This was to be expected, when Epic Games, notorious for not giving a rat's ass about Linux support, acquired the studio behind Rocket League. Other titles from studios bought by Epic will likely follow if they have not already.
This does pose the question on what happens to Linux players who have invested into digital purchases. Online functionality will be disabled so all items will basically be void and the game becomes mostly worthless.
I also wonder if this means that Rocket League will not run on Google Stadia and its competitors, as those platforms mostly run on Linux systems.
It's weird because Unreal Engine 4 is actually pretty well supported on Linux. I wrote a substantial projection art piece recently that used a ton of low level UE4 features, including native C++ modules, and it all worked flawlessly on Linux[0]
Rocket League is leaving Steam?!? I guess I shouldn't be surprised but that is very annoying. I'm definitely not looking forward to the fracturing landscape that is ahead.
A fractured landscape is a competitive one. Valve had several years of high margins (meaning more money to them, less to the people that made games) and stagnation of the Steam platform. I prefer this fracturing to the monoculture.
It would be nice if any of the game stores would actually compete instead of paying for exclusives. Steam has 1000x the features of any of the other stores. Origin has had probably a decade to catch up and yet its just falling further behind.
All this fracturing means for end users is more rootkit launchers to install and less games for linux users.
It's a chicken and an egg problem. Developers won't come until you have marketshare, and users won't come until you have games. Paying for exclusives is a way to bootstrap a chicken without an egg.
I understand that side of it but valve goes above and beyond so much that even if Epic or Origin had huge user counts I seriously doubt they would put the effort in to building features like "remote play together" which streams a game to other people and streams their controllers back to you so you can all play the same local coop game. Or Proton which allows playing games on linux.
Valve even has linux kernel devs around who fix bugs in drivers for gaming hardware.
Steam may have been a monopoly but it was a pretty good one for the end user.
EA has this with Origin Access (2 tiers, $5m/$30y and $15m/$100y), alongside Ubisoft with UPlay+ ($15m). And I guess platforms like Stadia would fall under this category.
Of course, the games are specific to the publisher or the partnerships the platform has.
Nonsense. Steam as a platform is head and shoulders above where it was a year ago.
All my Windows exclusive games appear side by side with my native Linux games. I no longer have to have wine installed and maintain a separate Windows (in wine) Steam installation.
I don't think the engine itself would be the problem. There might be a piece of middleware that breaks support through. Both Linux distros and MacOS are transitioning to x64-only and I can imagine a proprietary piece of third-party middleware doesn't support proper x64 or something making it impossible to upgrade the system to support modern OS's.
> Both Linux distros and MacOS are transitioning to x64-only
I think this isn’t true.
Although more Linux distros aren’t shipping full x86 images anymore, I don’t think that actually impacts x86 support on AMD64 setups. Some limited amount of x86 packages continue to be provided for running Wine and legacy proprietary software.
macOS is killing the ability to run 32 bit code at all. There’s not much of a true technical reason to do this that I’m aware of, it’s a decision similar to Windows disallowing 16 bit software in 64 bit Windows.
Under Linux AMD64 not only can you run 32 bit software, you can still create 16 bit code segments as well. No vm8086, but it can still be used for emulating old Windows applications.
Paradox has been pretty consistent about Linux support, and in turn I've been pretty consistent about lighting my money on fire by buying their games and the DLCs thereof.
It's been pretty consistently broken support. I've run into lot's of things like CK2 only working on xorg, HOI4 only working on x11 (or the other way around), Imperator not working unless you install some c++ runtime lib, EU4 not working at all at the moment for some reason, all on a pretty standard ubuntu 18.04.
Some of those might not be the fault of paradox, but Imperator shows that they didn't even test running it on a stock install.
I've had better luck with proton games, they don't always work but once they do I have far less regressions.
That's surprising. I'm on Slackware and literally every one of Paradox's strategy games I've tried (Stellaris, HOI4, CK2, EUIV, Imperator, in that order) works flawlessly out-of-the-box.
