8 ms·

If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about d

If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply.

flatiron 7y ago
What about switch and ps4? Are they being dropped? They don’t support direct x 11.
- ssully 7y ago
  Switch and PS4 players make up more then 0.3% of their playerbase, unlike Linux and Mac Users, so they will be supported.
  - Crisco 7y ago
    So I have no experience in 3D graphics and very little experience in game design (I wrote a 2D game in high school but that's it), but if they are already going from DX9 to DX11 why don't they go to another library that supports all the platforms they already develop for such as Vulkan? I'd imagine that would better future-proof their game to make adapting to other platforms that are released in the future easier. So how hard would it be to go from DX to something else? As stated before, I have no experience in this area so I'm being completely sincere with my question.
    - ssully 7y ago
      The developer has come out and said that as of the announcement of them dropping support for Mac/Linux, the two platforms combine make up 0.6% of their active player base [1]. I am guessing they just did the math and decided the cost of switching APIs to something like Vulkan is not worth it when such a small portion of their users would benefit from it. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/rocket-league-will-drop-support-for-mac-linux-versions-in-march/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/rocket-league-will-dr...
      - Crisco 7y ago
        Yeah, that is completely understandable. I was just curious why they wouldn't invest in developing for a different but more cross-platform library so that maintaining Rocket League on platforms such as the Switch and Playstation 4 (as well as the future consoles from both manufacturers) would be easier. They have stated no plans to remove support from those consoles, and I don't imagine they are much easier to maintain compatibility with than macOS or Linux.
    - fsloth 7y ago
      As they stated, most of their players are on windows. If windows is your target market, then DirectX is generally the graphics API you want to support. You don't want to make architecture decisions because one or other approach would be untenable to below 1% of your target. Cross-platform is not a value as such.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      At some point, somebody needs to actually tell the hardware what to do. If you're doing 3D graphic rendering in real time, that point is probably now. There are no magical abstraction layers that can let you do performant 3D graphics without paying attention to what's going on at the API level.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      Typically a DirectX revision bump would be less work than a totally different API. To answer "How hard could it be?", the answer is, "Surprisingly hard". Games rely on weird interactions with hardware and need to smoothly render at a consistent FPS. Often a revision bump in a library might introduce subtle changes (for example, a difference in how numbers are rounded might cause z-fighting or change the way shadows are rendered). All of those need to be discovered and fixed. Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over. It's definitely non-trivial. Doable, but non-trivial. I don't blame the devs for making a cost/benefit analysis and realizing they would never recoup the cost. Given the economies of the games industry (where studios are basically always one step away from complete failure and being dissolved into nothing), I appreciate the need to focus on not losing money in this way.
      - tambre 7y ago
        > Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over. Vulkan doesn't really have a shader language unless you want to write SPIR-V assembly. Thus you'd use either GLSL or HLSL. Microsoft's own DirectX HLSL compiler[0] supports SPIR-V as a target in addition to DXIL. [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler
        Pfhreak 7y ago
        Consider me corrected! I had done a quick google and saw GLSL listed in the top results and made an incorrect assumption.
      - Crisco 7y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. I guess part of why I'm confused is that they have not stated any plans to stop supporting Switch and Playstation 4 versions of the game and in my mind those are probably just as difficult to maintain as the macOS and Linux version. Do Nintendo and Sony provide support here that make it easier for Psyonix to port to their platforms, or are there just so many more players on those platforms that it is worth the investment?
    - pandaman 7y ago
      Reading the article, it appears that the issue is with the supported functionality and not with the literal library. They already had been using OpenGL instead of DX9 on Mac/Linux but they cannot use it instead of DX11 because the features they need are not available in that version of OpenGL.
    - protanopia 7y ago
      Rocket League is made with Unreal Engine 3 so if they wanted to port the game to using Vulkan they would also have to upgrade the game to Unreal Engine 4.
- blackearl 7y ago
  You can substitute directx 11 support for "issues requiring X amount of employee hours" and the ratio of affected player base.
- Impossible 7y ago
  The player base on PS4 and Switch is large enough to justify dedicated engineering support. Mac and Linux on Steam are not. Interesting enough iOS and Android might be big enough markets to put Mac and maybe Linux support back on the table, if they decide to make a mobile version of Rocket League. If Google threw a bunch of money at them for Stadia support Linux could come back also.
itake 7y ago
From what I understand, they also removed key features (like multiplayer) for people that have already paid for the app. They will not be getting refunds for in-app purchases.
- Guillaume86 7y ago
  Multiplayer requires latest version, so no getting updates results in losing multiplayer. I agree refunds would be a decent move given that multiplayer is the main selling point of the game though.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  It's unrealistic to continue supporting multiplayer if you're not updating the client anymore. It'd mean you could never make changes.
