took me some months to notice what was going on, and even longer to accept that my burnout was going to kill LGP unless I did something about it. The lack of drive slowed down production of new titles, shipping, customer service, everything that I either handled or had a big part in helping with, was all being compromised. The answer didn’t come from Dr’s, and it didn’t come from telling myself to ‘just stop slacking and get on with it’. The answer came by accepting the new reality that my burnout was not going away and I was no longer the right person to be at the heart of Linux gaming. I still love Linux and I love Linux gaming. LGP is my baby, and you don’t devote 12 years of your life to something like this without being proud of, and attached to, your creation.

And so in recent months I took the decision to stop. Difficult doesn’t even come close to how hard the decision was. I lost a lot of sleep over it, and it was depressing, stressful, and disheartening, but I knew in the end it was the best thing for me to do for myself and for the company.

But I didn’t want to let the company die. Of course not, I have invested too much time, money, blood sweat and tears into LGP to just say ‘That is it, bye’. And so I sat down and had a long think about how to save it.

The decision was made to find and hand over control of the company to someone new, someone who could move it forwards where I no longer had the drive and energy. To that end, I selected Clive Crous to take over my position in the company.

Clive has been a part time developer for LGP for many years, having a hand in quite a few games. But his primary qualification for the job comes with his unrestrained enthusiasm for Linux gaming. I selected Clive not because he offered the most money for the company, as the decision was made that only a token payment would be made, so don’t worry I just decided to ’sell out’ . I chose Clive as he will bring about new energy and drive to LGP, the main thing it has been lacking in the recent past. He has some big plans, and I won’t steal his thunder by telling you what he is going to be doing, but I think you’ll be happy with the new and revitalised LGP. Give him some time though, things won’t change overnight. He has a lot of work to do, and a lot to learn about the industry. Treat him gently!

So, as I say goodbye, I would like to thank the many many people who have supported me over the years in keeping LGP alive. Not in the least I need to give special thanks to Mel, Gareth and Eskild, who have been there offering support, a dose of reality, and a kick up the backside whenever it was needed, and to all the dozens and dozens of others who have given up their time, often for nothing in return, to keep LGP and myself running.

I know Clive is preparing a hello speech, like this is my goodbye speech, and his posting will follow this one in a day or two.

And with that, I give you, Clive Crous, CEO, Tux Games and Linux Game Publishing.

While we have migrated the old support requests over to the new system, the old one had a few bugs which may have resulted in some of them being lost. If you have contacted LGP support and have been waiting a long time without any reply, feel free to re-send your support request to ensure we have it.

You can still contact LGP support using the usual e-mail address (support@…) and it will automagically be entered into our tender instance.

If you have any input, suggestions or questions for me, feel free to ask them here in the comments, on IRC (Zero_Dogg in #lgp on irc.freenode.net), via identi.ca/twitter or via e-mail (to eskild at the domain linuxgamepublishing dot com).

Updated 26th of August: Patch for Jets’n'Guns released

We would like to apologise to all customers who had their downloads affected, or who had their ability to play rental games affected. We are immediately extending the rental period of all rental games that are active now, or would have been active during the downtime, by four days to make up for the intermittant downtime.This affects rentals purchased from any LGP reseller.

We are pleased to report that players with non-rental versions of the game, both download and boxed copy, experienced no lockout. As designed, the LGP protection system coped perfectly with the outage.

The outage also affected PenguinPlay, meaning that ingame multiplayer functionality via PenguinPlay would have been unavailable.

This will also have affected our resellers who sell downloadable copies of games, and request download keys dynamically. If any of your customers received blank keys, please contact us at support@linuxgamepublishing.com, and we will fix the problem.

Finally, on a lighter note, we would like to briefly laugh at RapidSwitch. Who as compensation for the downtime, have offered to upgrade our servers for free. Beside the fact that our servers are fully loaded and not upgradeable any further, I am still waiting for their reply to my question of why on earth did they think that appropriate compensation for extended downtime is – effectively – more downtime. I’ll summarise their response in a comment as and when it is received.

Late in the porting of Shadowgrounds Survivor, it became fairly clear that it would be little work to also bring the original Shadowgrounds game to Linux. We discussed it with Igios, who were doing all the hard work, and we decided that we would also release Shadowgrounds.

But, being the sneaky Linux Game Publishing company that we are, we decided to keep it secret. I guess, I just wanted to give everyone a nice surprise, and get a new game out that none of you were expecting. As it has the same game core as Survivor, it didn’t need the extensive beta test, making it one of the few times we would be able to release a game without a beta to let you all know it was on the way.

Later this week we will be releasing Shadowgrounds Survivor, and so we felt that the best thing to do for Shadowgrounds is to make it a budget title on release. We have decided to set the retail price at just £10, partly because it was easier to port and so the price being lower is fair. Also, and I’ll be honest here, I want lots of people to buy it, get hooked on the gameplay, and just feel that urge to buy the higher priced Survivor. I’m not going to claim to be completely altruistic, we ARE a business afterall {:-)

Now, one thing that will disappoint some players is that neither Shadowgrounds, nor Survivor, come with the co-op multiplayer option that Windows has. This is because of a conflict in the game design, and the design of SDL. It is actually technically impossible to provide the multiplayer (which on Windows requires two keyboards and two mice) with the architecture as it stands, and by the time we realised this, it would have required a complete rewrite of the whole game core to get this working.

However, good news, is that the next version of SDL will contain all we need to get co-op into the game, and Igios has committed to releasing a patch to provide this functionality as soon as SDL can do it.

Shadowgrounds has taken a lot of dedication from the guys at Igios, so I’m counting on the community to do their bit, and buy the game, give them some thanks for the long hours of work they have put in to bring this game to you. You can buy it boxed, or it will be available to download, either for purchase or rental.