Especially if they use an engine that natively supports Linux, they have no excuse not to release a Linux version.
Yes, they do. There is more than just the engine at play on compatibility. The main reason is actually usually the anti cheat.
Looking at Destiny. Game worked okay on Linux before they integrated Battleye, which HAS Linux support, but Bungie just doesn’t want to interact with it.
This is why it’s mainly larger developers that care about their community that implement Linux support. Take valve for example. Wonderful company that cares about their playerbase more than the average game development team. They have Linux support on almost all of their games as far as I am aware. Bungie is a decent company but most of their community doesn’t want to play on Linux anyway, so they won’t bother with it. However most teams that are smaller or care more about money than players won’t do it.
There are tons of reasons my dude. You can still have platform-dependant technologies in your game even if the base engine itself supports linux.
From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.
Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.
The kernel in use is literally meaningless. Sony’s userspace is unique and the graphics stack is fully proprietary. Same for Nintendo.
I believe the PS5 is partially based off of FreeBSD and I don’t think there is as strong of a gaming scene on BSD (even relative to the size of its userbase). I feel like there would be some rather large leaps going from a tailored console OS to a more widely available alternative OS.
In an ideal world everything would work out, but for some business it is a pretty huge commitment for what was less than 2% of the market just a few months ago. We certainly lost money porting our game in Linux at that last place I worked. It was before Proton though. Obviously each case is different, and some games work on Linux out-the-box due to Photon so this become a non-issue.