  - itake 7y ago
    I think you're missing the problem for the consumer. If I bought that game, because it means I could play multiplayer with my friends and now they are removing that feature <3 months after I bought the game, then I would not be a happy camper. I don't think anyone truly expects a game's multiplayer should last forever, but it should last while the game is still popular and releasing updates.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Totally reasonable to be unhappy, sadly it's a common occurrence in this era of live services. Sometimes you buy an online-only game and the servers go down a month later. If you're lucky the devs will be nice and refund you, sometimes they don't.
threatripper 7y ago
They leave a gap in the market where a competitor could emerge. EDIT: I know the gap is small, less than 1% but it is still a gap. If a competitor could emerge in a small gap like this is a question I cannot answer. There is potential for growth (especially if Microsoft slips up heavily which they almost did) but so far that growth hasn't happened and the future is hard to predict.
- ssully 7y ago
  Do you have any examples where a serious competitor emerged because a game developer didn't support Linux or Mac?
  - threatripper 7y ago
    None that I know of. Almost all Linux games also support Windows. Steam heavily supports Linux and in their numbers are 0.67% Linux users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... It is rumored that Steam uses Linux for leverage in negotiations with Microsoft. Therefore it may have a big strategic value for them even though the numbers are still so low.
    - Macha 7y ago
      I mean, Valve's Linux support happened because they were spooked by the Windows Store and the idea of a possible future iOS style lockdown leaving them shut out of the market
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    SuperTux and Gnome Mines!
  - yyyk 7y ago
    The casual link is nigh-impossible to prove. However, Bungie started as a Mac shop, and Stardock started as an OS/2 shop. It's possible to make the claim that had more commercial games been available to these relatively small platforms in the 90s, there wouldn't have been enough space for these game companies to emerge. As I said, I can't prove that. It's quite possible these companies would have been successful anyway.
reaperducer 7y ago
If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply. That's only if your business model only looks at the next quarter, and if you don't care about your brand. Amazon, and department stores before it, became huge because they made an effort to cater to all needs. That allowed them to be the go-to brands for people looking for things. Imagine if in its early days Amazon ran the numbers and discovered that textbooks were only a small portion of its sales, so it stopped selling textbooks. Then it noticed that cookbooks were only a small part of sales, and those were cut. Then it noticed that mysteries were only a small part of sales, so they went out the window. Next thing you know, nobody shops at Amazon because its focus on the big numbers turned it into a niche provider. If a games publisher chooses to restrict its platforms, that's its business. But I won't think of it for "games" in general when I want to find a game.
- shultays 7y ago
  I dont share your optimizm of linux desktop being a non minority next quarter. Or next 20 quarters
- Kapura 7y ago
  Amazon dot com and building a game are so different that it is difficult to follow the metaphor to any place where it offers insight. The reality is that it costs money to support any gaming platform. The cost of supporting platforms with only a tiny number of players can easily outstrip any potential upside. A prominent indie dev on twitter once said, of his game that has sold at least several hundred thousand copies, that only 100 people will buy your game on Linux and every single one will email you to tell you that they did. That they are technical and vocal doesn't make the playerbase any larger.
- pier25 7y ago
  Just look at the Steam stats. About 97% of PC players are on Windows. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey It's simply not a sensible economical decision to invest serious dev time for 3% of your potential players.
loudmax 7y ago
By tying themselves to a single proprietary platform owned by a potential competitor, Epic is giving up control over their own product. This will certainly save them some money in the short term. In the long term, this may not turn out to be such a wise decision. But by then, the executives at Epic will probably have moved on, so not their problem.
thethrowboat 7y ago
It's strange to me that they could support linux and mac back when they were smaller, but now that epic owns them and rl generates 50M(?) per year, they can't.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  Maybe if the cost of supporting Linux and Mac weren't so great they wouldn't have needed to sell to Epic in the first place. /s
polk 7y ago
This sums it up pretty well: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
yellowarchangel 7y ago
From a purely business decision? Sure. But why does Valve support linux and attempt to bridge the gap with steam play if it's only about profit? There are other reasons to support linux: - Game devs are usually a fan of linux / vulkan / open source (windows is bad for developers, it's closed source everything) - Linux is still a market portion. Some engines like UE4 support cross-platform builds with minimal work - Supporting competition to microsoft, and the really poor DX software
zahrc 7y ago
The “normal” Windows gamer just doesn’t has a choice, unless they want to switch to PlayStation / Xbox, one of the choices developed by Microsoft, again. The question is, how high or low is the demand for a equally performing alternative “pc gaming” platform? I personally would banish everything windows-related forever.
sangnoir 7y ago
> If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply. How very rational. I wish HN had the same attitude each time Google sunsets a well-loved, but little-used product.

