3 ms·

Stupid question, if I as a developer decided to ship a Linux build, but I explicitly refuse to support it, would you still buy it. By this I mean I'll probably

Stupid question, if I as a developer decided to ship a Linux build, but I explicitly refuse to support it, would you still buy it. By this I mean I'll probably run it on Ubuntu to make sure it loads, and play around with it for about 30 minutes, but I'm not going to track down OS specific issues.

smoldesu 4y ago
I would still buy it, as long as you didn't intentionally obfuscate the Windows version for Linux players. Targeting Linux is hard, and expecting game devs to update their game perpetually to the latest library is unreasonable (much like it is on MacOS). The real Linux advantage is Wine though, which serves as an even better runtime for playing games than their native versions, oftentimes. A couple anecdotes here: I really like the indie game Ziggurat 2, which shipped with a native Linux version, but it didn't follow XDG standards and made a random folder in my home directory. It also had input lag issues, and switching to the Windows version through Wine solved all of these issues. Same case for Rimworld, too: has a great native version with some modding quirks, but works perfectly well under Wine. The only thing that really pisses me off is when developers intentionally snub Linux users for seemingly no reason. The developer behind Diabotical, a Quake-like shooter, had a game that ran perfectly well on Linux without his knowledge, anti-cheat and all. The guy threw a fit for some reason when finding out about this, and went as far as adding syscalls into his game that crashed Wine. The game is still unplayable on Linux to this day, despite working perfectly fine (and supposedly with perfect EAC support).
- 999900000999 4y ago
  So wait, You prefer to just run Windows builds on Linux? You might have just saved me a ton of time, I would personally never do something intentionally to mess with Linux users. I imagine a third party integration, like calling the achievement system ( Gamepass games do this ) might.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Both Windows and native Linux titles tend to "just work" out-of-the-box, but native titles tend to be harder to support as time goes on. Targeting Wine ensures that as long as Wine is updated to the latest Linux technology, your game should run fine. And since Wine isn't going anywhere anytime soon, this isn't a bad solution. Of course, you'll find all kinds of opinions on the matter, but I don't think people will be angry if you ship a Windows-first title with Linux compatibility being a second-class priority. > I imagine a third party integration, like calling the achievement system ( Gamepass games do this ) might. It depends, Wine should allow for cross-application communication. I guess it would depend on if you had Gamepass prereqs installed on your system, and if Gamepass even runs in Wine (I doubt it). With that being said, there's a surprising amount of third-party integrations that work perfectly fine on Linux. Steam achievements work on Linux even when playing Windows titles. Discord will automatically pick up Wine games and display them as "Playing Now" properly. Even a few anti-cheats have Wine/native support, allowing for games like Apex Legends to work online without a hitch. Do whatever feels right for you, but I buy Windows games all the time and I don't own a single Windows machine.
    - 999900000999 4y ago
      Thanks, I'll keep Linux users in mind and will at least test out using Ubuntu if time permits. I haven't ran Ubuntu locally in years though, so I might go and spin up an EC2 GPU instance to test .
ridgered4 4y ago
I find games that have a linux build, even if I can't get it working, usually are a lot more likely to work well with proton. So it's a plus even if you're clear you aren't going to support it.

smoldesu 4y ago

I would still buy it, as long as you didn't intentionally obfuscate the Windows version for Linux players. Targeting Linux is hard, and expecting game devs to update their game perpetually to the latest library is unreasonable (much like it is on MacOS). The real Linux advantage is Wine though, which serves as an even better runtime for playing games than their native versions, oftentimes. A couple anecdotes here: I really like the indie game Ziggurat 2, which shipped with a native Linux version, but it didn't follow XDG standards and made a random folder in my home directory. It also had input lag issues, and switching to the Windows version through Wine solved all of these issues. Same case for Rimworld, too: has a great native version with some modding quirks, but works perfectly well under Wine. The only thing that really pisses me off is when developers intentionally snub Linux users for seemingly no reason. The developer behind Diabotical, a Quake-like shooter, had a game that ran perfectly well on Linux without his knowledge, anti-cheat and all. The guy threw a fit for some reason when finding out about this, and went as far as adding syscalls into his game that crashed Wine. The game is still unplayable on Linux to this day, despite working perfectly fine (and supposedly with perfect EAC support).

999900000999 4y ago
So wait, You prefer to just run Windows builds on Linux? You might have just saved me a ton of time, I would personally never do something intentionally to mess with Linux users. I imagine a third party integration, like calling the achievement system ( Gamepass games do this ) might.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Both Windows and native Linux titles tend to "just work" out-of-the-box, but native titles tend to be harder to support as time goes on. Targeting Wine ensures that as long as Wine is updated to the latest Linux technology, your game should run fine. And since Wine isn't going anywhere anytime soon, this isn't a bad solution. Of course, you'll find all kinds of opinions on the matter, but I don't think people will be angry if you ship a Windows-first title with Linux compatibility being a second-class priority. > I imagine a third party integration, like calling the achievement system ( Gamepass games do this ) might. It depends, Wine should allow for cross-application communication. I guess it would depend on if you had Gamepass prereqs installed on your system, and if Gamepass even runs in Wine (I doubt it). With that being said, there's a surprising amount of third-party integrations that work perfectly fine on Linux. Steam achievements work on Linux even when playing Windows titles. Discord will automatically pick up Wine games and display them as "Playing Now" properly. Even a few anti-cheats have Wine/native support, allowing for games like Apex Legends to work online without a hitch. Do whatever feels right for you, but I buy Windows games all the time and I don't own a single Windows machine.
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    Thanks, I'll keep Linux users in mind and will at least test out using Ubuntu if time permits. I haven't ran Ubuntu locally in years though, so I might go and spin up an EC2 GPU instance to test .

ridgered4 4y ago

I find games that have a linux build, even if I can't get it working, usually are a lot more likely to work well with proton. So it's a plus even if you're clear you aren't going to support it.