Granted, I'm on Slackware64-current, so it's possible I've got newer driver/lib versions than Ubuntu 18.04. I'm also using FOSS drivers exclusively (primarily AMD, though I've played Stellaris on Intel GPUs with decent results, too), so if you're using Nvidia graphics, that might be a factor, too.
I meant xorg and wayland but I just tried everything.
Currently on wayland stellaris and EU4 won't start for me, I didn't even know stellaris was broken until now, that was one of the better working ones.
On xorg they will all start but games are offset and sit below the top bar in gnome, The mouse isn't offset so it's completely unplayable. One of them used to work fine in xorg though, not sure which.
It's also been a while but I wasn't able to play CKII or EUIV against friends on Windows due to some clock-time issue. Not sure if that's still a thing, but it led me to use CKII in WINE while doing large multiplayer games.
edit: otherwise, single-player native linux has been solid with CKII, HOI4, and EUIV, including mods. Vicky II did fine in WINE. I'm running new-ish Fedora.
Proton is kinda the admission that even on Linux, Windows is still the better platform though.
I’m 100% not complaining because Proton has enabled me to play a libraries worth of games that were previously unavailable but it’s not exactly a victory Linux. The future might look like devs testing a little bit in Proton as “Linux support.”
I would disagree; "Better Platform" != "Supported Platform".
While it is an admission Linux gaming was hardly going to take off on its own from a cold start, it allows people to use the platform that makes more sense for them. With the increased capability of Linux+Proton as a platform, its horizons are pushed and it makes more sense for more people.
The only possible downside here is the potential for a developer to neglect Linux support now that people "can just run it in proton", netting Linux users a couple losses of what-would-have-been native ports. However, I believe the increase to the viability of Linux gaming overall makes up for it.
Not exactly, the the correct obvious admission is that Linux is a better Windows, as an extra translation layer for Win32 API to Linux/POSIX still has better performance (most games I play on Proton) than native Windows.
The meme might not be real but they're also not doing themselves many favors. People want a certain couple games, value does whatever they can to avoid it.
Even to hold people over they could have resurrected HL:DM and made it F2P.
You're missing counter strike: global offensive and dota2, which do work on linux natively. They're definitely in the top 3 in terms of general popularity for their genres.
All source games work on linux, but the new half life game might be the first exception. Proton works pretty well for other games, but there are hard blockers on some (for ex: the anticheat in pubg)
AFAIK there is certain level of active development, though it was for a long time only one person, but also the general code is kept clean and portable, and it's mostly the occassional middleware that is an issue.
Isn't it asking a bit much of developers to give a shit about Linux when according to Steam's latest software survey it accounts for a whopping 0.67% of users, spread across God-knows-how-many different flavors.
Why would I even install Linux on my gaming box if there are no games?
Yes, I know, chicken and egg - but most games I play don't really work on Linux and are not on Steam anyway. I'm just saying it's a dumb idea to go off usage numbers of Linux steam users. FWIW, I have it installed on a laptop, so if they do some sort of flagging, my account has repeatedly logged in from Linux and started games - just not many and not often.
Indeed, and those artistics usually don't get a damm about platforms beyond getting exposure to their work in some form.
Walking the corridors of GDC(E), PAX seldom turns into discussions about OS and 3D APIs, rather business opportunies, publishing contracts, turning ideas into contracts.
Street musicians and art fair artists also do stuff big labels and architure societies don't care about.
That’s because most of the indie developers use Unity, and in there you can release a Linux binary in the click of a button (you don’t even need to have a Linux OS, cross-compiling is supported out of the box)
> I also wonder if this means that Rocket League will not run on Google Stadia and its competitors, as those platforms mostly run on Linux systems.
Firstly, what do you mean by competitors? I'm pretty sure none of xCloud, Playstation Now, or Nvidia Now use Linux systems.
