Am Montag, 1. Oktober 2007 21:36:26 schrieb Roderick Colenbrander:
Call of Duty is popular but I would say that CounterStrike (+ CounsterStrike Source, the port to the Source engine) are way more popular.
More and more games these days are distributed using Steam. That's something to watch too.
There are very few cash cow games, the ones I know were mentioned already. However, from a Wine point of view, the engines are more interesting. When looking at the engines, there are a few popular ones: ID Software engines(quake, doon), Unreal, Source, and a few others. Many of the new high end games released in the last months were Unreal 3 based. Bioshock, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and others. Also note that while most engines are cross platform in their nature and have an opengl renderer, many games ship only the D3D backend, or the opengl backend is not functional.
The games which cause the buzz on the graphics market are usually single player games(TES Oblivion, Bioshock). Those are usually used by users to talk about how good or crappy Wine is, but the games that are long term interesting and block Windows to Linux switches are always Multiplayer or Online games, or sometimes Kids games. Those games are usually rather simple in their graphics requirements.
I think the main blockers for Wine as a gaming Platform isn't D3D any more. A few months back sound used to be a blocker, but Maarten has done a great job on that. Most issues seem to be located in the copy protection area, and in input handling. Sadly, there are some copy protection / anti cheat rootkits which are technically almost impossible to support(namely GameGuard), and in the Input area we have another OpenGL child window like problem. Also the network sometimes makes troubles, but this has improved with the recent wintrust / crypt work done for iTunes.