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Gaming is the #1 reason I haven't fully switched to Linux on the desktop at home (at work I exclusively run Linux). A lot of my Steam games work flawlessly with Linux but others will just silently fail to launch and it takes hours to properly diagnose and fix, which isn't what I'm after when I get some time to play games.
Gaming is the #1 reason I haven't fully switched to Linux on the desktop at home (at work I exclusively run Linux). A lot of my Steam games work flawlessly with Linux but others will just silently fail to launch and it takes hours to properly diagnose and fix, which isn't what I'm after when I get some time to play games.
Your comment is the perfect example of how there's an "invisible" demand demand for gaming on Linux. Nobody can see it, because those who want it will mostly make do with Windows.
Personally, I spend 98% of my time in Linux, but I dual-boot just for the sake of the few games I like that need Windows to run. If not for that, I'd have dropped Windows years ago.
While I love Linux, I think this is a totally fair "state of the union". At the end of the day, gaming or kickstarters or similar... are a business. You need to figure out your ROI (Return On Investment). It doesn't many any logical sense to spend a huge amount of time on a platform that nets you tiny amounts of sales (and gains you a huge amount of support costs). This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting t…
Is it? I mean, there's a good amount of support for gaming on the Mac, but I think it's always been so ... I wouldn't call it "a thing" though ... not in comparison to PC or Console ...
This is just an out-of-context tweet (well, the context is there - it's a reply to another tweet, which is out of context)... so perhaps it was just auto-crash reports, but I wonder if you get more tickets from Linux users, because Linux users are more likely to file tickets? When something crashes on my partner's computer she yells at it and restarts it. When something crashes on my computer I spend an hour trying t…
They still represent a vastly disproportionate amount of work for how much extra money they get you. They get you 0.1% extra sales, but they cost you 25% (= 20/80*100) extra support work. And this is nevermind the extra time spent during development. Your point would hold if the issues reported by Linux users would also fix issues on Windows. Some issues would occur on both systems, but I bet the vast majority is wei…
This is the crux of your assertion and requires substantiation.
On the other hands, all these Linux user might be doing you "a favour" taking the time to log these tickets that less conscientious users on other systems would.
Of course that does depend on the classification of the tickets but coming from that community I wouldn't expect them to be trivial issues ...
At least dev work can be drastically simplified with middleware like Unity, which is how small studios can even consider Linux. But support difficulties are real. Players have so many possible distros, configurations, and drivers - actually supporting all of them would require a level of Linux expertise that gamedevs simply don't have (being typically Windows or OSX based themselves). Limiting yourself to something like Ubuntu LTS helps a bit, but there are still plenty of gotchas.
So it becomes a simple matter of numbers: given relatively small amount of extra sales, is it worth the extra work, and spending the time to learn Linux development and administration in sufficient depth? Sadly usually it is not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case it sounds like the bugs were mostly Linux-specific ("gfx driver related").
Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019…
At almost any point in my time using linux there was something "temporarily broken" that would eventually get fixed/improve some time down the road (modems, sound cards, wifi, power-management modes, GPUs, etc), at which point it didn't take long for something new to break.
There are of course those calm eras of peace in between but anecdotally it never seemed to last long until the next nuisance.
Also I wonder how many of those crashes would have happened in windows or mac. I suspect the code is shared and would have happened.
"gfx driver related" code is unlikely to be shared between Windows, Linux and OSX ...
IMO issues does not need to be fixed by the game developers and drv developers might be happy to have them and some code that reproduces them. Not sure why the game dev complains here.