Secondly, I wouldn't read that far into it. I doubt this has much to do with supporting the Linux API, and more about other burdens of support for Linux desktops, dealing with packaging that can deal with differences in distros, systems, and drivers especially in the context of all the configuration and poor vulkan support. Likely make Linux as a platform not worth supporting. Where Stadia will almost certainly be evaluated separately like a standard game console due to it's (I assume) hardware and api stability. Of course, Stadia may also not be decided worth the burden based on it's player-base, but I am confident it'll be an orthogonal decision.
For macOS you're probably right; a Vulkan rewrite is likely not worth the expenditure.
> Firstly, what do you mean by competitors? I'm pretty sure none of xCloud, Playstation Now, or Nvidia Now use Linux systems.
I see no reason why Nvidia wouldn't use Linux where possible. Windows, especially cloud based Windows, has weird and sometimes expensive license charges that any Linux-compatible game does not need. They're likely still going to run Windows VMs out of necessity, though. I don't know the game streaming market well but with the groundwork Valve laid down for SteamOS support, I can see Stadia competitors choosing to use Linux as a cost-saving measurement. Still Google is quite some party to ignore.
Aside from dropping generic Linux support (which, of course, has an infinite amount of configuration options, especially when you encounter Arch and Gentoo users) they're also dropping SteamOS support. SteamOS (Debian with a layer of Valve software) deals with basically all issues you might have with libraries and versions for you.
This sounds like a choice based on economics (cost of testing Linux packaging vs income from Linux users) but if I were a Steam box user, I'd want the money I've invested into the game back. Based on the laws in my country, I'd say the product will be mostly broken (the main component, online play, will be intentionally disabled) which might be reason to terminate the purchase agreement (i.e. trade the product back for money as its manufacturer will not fix the shortcomings introduced). They'll likely fight tooth and nail to prevent this but one big lawsuit and the cost of maintaining limited Linux support would likely outweigh the cost of killing it after selling the game with Linux compatibility.
> dealing with packaging that can deal with differences in distros, systems, and drivers
"Differences in distros" is easy to fix: only target one distro (e.g. Ubuntu), and let users of other distros figure it out on their own. This has worked well for Steam's Linux ecosystem.
Dealing with "systems and drivers" is the exact same problem as exists on Windows.
Which makes it a non-starter for any multiplayer games using EAC and Proton/Wine, and it would be unlikely to see a native Linux game using EAC considering Epic lack of interest in Linux.
They're the new Nvidia of the Linux world.
Hopefully a more crossplatform anticheat tool is available..
Rust (the game) uses EAC and has a Linux native client. At least it did last time I played it on OpenSUSE. I haven't played it in a while. The lead developer has expressed regret for supporting Linux.
I just shut down my work computers and switched over to my personal machine so I could jump into training mode to work on my dribbling, because I watched a few tips videos on lunch I was eager to apply, but decided to check my news feed first. Fuck.
Cost of the game, 12 DLC packs, and 3 season passes just gone. 388 hours over 12 months to build skills I will never use again. And just as many hours watching others play.
Rocket League was the one and only game I decided to break my no-centralized-or-DRM-protected-games rule for because it is an absolutely beautiful, pure-sport game.
Psyonix made a fantastic game, Epic will destroy it. I knew how bad they were but really hoped they were just going to take this piece of art, not fuck with it, and just profit.
The money I've spent on the game as a Linux user is easily measurable, but what about the, no less than 10, people I've inspired to buy the game and the people they in-turn inspired to buy the game? What about the toys my 3 year old wants because he sees me playing the game? What about when it would have been time for him to get a copy? What about all the friends he was going to inspire to get a copy? All because of a single Linux user that went against his own ideals hoping not to get fucked just this one time.
Rocket League costs $20 when it's not on sale. Say you get 50 people to buy the game. That's $1,000 in revenue, let's say that 80% of that is profit. So that's $800 that Psyonix/Epic make.
I would imagine the staffing costs to keep Linux and macOS versions of the game running are more than $800/week.
I used to love Rocket League, but it seems like every time they make a change, it goes against the community.
