Tim Sweeney (crying): “There’s no future in Linux gaming. No! Stop it! Stop enjoying the good thing that isn’t from me!!!”
Tim Sweeney being so against Linux is baffling to me.
You’d think that with Epic battling against Apple and Google’s mobile ecosystems that he’d think “huh, we really shouldn’t put all our eggs in the Windows basket, what with Microsoft clearly trying to go down the locked-down mobile-like route for Windows”, but he doesn’t. He’s just relying on Microsoft’s goodwill (lol). It’s crazy.
It just demonstrates to me that it was never about being locked down and was always about them taking his money
That’s why I deleted my Epic Games account when they got bought by Tencent. Though their support was not happy I was exercising my GDPR rights and it took a lot of back and forth with them before they finally deleted it.
Right? When it started I felt it was a lose-lose situation: I might enjoy Apple products, but I do see the need to open them up at least a bit, so them winning would not be good. Epic winning on the other hand would give Epic something to stand on to criticize the greed of the 30% cut of Apple and Google, while apparently being fine with the same for EGS or consoles…
How can anyone hate linux… It’s just there for you… Not demanding anything from you… Just there… For you…
Two reasons:
First, rather than just overseeing the most profitable game in the world, Sweeney tied his leadership at Epic to picking fights with Apple and Steam to try to muscle his way into a broader industry position. With how broken and barely functional the EGS is, it’s incredibly obvious there is no way he can muster a team to do ANYTHING like Proton, so his solution is to go full throttle into pretending Windows is fine and not a dependency with existential risk.
Second, the bread and butter of EGS is Fortnite, and the developers at Epic are apparently completely unable to engineer any kind of effective anti-cheat which doesn’t involve kernel level access. It is actually easier to save face by pretending the entire Linux ecosystem doesn’t matter than to officially support Linux and then have to explain why Fortnite isn’t available.
The ironic thing is, if he’d put the money the company wasted on exclusives and free giveaways into actual development, they could EASILY have solved all of these problems. It is fascinating, however, to watch Fortnite players dump literal billions of dollars into the company each year, just to watch it get flushed away into absolutely nothing.
I don’t even want to use EGS on Windows. Steam may be clunky, but Epic is unusably slow.
I can’t find it now, but back in the late 90s Tim Sweeney tried Linux / KDevelop for a week and, if he liked it, would make games for Linux. It was on Slashdot if I remember correctly.
It went fine, but some features like hot code swap weren’t available like they were in MSVC. I see that he’s still moving those goalposts.
Steam deck compatibility helps people with low spec PCs the ability to play new games.
More importantly it helps people radicalised by Stallman to play games on their GNU/linux machines (kidding)
I know you are kidding, but after the failed Steam Machines, the Steam deck has made people realize that gaming on Linux is mostly viable. Microsoft has pissed me off enough with windows 11, that I have decided to switch to Linux as my main OS on desktop as well.
I switched some years ago away from 7 when 10 came out and the “free” upgrade nuked itself and its partition into an unrecoverable state. Windows and Linux can both be their own hassle in different ways, but at least with Linux I got control back over my operating system, and that felt so damn good.
Pretty much the only remaining hurdle to Linux gaming is kernel-level anti-cheat which may be going away in the near future.
If you target the lowest common denominator, you’re likely to catch more fish. Its great to see developers make games with the Deck in mind.
❤️
AMD recently launched their 9000 series CPUs. Most reviews showed lackluster performance. Except for Linux. Turns out it was a Windows problem that will be fixed with the next release. Initial tests show big gains depending on the game.
Microsoft is selling Windows as the gaming platform. It’s just marketing. And it’s crumbling just a little bit. I hope this will at least lead to parity with Linux.
