THQ looking into Linux ports

I’ve previously mentioned The Humble Indie Bundle before on this blog.  A collection of cross platform, independent games are made available for a brief period and a part of the money goes to charity.  Recently, to my horror, they released the Humble THQ Bundle.  THQ are far from being an independent developer, releasing games on PS3, xbox 360 and PC, probably their most notable recent products has been the sandbox game series Saints Row.

I thought that this was the owners of the Humble Bundle falling away from their independent roots and starting to chase after more money from the bigger companies, especially given that this bundle was advertised as “Windows only” and the majority of the games that I checked out on the Wine website listed their performance as “Garbage” so this meant that the deal was truly aimed at the windows user.

However, following some recent news by THQ I have a renewed sense of optimism.  The company were pleased with the sales over the limited period, but even better were the number of requests on their forum and Twitter to offer a Linux port in keeping with the tradition of the Humble Indie Bundle.

In a recent interview with Polygon, THQ president Jason Rubin stated "The message I took away from a large number of tweets and comments around the THQ Humble Bundle sale is that there are vibrant communities of gamers using other operating systems besides the dominant ones, and a company like THQ should not overlook them," 

"Complicating the analysis (in a positive way), gamers have tweeted inventive ideas to me, such as letting the community help in the porting to bring down costs," Rubin said. "THQ is committed to look at anything that makes sense."

"I'm sure we will have more to announced shortly," Rubin added.

We shall look forward to hearing the announcement, whilst this will not get much praise from the freedom lovers, a lot of Linux users still keep a Windows partition purely for gaming purposes.  This is certainly a step in the right direction for gamers on Linux.

I’ve previously mentioned The Humble Indie Bundle before on this blog.  A collection of cross platform, independent games are made available for a brief period and a part of the money goes to charity.  Recently, to my horror, they released the Humble THQ Bundle.  THQ are far from being an independent developer, releasing games on PS3, xbox 360 and PC, probably their most notable recent products has been the sandbox game series Saints Row.

I thought that this was the owners of the Humble Bundle falling away from their independent roots and starting to chase after more money from the bigger companies, especially given that this bundle was advertised as “Windows only” and the majority of the games that I checked out on the Wine website listed their performance as “Garbage” so this meant that the deal was truly aimed at the windows user.

However, following some recent news by THQ I have a renewed sense of optimism.  The company were pleased with the sales over the limited period, but even better were the number of requests on their forum and Twitter to offer a Linux port in keeping with the tradition of the Humble Indie Bundle.

In a recent interview with Polygon, THQ president Jason Rubin stated "The message I took away from a large number of tweets and comments around the THQ Humble Bundle sale is that there are vibrant communities of gamers using other operating systems besides the dominant ones, and a company like THQ should not overlook them," 

"Complicating the analysis (in a positive way), gamers have tweeted inventive ideas to me, such as letting the community help in the porting to bring down costs," Rubin said. "THQ is committed to look at anything that makes sense."

"I'm sure we will have more to announced shortly," Rubin added.

We shall look forward to hearing the announcement, whilst this will not get much praise from the freedom lovers, a lot of Linux users still keep a Windows partition purely for gaming purposes.  This is certainly a step in the right direction for gamers on Linux.

THQ looking into Linux ports