First they took some fun, casual games (alternate modes) and made them competitive. The competition isn't the worst, but doing this removed the ability to rematch. Since the games weren't as popular, you'd often find a really great group where both teams were fairly balanced and rematch a dozen times.
This was fun.
They took that away along with the 'Labs', which were alternate arenas. Some went into Rumble (Rocket League with fun tools), but it just wasn't as fun.
With the recent move away from keys, they totally borked their item system. Suddenly near worthless items would cost the user $8. They may have adjusted this, but I've all but stepped away.
It's a shame to see the game slowly go downhill. They had a perfect balance a few years ago that allowed casual and competitive people to enjoy the game. Combine this with the eSports, and everything should have cruised along nicely.
Epic started out saying that they would bring the Epic Store to Linux. That was removed. Then this.
I am so glad I haven't bought anything on the Epic Store. I did buy this game on Steam, before the studio was bought by Epic.
Tim Sweeney was right with GabeN complaining about Microsoft; saying Linux was a 'get out of jail free' card. Now he is establishing his own monopoly that is dependent on Microsoft's monopoly on Windows.
I feel this is a horrible anti-consumer practice, but their ROI must be incredibly low. I don't remember the last time I played a game on a Mac. I wonder how Apple Arcade is doing.
Realistically the 32-bit abandonment in macOS Catalina significantly damaged the Mac gaming market (however “justified” it may be from an engineering standpoint, with many years of warning, etc.). There is simply no good way to tell people that the vast majority of games they probably acquired in the last few years are unlikely to run on any recent hardware.
Some games do move forward to 64-bit but it will certainly require several years for the Mac game market (such as it is) to recover even to the point it had reached.
Ugh, you just reminded me of just how sad I was when I logged into Steam over the weekend for the first time in a while and discovered how many games I lost to Catalina.
I have 118 games in my library, 17 of which are Windows-only. Only 25 of the remaining 101 MacOS-compatible games survived the 64-bit upgrade.
Edit: thinking about it a little more though, this has been the situation for many many months, but I only realized over the weekend how bad it was because I've moved almost all of my gaming to my Nintendo Switch. (I only happened to return to Steam because I wanted to play A Short Hike.)
Many of those games are flagged as not working or not 64, but they are. Stardew Valley for example says it won’t work in Catalina, yet click run and it loads fine.
I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the last major version to support 32 it, it's been deprecated since 2009!
Game companies! The majority of the Mac compatible games I have are 32 bit.
Also, Snow Leopard may have been the last version to support 32 bit processors, but I don't think support for 32 bit apps was deprecated that long ago? Certainly, Apple themselves was still releasing 32bit software back then—if you have a copy of iWork '09 (which got updated as late as 2012), it's 32 bit.
Not to be a jerk but... why? At a certain point none of your customers are running 32 bit hardware, so which parts of your toolchain/dependency tree are so ancient or difficult to alter that you remain compiling to 32 bit?
And while you're right it was deprecated immediately, I do recall universal binaries were soft and then hard deprecated some years ago but I could tell you the exact date. I know there's a lot of vintage software that would never be updated, but like, a good chunk of stuff seems to have been new development or continued support.
I'm not a game developer, so I can't really answer your question. But it's worth noting that most of these games are 32 bit on Windows too. I don't know if that's because of middleware or an actual desire to support 32 bit hardware, but regardless, it probably doesn't make sense to use 32 bit on Windows and 64 bit on macOS.
For non-games, a lot of the Mac software that was still 32 bit was using Carbon, which doesn't have a 64 bit variant. Carbon is old as heck, but if you're using it, there's no upgrade path other than a complete rewrite. That may or may not be worthwhile versus EOL'ing the software.
(As a complete tangent, I recently learned that Apple did once promise a 64 bit version of Carbon. The library was present in the developer preview of Leopard, and many devs began building with it. But then it was gone in Leopard's final release, and Apple never mentioned it again.)
Because no serious game developer expects a platform vendor to pull the rug out from under them. What benefit is there to an up-to-date port, especially when very few people already buy games on Mac? Most of these port projects were done 10 years ago, when Steam on Mac first released.
