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If only. Take e.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity, so they would literally only have to push a button to support linux, and yet, no
by asddubs 11y ago
If only. Take e.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity, so they would literally only have to push a button to support linux, and yet, no linux support.
- satyanash 11y agoI don't think it's that easy. The amount of effort that goes into testing, supporting and getting a game running for another operating system is not offset by the amount of consumers you have in the linux demographic.
- eterm 11y agoThat's a technologist's falacy. Sure, they could enable a linux build with a "push of a button", but to have linux support they require a support department to support that build. Actually supporting something is a lot more than just the technology required.
- mrmondo 11y agoRelease it as a beta - perhaps even for a reduced price and let the community provide bug reports or even submit fixes if parts are open sourced. This has worked very well for non-game software so the same principles likely apply at least in part.
- charlesdm 11y agoThis is Blizzard - they would never do that. They don't want to erode their 'we only release stuff when it's properly finished' brand.
- johnchristopher 11y agoSupport period for unsuccessful games is wayyyy shorter than support for unsuccessful or buggy first release of open source softwares that can benefit from bug fixes and patches in the long run. Games are not in the long run.
- jebblue 11y agoI've found first release of open source software to often be more stable and release ready than commercial software I paid for.
- johnchristopher 11y agoYour point being ? Whatever the platform the vast majority of games are never going to be supported for as long as open source software running on Linux is. So if the game is successful but doesn't work out of the box players will not bother and simply run the Windows version while the Linux gang will lament how it's not yet the year of Linux gaming. If the game isn't successful the Linux version will die out the same but faster. Thinking an AAA game that missed its launch might benefit `from the community bug reports` is wishful thinking. edit: And it's not due to the technological aspects or the software philosophy of the platform, it's about having the money and the time to support a product for a niche platform.
- Crito 11y agoGames with a critical mass of followers will receive better support from open source communities than they ever will from companies. Try to get Quake 3 support today. Then try to get support for ioquake3. Alternatively, try to get support for Transport Tycoon. Now try to get support for OpenTTD. It's not a matter of "game or not game". We have these examples of formerly commercial games for which commercial support no longer exists, but for which open source community support is plentiful.
- johnchristopher 11y agoBut the critical mass needed to get that kind of support is in the Quake 3 range... I seriously doubt many games are going to reach that threshold and prove that `à la linux' support can work. Especially on the long term (ie: further along the line than the game launch window). I am of the opinion that Quake3 is an exception, not the rule.
- tadzik_ 11y agoMaybe they have learned other developers' lesson that a it takes much more than a push of a button to get a Unity game on Linux. QA takes time. Middleware may or may not be available. Launchers may not be there (especially in the case of Hearthstone). A lost of indie/kickstarted projects are still considered "Linux Scams" because they assumed that it'd be that easy.
- ekianjo 11y agoPlayonlinux makes it easy to launch Hearthstone and play it on any Linux distro. I have a hard time to believe that Blizzard does not have enough resources to do QA.
- tadzik_ 11y agoI'm sure it does, they just not consider it economically viable.
- ekianjo 11y agoI just wish they could try once at least.
- jon-wood 11y agoWhat's to say they haven't, and decided the work involved would be too much for a commercial release. Blizzard are well known for their approach of not releasing things until they're ready, and they won't want to kill that reputation for a Linux port.
- hitlin37 11y agoit may not be easy, but with the progress made by other game engines in last few months, running your game on linux is now a reality and as easy as making it for PC (with little effort).
- tadzik_ 11y ago
- golergka 11y ago> they would literally only have to push a button to support linux What. Why do people think that? Even if you use Unity, the DirectX/OpenGL distinction still matters, not to mention all other platform-specific stuff. Of course, with Unity you _can_ develop a very simple and unoptimised game that would be able to compile on all desktop and mobile platforms with one click — but when you start to dig down and try to do things effectively, you end up with a lot of platform-specific code.
- tormeh 11y agoUnity is a game engine. I'd assume it handles all graphics calls for you - you don't really have to care about directx and opengl.
- golergka 11y agoUnfortunately, you'd be very wrong. As a Unity developer, I had to drill down to the float sizes on specific Android devices (some genius noname graphic adapter used 12-bit floats, and it messed up my custom shader). Game engines, as every similar kind of middleware, are an abstraction that is almost always leaky. It's still a great improvement over doing everything natively, of course.
- thefreeman 11y agoWell, they support mobile clients, so they had to deal with OpenGL anyway.
- to3m 11y agoThat's OpenGL ES, which isn't the same (though I believe the plan is to merge them one day). Mobile GPUs tend to have different feature support and performance characteristics too.
- hutattedonmyarm 11y agoWell, they support OS X, so they do have to support OpenGL. Both Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are native, not just wrappers
- scrollaway 11y agoThere's a lot of Unity games that don't release on Linux. Ori and the Blind Forest is another one that comes to mind (http://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/).
- cwyers 11y agoI agree with the overall thrust of your point (plenty of Unity games don't see a Linux release, and it's not as easy as pushing a button), but a game published by Microsoft Studios is not a very good example.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoBut how would they sell it? Their launcher is not on Linux so there is more overhead to it. It has just now come to Android and IOS, which makes sense that they would target those platforms first.
- tcfunk 11y agoI imagine it has less to do with Hearthstone and more to do with Battle.net and other DRM-related stuffs. But that's just a guess.
- orbifold 11y agoPretty much all Blizzard Games have been running very well under Wine for years.
- needusername 11y ago> Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, which is made in Unity Oh, that explains why it's so shitty on Mac OS X.