Dan 'theoddone33' Olson has put together a list of ten critical observations that every potential Linux gamer should consider before buying Transgaming's WINE-based product Cedega (formerly WineX). With Dan's permission, as this is a potentially more appropriate forum, it is mirrored below. Perhaps Dan's even tone will be more appealing than a certain more shrill curmudgeoning.

This document aims to be a summary of the major issues we see with TransGaming and Cedega. While not everyone may agree with every point, we are convinced that these are things that need to be confronted before subscribing to Cedega. You are free to reproduce this document in an unmodified form. If you wish to provide a link back to this page, that would be nice as well. Comments go to theoddone33@timedoctor.org.

• Performance

  Cedega is designed to maximize compatibility with Windows games. However, many users find that their favorite games work poorly in Cedega, if at all. While TransGaming offers voting services to determine the most popular games, there are still hundreds of games that are not playable in Cedega. For games that are not officially supported by TransGaming, users may find that the performance of Cedega is "hit or miss."

  
  
• Pricing

  TransGaming charges $5 a month for the use of the commercial version of Cedega, yet makes a development version freely available. The commercial version has additional support for games that use copy-protection methods such as SafeDisc, among other features. The commercial version of Cedega requires a minimum subscription of 3 months, and all games that it can be used with must be purchased separately.

  
  
• Progress

  TransGaming's list of supported titles has not grown significantly since the first release of WineX in 2001. Today, less than 10 games have been given a 5-star rating, meaning that they can be expected to run without problems. Many games run with only minor annoyances, but they are not officially supported. TransGaming has also been criticized for slow release times, with 3 month subscriptions starting and ending without seeing a new release.

  
  
• Potential

  TransGaming has stated that their goal is 100% compatibility with Windows games. However, it is highly improbable that they will ever attain this goal. Windows and Direct3D are in active development, and TransGaming developers will always be playing a game of "catch-up", while at the same time trying to find and fix current bugs in Cedega. In a sense, Cedega's destiny is tied to Microsoft as much as it is tied to TransGaming.

  
  
• Priorities

  While TransGaming still offers Cedega to Linux gamers for the time being, it is clear that their primary interests reside elsewhere. They actively produce titles for Mac OSX, and their website advertises plans to support XBox and PS2 in the future. TransGaming has stated that no income from Cedega subscriptions is used to fund their other ventures, but while their finances may not be divided, the same cannot be said of their interests.

  
  
• Promises

  TransGaming began with the promise to release their changes to the Wine project under an "open" license when the number of subscribers reached 20,000. Shortly after this, they introduced code into the project which they are not able to release openly due to contractual obligations. While the current number of subscribers has not been publically announced, it is doubtful that TransGaming would be able to release all of their changes when this milestone is reached. TransGaming has, however, given code back to Wine at various times.

  
  
• Packaging

  While TransGaming offers a free development version of Cedega, they have repeatedly threatened Linux distributions that have offered packages of it to their users. Debian and Gentoo have both withdrawn packages of the development version of Cedega at the request of TransGaming, who stated that they would no longer offer the free version if it was packaged by third-party Linux distributions.

  
  
• Portability

  TransGaming advertises Cedega as the world's foremost portability solution, and they claim that it can be used to migrate applications seamlessly between platforms such as PC, PS2, and even PDAs. These claims are sketchy for a variety of technical reasons. One example is that most PC games use over 100M of memory, while the PS2 has only 32M of main RAM. Cedega's strategy of reinterpreting runtime calls is likely to add more overhead than it can reduce, and is not sufficient for this task.

  
  
• Propaganda

  For as long as TransGaming has had a website, it has been filled with dubious claims about the company, about the game industry, and about porting software. Unsurprisingly, most of these claims paint TransGaming in a positive light. However, many of them fail to hold up under scrutiny. While one hopes that this is simply the result of poor research, it is very easy to suspect otherwise.

  
  
• Prevention

  There is speculation that Cedega discourages both users and companies from investing in native Linux versions of popular games. Many feel that the running a PC game with Cedega does nothing to indicate to publishers that there is a market for Linux games. TransGaming has stated that Cedega leads to increased acceptance of Linux as a desktop operating system. However this claim is debatable, as Cedega is of primary interest only to those who already use Linux regularly and reboot to Windows for playing games.