Console generations are a known quantity for both developers and consumers. A lot of people keep their old consoles around when they buy a new one.
You will never see Sony release a PS4 update that drops support for 2013-era PS4 games, at least not purposefully. If they did, people would be very mad.
Sure, but you're missing that it's worth the effort to maintain. Console platform sales are extremely healthy. Mac sales have never really been enough to support initial porting work, let alone continued investment.
I can only speculate as to each company’s intentions but I will say that it is not just a matter of “recompiling” to support 64-bit.
For example, one thing I noticed on the iOS side (when it went from 32-bit to 64-bit) is that pixel position rounding changed so you would see things like random one-pixel gaps where textures were previously adjacent, etc. These things add up, and a company might decide an older title is not worth fixing.
On the Mac side, the entire damned UI library was thrown out (Carbon), and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if games had been relying on it. That is a huge thing to just redo, and again I would not blame any game company for not bothering to spend the resources.
Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).
There are a litany of lightroom competitors on macOS ATM: CaptureOne and Irridient Developer are probably my favourites, but there's also Luminar and a few I'm forgetting.
I suspect Apple's intent is to leverage the massive interest in game development on their other platform, iOS, to spur game development on Mac. This feels fairly evident with the Apple Arcade push and Catalyst allowing for relatively easy porting from iOS.
I doubt that Epic would have bothered targeting Metal in UE4 if it were macOS only. With it, building games for Macintosh for a great deal of developers is fairly trivial. Unity also targets Metal, as far as I am aware.
It sucks because I feel like gaming on the Mac was actually quite nice for a bit. With Steam/Source running on Mac you actually had a good run where you could play a lot of great games. I remember being so excited to play TF2 on the Mac.
The only games worth developing on the Mac are the 99¢ style iOS games. Anything else just isn't worth it, as developers have been burned too many times now. Just a matter of time before Apple makes it mandatory to use some technology or drops support for something that's currently required and everything has to be updated.
It's back to running games in a VM for me. Not the worst thing, really.
Apple Arcade & iOS gaming is a whole different ballpark from Mac gaming. More and more it's becoming clear that Macs are limited to being work tools. I suspect most people with Macs and want to game on a big screen either own a Windows PC or have a console.
Bootcamp is the only real answer on macOS right now when it comes to 3D - that includes more than just gaming. Now I just have wait and see which one will happen first, AMD actually comes out with a high end video card or nvidia and apple work out their differences.
Unless a recent Windows 10 update screws up the UEFI bootloader and points the loader to the second partition which is incidently used by OSX and prevents booting Windows (well, it fixed an issue on Dell laptops with Windows, which suprise suprise is where most Microsoft PC’s are supplied from). The silly recovery tool wont allow you to mount the eFI boot partition in R/W mode so you cannot fix it yourself (EFI boot requires correct partition UUID). Windows 10 update killed bootcamp option for me, now I triple boot with Linux and Haiku.
Those rumours will not pan out. Apple just made a big deal of releasing a Xeon-powered work station. Chances of them going ARM-only are zero. They may release an ARM-powered notebook.
As someone who owns a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, it wouldn't surprise me if my next MacBook Pro is ARM based. They are just different tools for different purposes.
I play Starcraft 2 multiplayer a couple of times a week on a Mac and it's still great, just as it was almost a decade ago. It's not hard to make games work on a Mac. Linux, on the other hand, I've had very poor experiences with. It was my former default OS which I now run in a VM for development and I could never get games to operate properly without a heavy time investment.
I still play quite a bit of SC2, but using bootcamp, the performance on my 15" MBP 2016 is wayyyyyy better than macos. (I've tried fiddling with settings on macOS, tried the Metal rendering API, and still it's not close).
From my experiments with Lutris and Proton, getting games to work has been quite easy as long as the games don't require ancient Windows APIs and such.
The biggest difficulty I experience with gaming on Linux is Nvidia and their atrocious drivers. Getting games to run isn't very hard these days as long as you can manage to get your GPU to render an image.
