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> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux v

by franga2000 6y ago

> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs. Even if there's only 100 people who'd buy it only if it ran on Linux, that should pretty much cover the couple hours of dev time.

coldpie 6y ago
I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be supported across distros, which mostly means the Steam Runtime, which means you need to go learn about and understand that. You can't introduce any platform assumptions ("ehh, I'll just hardcode this path with a backslash... oops"). Once you release, you're talking support for dozens of different distros, different versions of distros, different package managers, different filesystems. I know what you're going to say: "Just support Ubuntu LTS and ignore everyone else". Well, now you've just cut your customer base by at least 75%[1], and your customers on other distros are going to demand support anyway. Do you tell a paying customer to F-off because they're not using a distro with only ~20% of the market? Supporting Linux is hard. So is supporting Windows, but if Windows makes up 98% of your customer base, it's justified. 2%? Ehhhhh. (P.S. I love Linux. See my profile. This is the kind of stuff I deal with every single day.) [1] https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no-more/ https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no...
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        ....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any better.
        cycloptic 6y ago
        I'm not making a case for shipping on the "Linux desktop" because that doesn't exist and has never been a real platform. Most smaller distros are not trying to be "relevant" to whatever the gaming community's fad of the day is. They're perfectly fine filling what niche they do. If you want to target those smaller distros as a platform, you can give them some source code to work with, or you can pay all the cost of maintaining things yourself, or you can just ignore those. They will do fine without your game.
Chouhada 6y ago
> What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that if none of your code is Windows-specific and works exactly the same on the Linux distribution you are targeting. Once you start using your own middleware and libraries from outside of the default engine, you need to make sure every single one works across all the platforms you're targeting. Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. > It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I've been a producer on large games, and the QA process starts very early on. You don't 'finish' a game and then QA starts - It's an ongoing process that consists of significantly more than just launching a game. >We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs Some people don't see it that way though. People who have paid for a product have the right for it to work properly. Tickets for Linux support are often higher [1], so the time investment against payback can be problematic. GPU driver support on Linux can also still be problematic. From feature differences against Windows, to crashes. These all take additional development time. Linux developers are often more difficult to acquire in the game dev world. QA even more so. Game dev is really hard. Some of it is hidden by engines like UE4 on the surface, but as soon as you start digging down into serious development, it's difficult. [1] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
- smaudet 6y ago
  Probably the most relevant issue here is the DirectX stack or using some windows specific API (why? DirectX I maybe got at one point, the others speak to some absurd Microsoft-Is-Best-Cause-I-Paid-Money-ism). > Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? Outside of truly exotic window managers, the biggest issue I've ever seen with ports has to do with dependencies. Flatpack/Snaps solve most if not all of those problems. > There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. That's assuming anti-cheat systems are ethical, even. Most games I play I want to be multiplayer, and moddable. Most games I play can do both of those things and work in a cross platform modding language. Not hard. I don't want any anti-cheat systems for a complex game with tons of modding. The only place anti-cheat systems make sense is with e-sports style games. Of which, the best anti-cheat systems work server side. Anything else is invasive and tantamount to illegal spying. Shame on you, go burn in peeping Tom hell you perverse game dev. > For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I find this incredibly hard to believe. If you are working within the engine the majority of the time, the majority of the game will play wherever the engine works. Which brings us back to one of your first comments: > For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that For which games are you not just using the UE4 stack? I.e. what specific problems are game devs normally experiencing causing their code to be non-portable? A bunch of low level assembly code and non standard C++? > but as soon as you start digging down into serious development I challenge you to define 'serious' development. That sounds suspiciously like you're wasting your time fighting infrastructure, or just doing things in a non-portable manner. Solving problems is cross platform, so you can't be doing much serious game coding, its probably problem solving for your particular platform (e.g., as I already mentioned, doing a bunch of work in DirectX shaders or something).
golergka 6y ago
Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because you want to support gamepad with minimum hassle for the player), and million of unknown unknowns that hopefully will be found by QA, but realistically, by very angry players, I'd budget at least a couple of man-months for this. With sales in hundreds or even tens of thousands, we can expect to get about 2% of audience from Linux, which will account for single-digit thousands, or hundreds of copies sold. With a price tag of $10-20, after Steam cut, taxes, regional prices, sales and refunds, it's about $5-10 of revenue per unit, so in total, about $10k. If that would just be the money a single developer got for 2-3 months of work, it could still be fine for some regions (not everyone on HN is from US). But with a studio, you also have to spend money on marketing, payroll taxes, rent, and development of future projects, which most likely sell even worse. So, no, I really don't see how porting to Linux would pay. Most of developers that I talked to who did it admitted that supporting OSX and Linus turned out to be a giant waste.
- smaudet 6y ago
  I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm). But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.

