At that point, fresh from our completion of Majesty, we were convinced world domination was just around the corner and we would all have our ferraris quite soon. We had a number of copies of Majesty printed (no, I’m not saying how many), and expected to have to get a reprint within 2 months, judging by the number of applications for the beta test, and the enthusiasm shown by people.

Over the next few months, reality, and a certain level of depression set in. We didn’t need to reprint Majesty. In fact in the first 3 months we didn’t even sell a quarter of the copies we had produced, and after the first few months, sales begin to slow down, so it didn’t look likely that we would suddenly see a huge rush of orders. The optimism pretty much evaporated.

So, realising it wouldn’t all be parties and glamour and free money by the bucketload, we settled down to some real work. We had more projects going on, with NingPo, Soul Ride and HDB, and we had new ideas. One of the new ideas that we went with was to open a physical shop.

Not a lot of people know we did that. We opened a shop in Nottingham, that was selling games. I admit we didn’t just sell Linux games, we sold all kinds of games, but the idea was to get a bit of local publicity for Linux games, while raising money using sales of other games, to fund the development of Linux games. It also didn’t feel horrible to see a shop where Linux games were on the same shelves as Windows games.

To be honest it didn’t do that great. The shop was small, and the people we rented the premises from made vastly inflated claims of how busy the mall we rented in was. Oh they didn’t lie, but they neglected to mention that the figures for mall visitors also included people walking in one side and straight out of the other side, as it was the only direct route from the city centre to the train station… However we sold a few Linux games, and increased company turnover (which always looks good on the books). In the end though, it was fairly obvious it wasn’t going to be the cash cow we had hoped for, in fact it was more a cash sink. So we closed it down after a few months.

Shortly after, I had been invited to talk at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, and on my return to the UK, found we had had a disaster. Overnight on the day I returned, our stock room (also our server room) flooded. Our premesis is on a hill, and a severe rainstorm caused a building uphill from ours to flood, and the flooding cascaded downhill until reaching our stockroom, which seemed to be waterproof on the downhill side and not on the uphill side. End result was that the water pooled there, causing thousands of pounds of damage, and days of downtime. 6 inches of water took several days and a quite elaborate pumping system to remove, and obviously while half of the electrical system was underwater, we couldn’t fire up the servers!

Luckily, the damage wasn’t catastrophic. while hundreds of games had been destroyed, and computers had been submerged, no game was completely wiped out of stock, so we had no mad rush to reprint, and no orders were delayed. Backups ensured no data had been lost, but it was a bit of a scare! We spent a good few days raising everything in the room up by 6 inches, so that if it ever happened again we wouldn’t have a big problem, and we even installed a pumping system just in case!

Following one disaster, it is only appropriate that we mention another company disaster at this point. Disciples, a great game, but unfortunately LGP’s DNF. It was around this point that Disciples caused the first of many resignations from LGP. Mike Phillips left the company after one too many late nights trying to beat the game into submission. It isn’t that there is anything wrong with Disciples, it is simply that you need a developer with just the right development style to be able to port it, and they have proven hard to find over the years. And so over those years, Disciples has been part-ported several times, leading to belief it will never be released. I can say for sure it will be released, I just cannot, still to this day, say for sure when!

Despite the downsides, the flooding, the game that refused to be ported, and the staff that left, we had successes. Postal 2 became the fastest selling game in its first month, and when we looked back at the accounts we found that we had, in many ways done it right. The company had proven itself sustainable. Where Loki had come in in a blaze of glory and burned out just as quickly, we had been around for as long as Loki, and we were still here. We were not as high profile, the games we ported were not the ones you see advertised on TV, but they were all undoubtedly as good as the games produced by Loki. Just because a game is high profile doesn’t make it good, and just because a game is less well known doesn’t make it bad.

So, we were stable, we were ready for the future, and we now had to make some decisions. How could we grow. What could we do to drag Linux gaming into the mainstream. And how could we do it without the blaze of glory ending…

Although it still is relatively new, there’s already quite a few nifty features available, such as in-game lobby, live information about ongoing games on the web site, as well as highscores for all games. Sadly though it can still at times be somewhat hard to find someone to play with, which is why we added a new feature to PenguinPlay this week, namely e-mail notifications. This lets you subscribe to notifications for games, then PenguinPlay sends you an e-mail when a multiplayer game that you can join is started. In order to enable this feature you need only log in to your PenguinPlay account, edit your account settings and then select that you wish to edit notification settings. From there you can subscribe and unsubscribe to new game notifications for the various games available on PenguinPlay.

To compliment the notification service and the on-site forums we have also started an IRC channel where PenguinPlay games can chat and schedule games in. Join #PenguinPlay on the irc.freenode.net IRC network.

One of the primary things that separates PenguinPlay from the many others similar services out there (apart from the obvious support for Linux) is that it is available, very cheaply, for developers of Free/Open source games. The Grapple library is already open, so they need only pay a (nominal) fee for hosting services, and then we take care of the rest (no proprietary code needed). The library itself is multi-platform and runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows. Our goal is that a multi-platform online gaming community is built up around it, in particular, one where Linux gamers are real full-time members of the community and treated at least as well as gamers from other platforms.

As of this writing, the games that are available are only Linux versions, and only commercial games. There is no technical reason why the developers of the games for other platforms shouldn’t be able to patch their games to work with PenguinPlay. The games that are available are currently available for online play are Ballistics and Knights & Merchants both of which needs to be patched to the latest version, as well as high score support for Jets’n'Guns, which was the first LGP game to ship with PenguinPlay support out-of-the-box, and Candy Cruncher (which also requires a patch). The upcoming LGP game Sacred: Gold will also ship with PenguinPlay support out-of-the-box, enabling Linux gamers to adventure together, and our beta team has already done so. I for one can’t wait to quest along with fellow Linux gamers.

We are hoping that the service improves the multiplayer experience for Linux gamers, making it easier for the gamers to find people to play with, and games developers to have full multi-platform multiplayer support in their games. Keep checking this blog and the PenguinPlay website for news about more upcoming PenguinPlay features and games.

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).

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).