> Obviously, there are a lot of caveats here. Numbers such as the DLC Revenue Percentage (relative to non-DLC revenue) and profit margin are completely made up by me
LOL. Even otherwise, without factoring in the percentage of operating expenses devoted to supporting Linux, trying to calculate profit numbers is meaningless.
For Mac - Apple has to make gaming a bigger priority, and that's clearly not going to happen. A ~$1000 upgradable Apple machine with a powerful graphics card that can run the latest games is a pipe dream.
For Linux - It's the same problem as building any software for Linux that caters to the non-server non-developer segment. There just isn't enough of a business justification.
Honestly, recent Macs are running contemporary titles more than well enough. Not everyone cares about turning the graphics sliders up. On Windows or otherwise. I've been playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided just fine lately, and Overwatch works well if I boot Windows, for example. Most MMOs and popular "e-sports titles" (pretty much the core of PC gaming, by numbers) like Counter-Strike, the MOBAs and such are all there on the Mac side.
Most AAA games are designed with the trash hardware of consoles in mind, so laptops with more powerful GPUs handle them just fine. Apple's desktop offerings are abominable in terms of value and sticker price, but they pretty much own the non-Walmart-quality laptop market...
Acctually there were recently strong rumors Apple is going to do just that. Makes sense that Apple sees the growing gaming market and wants to get in on it. Them entering the market would be the incentive devs need to make their games work for Mac (and hopefully therefore Linux)
Dedicated consoles. The Nintendo Switch runs Rocket League just fine.
Once it's on there, you don't really have to worry about constant breaking changes from the operating system changing its audio subsystem or weird graphics drivers.
So Epic buys Psyonix in May 2019, Rocket League is an Unreal Engine game, and less than a year later Epic/Psyonix drops support two supported Unreal Engine platforms.
Is this isolated? Do I have any rational reason to sweat this as foreshadowing of Epic dropping those as UE4 platforms?
It's probably more likely related to the EGS not running on Linux, and Psyonix saying that they are transitioning to only the EGS after they got bought by Epic.
Targeting cross platform anything drives the cost up immediately.
Just building websites that work on different devices if the site is non-trivial i.e. SVG, WebGL etc the cost up because each platform you have to duplicate the QA phase. This week I spent 4 days tracking down an iOS bug in a WebForm. The company had to pay me 4 days worth of work, half of that was reproducing the bug reliably.
People make out this stuff is easy. It isn't and I am sorry but Linux users on Steam is like 1 or 2% the last time I checked. It just isn't worth the effort for most developers.
Have you actually tried to do this yourself? With anything? I feel like everyone in this thread is trying to back-seat drive without realizing the effort that is actually involved in supporting multiple platforms.
We’re an embedded gaming system (casino) and I make sure we have a platform abstraction layer (2 c++ files per platform), and any project we build can be made for any platform (even Haiku). The amount of threading issues you discover makes this exercise absolutely worth it. The platform files haven’t been touched for almost a decade, write once (a week) and use forever.
We have and our software is better for it. Most of the stories about multiplatform being 'more expensive' or 'harder' are from corner-cutting devs and orgs.
It's nice to think that shipping a bunch of stacked hacks and making some money to then just get closed down/bought/retargeted is the 'happy flow' but unless you don't know any better you may want to diversify and find a job or project that has actual quality as a standard. I know that in late-stage capitalism with minmaxing in the mix that is hard to find in some countries, but it exists plenty if you go look for it.
I don't know much about macOS development, but I am a linux developer by trade. Can you elaborate further on how linux doesn't do long-term healthy platform maintenance?
I also don't understand how long-term maintenance can be a factor when games don't run correctly on launch day. I would appreciate an explanation for this as well.
However, the number of available titles on Linux/Mac is small, so you become a big fish in small pond and take all the users money. Piracy on OSX is smaller, and they are typically wealthier and starving for content.