coldpie 6y ago

I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be supported across distros, which mostly means the Steam Runtime, which means you need to go learn about and understand that. You can't introduce any platform assumptions ("ehh, I'll just hardcode this path with a backslash... oops"). Once you release, you're talking support for dozens of different distros, different versions of distros, different package managers, different filesystems. I know what you're going to say: "Just support Ubuntu LTS and ignore everyone else". Well, now you've just cut your customer base by at least 75%[1], and your customers on other distros are going to demand support anyway. Do you tell a paying customer to F-off because they're not using a distro with only ~20% of the market? Supporting Linux is hard. So is supporting Windows, but if Windows makes up 98% of your customer base, it's justified. 2%? Ehhhhh. (P.S. I love Linux. See my profile. This is the kind of stuff I deal with every single day.) [1] https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no-more/ https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no...

cycloptic 6y ago
Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      ....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any better.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        I'm not making a case for shipping on the "Linux desktop" because that doesn't exist and has never been a real platform. Most smaller distros are not trying to be "relevant" to whatever the gaming community's fad of the day is. They're perfectly fine filling what niche they do. If you want to target those smaller distros as a platform, you can give them some source code to work with, or you can pay all the cost of maintaining things yourself, or you can just ignore those. They will do fine without your game.

Chouhada 6y ago

> What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that if none of your code is Windows-specific and works exactly the same on the Linux distribution you are targeting. Once you start using your own middleware and libraries from outside of the default engine, you need to make sure every single one works across all the platforms you're targeting. Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. > It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I've been a producer on large games, and the QA process starts very early on. You don't 'finish' a game and then QA starts - It's an ongoing process that consists of significantly more than just launching a game. >We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs Some people don't see it that way though. People who have paid for a product have the right for it to work properly. Tickets for Linux support are often higher [1], so the time investment against payback can be problematic. GPU driver support on Linux can also still be problematic. From feature differences against Windows, to crashes. These all take additional development time. Linux developers are often more difficult to acquire in the game dev world. QA even more so. Game dev is really hard. Some of it is hidden by engines like UE4 on the surface, but as soon as you start digging down into serious development, it's difficult. [1] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760

smaudet 6y ago
Probably the most relevant issue here is the DirectX stack or using some windows specific API (why? DirectX I maybe got at one point, the others speak to some absurd Microsoft-Is-Best-Cause-I-Paid-Money-ism). > Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? Outside of truly exotic window managers, the biggest issue I've ever seen with ports has to do with dependencies. Flatpack/Snaps solve most if not all of those problems. > There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. That's assuming anti-cheat systems are ethical, even. Most games I play I want to be multiplayer, and moddable. Most games I play can do both of those things and work in a cross platform modding language. Not hard. I don't want any anti-cheat systems for a complex game with tons of modding. The only place anti-cheat systems make sense is with e-sports style games. Of which, the best anti-cheat systems work server side. Anything else is invasive and tantamount to illegal spying. Shame on you, go burn in peeping Tom hell you perverse game dev. > For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I find this incredibly hard to believe. If you are working within the engine the majority of the time, the majority of the game will play wherever the engine works. Which brings us back to one of your first comments: > For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that For which games are you not just using the UE4 stack? I.e. what specific problems are game devs normally experiencing causing their code to be non-portable? A bunch of low level assembly code and non standard C++? > but as soon as you start digging down into serious development I challenge you to define 'serious' development. That sounds suspiciously like you're wasting your time fighting infrastructure, or just doing things in a non-portable manner. Solving problems is cross platform, so you can't be doing much serious game coding, its probably problem solving for your particular platform (e.g., as I already mentioned, doing a bunch of work in DirectX shaders or something).

golergka 6y ago

Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because you want to support gamepad with minimum hassle for the player), and million of unknown unknowns that hopefully will be found by QA, but realistically, by very angry players, I'd budget at least a couple of man-months for this. With sales in hundreds or even tens of thousands, we can expect to get about 2% of audience from Linux, which will account for single-digit thousands, or hundreds of copies sold. With a price tag of $10-20, after Steam cut, taxes, regional prices, sales and refunds, it's about $5-10 of revenue per unit, so in total, about $10k. If that would just be the money a single developer got for 2-3 months of work, it could still be fine for some regions (not everyone on HN is from US). But with a studio, you also have to spend money on marketing, payroll taxes, rent, and development of future projects, which most likely sell even worse. So, no, I really don't see how porting to Linux would pay. Most of developers that I talked to who did it admitted that supporting OSX and Linus turned out to be a giant waste.

smaudet 6y ago
I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm). But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.