Blaming the purchaser for not checking beforehand if it will work. ProtonDB is a good source.
You mean they choose not to support Linux. Still sounds like they are to blame, not Linux.
ProtonDB recently told me civ 3 didn’t work or had major issues. Here I am playing flawlessly.
Well, you can’t blame developers to not cater to their 1% player base. Especially since that group usually have the most problems and requires more development time.
I don’t remember exactly who, but there was one game developer who was all praises for that 1%. The Linux users were the most prolific testers who sent back detailed bug reports with ways to recreate the bug, logs and often core dumps even. That 1% helped the devs, as well as the other 99%.
Market share and earnings are not everything. We understand why game developers could not want to port their stuff, but the point is not to blame operating system that has nothing to do with it and focus trying to convience developers to support user-friendly systems at least out of principle even if it is not the most revenue generating decition.
It may be silly but I usually will blindly buy a game, find out it doesn’t work, then wait for a few years until it does. Because it will. Even if someone has to reverse engineer the game engine to use the game assets.
That’s silly and dumb on top, because games rapidly lose value. The $60 game you buy today (and don’t play) costs $40 in a year. And will be in a $12 Humble Bundle with 9 other games in 3-5 years tops.
I already get enough games in bundles that I don’t play, when I actually buy a game (even on sale) I only do it if I want to play it immediately. Otherwise in the future it will be cheaper anyway and have plenty of updates on top (if it didn’t get abandoned).
The thing is: I’d never buy a €60 game, because money is hard to earn. I have clear priorities, games are just a hobby.
Most of the games I buy are either old and more suitable to run on lower end hardware, or discounted, or bundles. I hate multiplayer games, so I won’t jump on the latest hyped up AAA franchise either. I’m a proud member of /c/patientgamers and /c/retrogamers.
My comment was meant as a tribute to how much gaming on Linux has improved, and to the people that make it happen.
Personally I prefer to get a refund with the explicit reason “Game wont run on proton” It gives clear quantifiable feedback to valve and the developer that they lost this money because it wouldnt run on linux.
Or at least I would if that had happened recently. Last time a game wouldnt run for me was ace combat 7.
How often does that happen though? Usually these games get a couple updates early on to fix major bugs, and once it’s stable it’s never touched again.
On the Mac side it’s been a real sad story because so many old 32bit and/or x86 games simply can’t run anymore.
The work that is going into Wine, Proton, DosBox, ScummVM, Luxtorpeda and all the other compatibility tools is what makes me quite positive that any game I buy will eventually get supported.
Sometimes that assumption will fail, but it’s a very small percentage of the games I own. I can live with that.
As the other guy pointed out that’s a little silly from an economics standpoint. Games depreciate quickly so it’s going to be cheaper to wait until someone confirms Linux support.
Also, buying something in hopes of it one day getting the support you want? That’s just crazy! Don’t buy something until it fits all your needs.
I’d just like to interject for moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, Steam/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by Steam Proton, DXVK, and vital Wine components comprising a full OS as defined by Valve.
No, it is actually GNU/Linux+Steam 😒🤓
(Please don’t take this comment seriously, it’s a joke)
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.
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.
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.