Maybe flip that around: iOS and macOS sales (even if just via the 'store') seem to be plenty for developers and complete studios to build entire businesses on or at the very least invest and get a functional ROI for a business to run on.
If that works, then what do those developers on the other 'stores' do that makes it so hard? Almost all games are effectively assets + scripts executed by a portable runtime. The only reason you might get in to trouble using that portable runtime effectively is when you start hacking on that level and reducing the portability to a point where it no longer works. That's a choice, not an inevitability. As a bonus (like posted earlier); in software engineering you get to discover a lot of issues by writing abstractions (to support portability) that you otherwise wouldn't be able to catch ahead of time. And no, day-1 patches are not the solution, they are the symptom of the problem.
The Unreal engine supports Linux as much as MacOS and Windows
I could only imagine a minor(or somewhat major) code change to rely less on platform specific things and and add support for other e.g. audio backends
And he'll Id argue that Linux users are less likely to contact support duo to requiring some amount of knowledge of their system
You're making it sound like non-Windows users are paying less, when in fact, they're paying the exact same amount as Windows users. There's really no need to demonize macOS or Linux users.
Between these kinds of stories, companies abandoning robust and powerful Desktop applications for their mobile (toy-like in comparison) “apps”, companies dropping support for less-popular browsers, os vendors abandoning or downplaying cross-platform APIs like OpenGL, and the rise of halfway-house solutions like Electron, we seem to be headed towards another Dark Ages for cross-platform software. Charitably, this could be just companies saving developer time at the expense of users. Uncharitably, it’s explained by developer laziness and/or inability to learn cross platform development.
I remember how frustrating it was in the late 90s being a desktop non-Windows user or non-Netscape user. We seem to be rapidly heading back to those bad days. Yet there’s no evil empire like Microsoft dominating the computing world and crushing cross-platform anymore like they did back then. It’s just kind of happening and it’s sad.
It wasn't long ago that there were ~zero games for Linux/Mac on Steam. Now I see Linux/Mac icons on at least a third of the AAA titles. And the most popular games in the world (Dota, LoL, CS:GO, Fortnite, etc) are playable on Mac and sometimes even Linux.
Seems pretty obvious that cross-plat is winning. Especially once you consider the most ubiquitous cross-plat vehicle of all: the browser. It's also the only platform with a built-in ad-blocker and development console, thus the most open and end-user-friendly.
It's true developers and so started supporting Linux and macOS more and more
But considering Epic used to be a Linux supporter it's sad to see it get outright removed from RL
Just because a game is available for a platform doesn't mean that it will always be supported for that platform. That's like people complaining that the Wii U version of a multiplatform online game isn't getting patches anymore. Yeah, that sucks, but you're making a mistake if you think a platform will be supported indefinitely.
Most likely stuff like DirectX 12, or third-party middleware without viable MacOS or Linux support.
The deprecation of OpenGL on MacOS is another barrier for that platform - you either have to buy GL-on-Metal middleware from someone or write a new Metal renderer. If the % of customers on Mac is small enough I can understand just opting to drop that platform.
Hard to say re:Linux, though. Maybe they get more customer service burden out of maintaining Linux support than they do revenue. It's common to hear that from indie game developers, though some developers say the opposite.
EDIT: Also just occurred to me that Valve's ongoing Proton efforts have resulted in Windows Rocket League working okay on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
As a result the devs may have decided it's better to just leave Linux to third parties. Some of the reviews claim Windows-via-Proton is faster than the official Linux port!
They shouldn't be able to pull Rocket League from customers who already have it in their library. They couldn't do it with other games like Metro Exodus either.
What excited me about RL is the pure sport of it and the insane amount fine grained mechanics one had to learn to get good. Are there any other games with those attributes that that can't be arbitrarily taken away from me?
Looks fun but I guess physics based mechanics is what I'm more interested in. And I'm pretty sure this could still potentially be taken away from me on a whim. No DRM and stand-alone servers are a prerequisite, I'm not falling for this shit ever again. This move by Epic was truly the last straw.