If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply.

flatiron 7y ago

What about switch and ps4? Are they being dropped? They don’t support direct x 11.

ssully 7y ago
Switch and PS4 players make up more then 0.3% of their playerbase, unlike Linux and Mac Users, so they will be supported.
- Crisco 7y ago
  So I have no experience in 3D graphics and very little experience in game design (I wrote a 2D game in high school but that's it), but if they are already going from DX9 to DX11 why don't they go to another library that supports all the platforms they already develop for such as Vulkan? I'd imagine that would better future-proof their game to make adapting to other platforms that are released in the future easier. So how hard would it be to go from DX to something else? As stated before, I have no experience in this area so I'm being completely sincere with my question.
  - ssully 7y ago
    The developer has come out and said that as of the announcement of them dropping support for Mac/Linux, the two platforms combine make up 0.6% of their active player base [1]. I am guessing they just did the math and decided the cost of switching APIs to something like Vulkan is not worth it when such a small portion of their users would benefit from it. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/rocket-league-will-drop-support-for-mac-linux-versions-in-march/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/rocket-league-will-dr...
    - Crisco 7y ago
      Yeah, that is completely understandable. I was just curious why they wouldn't invest in developing for a different but more cross-platform library so that maintaining Rocket League on platforms such as the Switch and Playstation 4 (as well as the future consoles from both manufacturers) would be easier. They have stated no plans to remove support from those consoles, and I don't imagine they are much easier to maintain compatibility with than macOS or Linux.
  - fsloth 7y ago
    As they stated, most of their players are on windows. If windows is your target market, then DirectX is generally the graphics API you want to support. You don't want to make architecture decisions because one or other approach would be untenable to below 1% of your target. Cross-platform is not a value as such.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    At some point, somebody needs to actually tell the hardware what to do. If you're doing 3D graphic rendering in real time, that point is probably now. There are no magical abstraction layers that can let you do performant 3D graphics without paying attention to what's going on at the API level.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Typically a DirectX revision bump would be less work than a totally different API. To answer "How hard could it be?", the answer is, "Surprisingly hard". Games rely on weird interactions with hardware and need to smoothly render at a consistent FPS. Often a revision bump in a library might introduce subtle changes (for example, a difference in how numbers are rounded might cause z-fighting or change the way shadows are rendered). All of those need to be discovered and fixed. Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over. It's definitely non-trivial. Doable, but non-trivial. I don't blame the devs for making a cost/benefit analysis and realizing they would never recoup the cost. Given the economies of the games industry (where studios are basically always one step away from complete failure and being dissolved into nothing), I appreciate the need to focus on not losing money in this way.
    - tambre 7y ago
      > Not to mention that DirectX uses a totally different shader language than Vulkan, so you have to get in there and translate all that code over. Vulkan doesn't really have a shader language unless you want to write SPIR-V assembly. Thus you'd use either GLSL or HLSL. Microsoft's own DirectX HLSL compiler[0] supports SPIR-V as a target in addition to DXIL. [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler
      - Pfhreak 7y ago
        Consider me corrected! I had done a quick google and saw GLSL listed in the top results and made an incorrect assumption.
    - Crisco 7y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. I guess part of why I'm confused is that they have not stated any plans to stop supporting Switch and Playstation 4 versions of the game and in my mind those are probably just as difficult to maintain as the macOS and Linux version. Do Nintendo and Sony provide support here that make it easier for Psyonix to port to their platforms, or are there just so many more players on those platforms that it is worth the investment?
  - pandaman 7y ago
    Reading the article, it appears that the issue is with the supported functionality and not with the literal library. They already had been using OpenGL instead of DX9 on Mac/Linux but they cannot use it instead of DX11 because the features they need are not available in that version of OpenGL.
  - protanopia 7y ago
    Rocket League is made with Unreal Engine 3 so if they wanted to port the game to using Vulkan they would also have to upgrade the game to Unreal Engine 4.
blackearl 7y ago
You can substitute directx 11 support for "issues requiring X amount of employee hours" and the ratio of affected player base.
Impossible 7y ago
The player base on PS4 and Switch is large enough to justify dedicated engineering support. Mac and Linux on Steam are not. Interesting enough iOS and Android might be big enough markets to put Mac and maybe Linux support back on the table, if they decide to make a mobile version of Rocket League. If Google threw a bunch of money at them for Stadia support Linux could come back also.

itake 7y ago

From what I understand, they also removed key features (like multiplayer) for people that have already paid for the app. They will not be getting refunds for in-app purchases.

