C4 game engine drops Linux support citing frustrations with desktop Linux

Eric is indeed a very skilled programmer, but this engine is very much developed to meet his whims. He hasn't yet released any games on it, and the vast majority of his engine licensees are hobbyists, who quite frankly are also unlikely to release a game.

So while Linux was a nice-to-have earlier on, and likely sold him a few licenses, with UE4 heading to Linux it's unlikely to give him many more sales. And I suspect he's used to developing in Windows, likely with visual studio, and in comparison, Linux can feel quite archaic. And in that context, maintaining Linux build systems can seem quite painful, likely the primary reason it's getting dropped.

On the contrary, with Valve's current and monumental efforts, I suspect we're going to see a lot of games continuing to be released on Linux. And the tools are improving vastly, and some rather nice tools, vogl for instance, are only fully functional on Linux, which provides a strong advantage.

I'm personally pretty excited to see what comes from AMD being much more open with their ISA, and related documentation. I'm pretty hopeful for a very open and fast graphics API, OpenGL in my opinion is the worst part of working on Linux.

Frankly I doubt I will ever see them.

But I'm playing on this Thinkpad running Arch, using my Steam account. I tend to ignore games that aren't cross platform (although I have a gaming box running Windows 8 as well).

It helps that a lot of games that I like (Awesomenauts for example) are available and work amazingly well.

Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up"

Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how is not wanting to spend any more time on it purely a political position rather than a technological or business decision? Especially the latter, which is also explained again by Eric:

I cannot afford to spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working. I simply don't have the funding to justify letting the engine stagnate while I mess around with an OS that should just work. It's extremely wasteful and unfair to users who are waiting on new features.