161–170 of 415 posts
The flip side of this is: I only game on Linux. If your game doesn't run well on Linux, chances are, I'll never play it. There's already a back-log of games on my wish list that I'll get to as soon as i find the time.
>There is no denying that there are plenty of issues with some parts of Linux, but still I believe it will become predominant gaming platform, especially in the more "appliance" space. It is worth investing in the know-how early. Bold claim to make. I doubt Linux will ever be a predominant gaming platform.
Umm... Phone games? All Android devices are based on Linux. Android is a major player in the mobile gaming industry.
I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…
I maintain about two dozen software packages in the AUR, including some really old stuff like the Heretic 2 Linux release from 1999 and RBDoom 3 BFG which has a boatload of dependencies. Breakages are extremely rare for the average package even with the rolling release and generally any breaking change in a common library will see the legacy version hang around since stuff will still depend on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically speaking I'm sure you're right. In practice it doesn't really matter though, if they did it that way it's either because it was easier or because that's the way they were used to doing it. The fact that "technically" it's not Linux's fault doesn't really matter, unless you're more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game. Why should they chan…
> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countle…
If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.
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…
The support burden for developers is proportional to the operating systems you officially say you support. If you support "Linux" you are supporting thousands of completely dissimilar execution environments. If you support Ubuntu, or Steam, or a Flatpak target you are only supporting that one operating system.
And thats fine. Thats all Linux users really want anyway. If it breaks on your distro its your responsibility to fix it so long as it works on its officially supported target OS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically speaking I'm sure you're right. In practice it doesn't really matter though, if they did it that way it's either because it was easier or because that's the way they were used to doing it. The fact that "technically" it's not Linux's fault doesn't really matter, unless you're more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game. Why should they chan…
> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countle…
This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux , but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.
100% this. source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything. I tried linux gaming fo…
For what it's worth, I used to have that, and I am happy I don't anymore. Having two separate computers for gaming and work has been very positive to both my work and gaming experiences. I recommend this to anyone who can afford it.. even if you work on Windows.
I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…
What if game developers release the game's source code and let community developers help with porting to different distros and platforms? The game's assets can remain paid. For example, Doom has been ported to pretty much all platforms, and it's up to maintainers to ensure compatibility. I guess at this point it becomes a partly open source/free software game.
I'm aware this may not align with current business practices.
https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080380532108619776
> 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.
I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…
That sounds like more something to blame the Debian family over than the whole ecosystem. I might be running "bleeding edge" on Arch but I can still depend on and use libcurl3 with the libcurl-compat package. I maintain about two dozen software packages in the AUR, including some really old stuff like the Heretic 2 Linux release from 1999 and RBDoom 3 BFG which has a boatload of dependencies. Breakages are extremely…