Planetary Annihilation dev comments on the sales dead end for Linux and Mac. Check out the chain for lots more.
I’m an all-around penguin hater, but you can make numbers say anything. From his first tweet, I am quite inclined to read that when you make a crappy, crashing port, you don’t sale ;)
There’s no reason for ports to Linux or Mac anymore. I swear, almost every port I’ve seen done manually is crap, whereas using Wine (or now Proton) gives better results. The Wine guys know what they’re doing when porting, while your average dev doesn’t.
From his tweets, he mentions the main culprit were gpu drivers. They even got a set list of recommended distributions and gpu drivers versions that were ok, but Linux users would ignore it.
I always wonder about this - you see this as a goal for so many projects and it’s often one of the first things cut.
Vulkan is going to solve everything!
The irony of someone who apparently spends a large amount of time on Twitter advocating for porting games to Linux calling other people “nerds” is almost too much for me to bear.
Looks like solid business calculus to avoid a port to Linux to me.
Seemed like a nice thread of discussion, at least the posts Twitter decided to show me with their algorithm.
It’s a sad, but it’s not news that graphics drivers are problematic, especially on Linux - and it’s becoming a lot better. We all have high hopes the open source AMD drivers will make things a lot better, and NVIDIA has made a bit of an effort as well.
It would be a shame if we go down from 132 of the 250 most highly rated games on Steam supporting Linux, but I can understand the cost and difficulty and don’t demand it. What annoys me is the recent wave of kickstarters removing support without some form of restitution.
And yes, we could all live without the vocal twats (as with any group) demanding support for unsupported versions and demeaning the technical capabilities of those who don’t bother with us - it’s life, guys, grow up. “No Tux, no bucks” is childish when put like that.
The guy walked back his claims a bit later on:
I buy a couple of games a year with a requirement for them to run on Linux. But that’s indies to run on a laptop, not AAA games with complicated 3d engines.
No dog in this fight but it struck me that this statement probably could’ve been written 20 years ago.
I hope one day they work well.
It would be fine if they would release the info needed, but people are working with 1 arm tied behind their back.
Perhaps we’ll get game-stable and popular desktop Linux at precisely the same time as economical fusion.
That’s not entitlement, that’s a reality distortion field. BTW, I’ve been meaning to ask, are you the same rei from Slashdot?
Heh, true, but it is a different situation, at least with regards to AMD making a damn good effort. It doesn’t imply anything, especially if it’s still for a very small number of people, but it’s something to appreciate… whenever I budget a new graphics card.
He only walked back the specific tweet he quoted, i.e. the claim that, by a certain period of time 100% of the crash report tickets being opened were Linux support issues.
ps When I first saw this tweet yesterday I was greatly entrained by the juxtaposition of:
Linux uses we’re a big vocal part of the Kickstarter and forums. In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related).
Followed up by an endless stream of Linux users telling them it’s their own fault, Linux is definitely a viable platform, and that because of these issue they’re not buying their next game etc etc.
Linux users are fucking nuts. I used it extensively when I worked as sysadmin and it’s great for servers but for desktop it blows, especially if you constantly have to add new tools for work. I ended up spending more time fixing shit or getting shit to work on my own workstation than the backend problem I was supposed to be working on.
In the end I chucked that piece of shit into /dev/null and looked at the world of Linux strictly through port 22.
I was just arguing with a couple of evangelists about it over on RPS. Because I hate Windows and think it’s a piece of horrible shit, which to Linux users automatically translates to Linux being your salvation. Except, like…I actually thought Linux was worse when I tried it and, no, guys, there being hundreds of games that work great on Linux is not the same thing as being able to reliably play whatever I want on Linux, which is the reason I’m using Windows despite it being a piece of shit.
Sounds about right.
I am not using Windows, because is a piece of shit. But if I where playing videogames again on PC, I would be using Windows, because seems the path of least resistence.
Is one of the reasons I don’t do PC gaming anymore, I despite Windows.
I do have a few games on my MacBook Air. I can tolerate Mac.