Guillaume86 7y ago
Multiplayer requires latest version, so no getting updates results in losing multiplayer. I agree refunds would be a decent move given that multiplayer is the main selling point of the game though.
kevingadd 7y ago
It's unrealistic to continue supporting multiplayer if you're not updating the client anymore. It'd mean you could never make changes.
- itake 7y ago
  I think you're missing the problem for the consumer. If I bought that game, because it means I could play multiplayer with my friends and now they are removing that feature <3 months after I bought the game, then I would not be a happy camper. I don't think anyone truly expects a game's multiplayer should last forever, but it should last while the game is still popular and releasing updates.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Totally reasonable to be unhappy, sadly it's a common occurrence in this era of live services. Sometimes you buy an online-only game and the servers go down a month later. If you're lucky the devs will be nice and refund you, sometimes they don't.

threatripper 7y ago

They leave a gap in the market where a competitor could emerge. EDIT: I know the gap is small, less than 1% but it is still a gap. If a competitor could emerge in a small gap like this is a question I cannot answer. There is potential for growth (especially if Microsoft slips up heavily which they almost did) but so far that growth hasn't happened and the future is hard to predict.

ssully 7y ago
Do you have any examples where a serious competitor emerged because a game developer didn't support Linux or Mac?
- threatripper 7y ago
  None that I know of. Almost all Linux games also support Windows. Steam heavily supports Linux and in their numbers are 0.67% Linux users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... It is rumored that Steam uses Linux for leverage in negotiations with Microsoft. Therefore it may have a big strategic value for them even though the numbers are still so low.
  - Macha 7y ago
    I mean, Valve's Linux support happened because they were spooked by the Windows Store and the idea of a possible future iOS style lockdown leaving them shut out of the market
- speedgoose 7y ago
  SuperTux and Gnome Mines!
- yyyk 7y ago
  The casual link is nigh-impossible to prove. However, Bungie started as a Mac shop, and Stardock started as an OS/2 shop. It's possible to make the claim that had more commercial games been available to these relatively small platforms in the 90s, there wouldn't have been enough space for these game companies to emerge. As I said, I can't prove that. It's quite possible these companies would have been successful anyway.

reaperducer 7y ago

If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply. That's only if your business model only looks at the next quarter, and if you don't care about your brand. Amazon, and department stores before it, became huge because they made an effort to cater to all needs. That allowed them to be the go-to brands for people looking for things. Imagine if in its early days Amazon ran the numbers and discovered that textbooks were only a small portion of its sales, so it stopped selling textbooks. Then it noticed that cookbooks were only a small part of sales, and those were cut. Then it noticed that mysteries were only a small part of sales, so they went out the window. Next thing you know, nobody shops at Amazon because its focus on the big numbers turned it into a niche provider. If a games publisher chooses to restrict its platforms, that's its business. But I won't think of it for "games" in general when I want to find a game.

shultays 7y ago
I dont share your optimizm of linux desktop being a non minority next quarter. Or next 20 quarters
Kapura 7y ago
Amazon dot com and building a game are so different that it is difficult to follow the metaphor to any place where it offers insight. The reality is that it costs money to support any gaming platform. The cost of supporting platforms with only a tiny number of players can easily outstrip any potential upside. A prominent indie dev on twitter once said, of his game that has sold at least several hundred thousand copies, that only 100 people will buy your game on Linux and every single one will email you to tell you that they did. That they are technical and vocal doesn't make the playerbase any larger.
pier25 7y ago
Just look at the Steam stats. About 97% of PC players are on Windows. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey It's simply not a sensible economical decision to invest serious dev time for 3% of your potential players.

loudmax 7y ago

By tying themselves to a single proprietary platform owned by a potential competitor, Epic is giving up control over their own product. This will certainly save them some money in the short term. In the long term, this may not turn out to be such a wise decision. But by then, the executives at Epic will probably have moved on, so not their problem.

thethrowboat 7y ago

It's strange to me that they could support linux and mac back when they were smaller, but now that epic owns them and rl generates 50M(?) per year, they can't.

kgwxd 7y ago
Maybe if the cost of supporting Linux and Mac weren't so great they wouldn't have needed to sell to Epic in the first place. /s

polk 7y ago

This sums it up pretty well: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760

yellowarchangel 7y ago

From a purely business decision? Sure. But why does Valve support linux and attempt to bridge the gap with steam play if it's only about profit? There are other reasons to support linux: - Game devs are usually a fan of linux / vulkan / open source (windows is bad for developers, it's closed source everything) - Linux is still a market portion. Some engines like UE4 support cross-platform builds with minimal work - Supporting competition to microsoft, and the really poor DX software

zahrc 7y ago

The “normal” Windows gamer just doesn’t has a choice, unless they want to switch to PlayStation / Xbox, one of the choices developed by Microsoft, again. The question is, how high or low is the demand for a equally performing alternative “pc gaming” platform? I personally would banish everything windows-related forever.

sangnoir 7y ago

> If user base on those platforms is very small then it makes no sense for the developers to spend resources to keep it updated. At the end of the day its about demand and supply. How very rational. I wish HN had the same attitude each time Google sunsets a well-loved, but little-used product.