Gaming in Linux has basically undergone a revolution in the last 18 months. It's now possible to pretty much play any game under the sun using Proton (Valve's homebrew Wine + DXVK) or Lutris (Wine manager and installation script repository).
The only trouble is games with anti-cheat, which rules out a lot of online games including Fortnite, PUBG and others.
You do realise that Proton and similar technologies decrease the incentive for developers to port their game to Linux?
Why bother porting it when you can count on someone fixing it for you.
As for playing any game under the sun. No it doesn't. A lot of things fail and don't work quite right. Also a lot of mods don't work which is half the reason to play games on PC.
There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...
The only practical way to break that vicious circle was the emulation option. Linux gamers play on emulation, but appreciate native ports and form the (initial) buyer pool for Linux games.
So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.
> There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...
There isn't much of a gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number of people who like to play PC games and really care about Open Source I would wager isn't very many.
> So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.
Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots. Some people have spoken about some GPU pass-through nonsense with a VMWare which just seems like a faff.
It just easier to buy a drive, slap Windows on it and Steam and be done with it. Until it is easier and more reliable with my whole catalogue I will be sticking with Windows.
>There isn't much of a [Linux] gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number...
It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.
> Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots.
As for myself, I don't play a lot, but a Linux version (native or emulated) plays a big role in deciding which games to buy when I do. It's not due to 'Open Source' reasons though.
Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.
> Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.
It is odd. I run Windows at work and the machine rarely gets rebooted. No problems what-so-ever. I run a Windows at home and in my Office (I do a lot of SQL SERVER and .NET dev), I rarely have crashes (once or twice a year). I work in a very large office with many other developers and the machines run fine for years on end.
Yet when someone is complaining about Windows on the internet and they like Linux it always has thousands of updates and they need to reinstall the whole OS to play one game. Odd how that comes about. I don't know quite how people manage it. Yet I use the same windows installation for half a decade with almost no problems. It almost sounds like it is operator error.
I run Windows at $WORK too, and it runs fine (there were minor issues which would probably have been worse on Linux). Also much of my work is with the MS stack, which is pretty fine too.
It's just I have little use for it at home, so I run and upgrade it rarely. It turns out upgrading from the nearly oldest Windows 10 build to the latest (at the time) crashed the upgrade process on my setup. This is hardly a regular process - I am sure 99% of people upgrade more regularly, and do not skip as many builds.
It's a cycle too, I guess. The less I use Windows the more upgrades the system accurres which makes me dread turning it on more....
> It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.
No it wouldn't - there would still be people who like playing games and use Linux even if they couldn't play those games under Linux. Proton doesn't add anything to that.
These people would have had to make the effort to get another system - Windows or a console, at which point most of them would have little reason to bother with Linux gaming.
Under SteamPlay, any game played using proton counts as a Linux sale. Therefore from a developer point of view Linux sales are getting more visibility and it becomes more attractive (or more justifiable) to invest in Linux development and maintenance.
It like you didn't read my comment. If I could count on customers or Valve just fixing it with a wrapper for me, why bother making a Linux version at all? You wouldn't.
I read your comment. I just think that a large number of Linux sales is seen as a large 'pie'. I can't imagine that if there are 20-30% Linux sales that many will be thinking "Well most of those are Proton, we don't have to do anything to keep support up there!". They will be thinking "20-30% of our sales are Linux and we're beholden to the tech debt of one of Valve's vanity projects and the effort of one volunteer who has just burned out and put his project into maintenance mode? We need to take control! We need official Linux support".
Comments like yours make me angry. Your whole attitude makes me angry. You're extremely offhand and dismissive of all possible Linux paths. I would accept that a 1% market share isn't an attractive proposition at the current time, that's a fair comment. I would accept that for the time being if Proton is filling a gap that developers currently aren't interested in or can't justify, but I absolutely refuse to accept that a larger player base who are willing to pay for a Linux first platform are going to be blithely brushed aside as not the developer's problem.
> I read your comment. I just think that a large number of Linux sales is seen as a large 'pie'. I can't imagine that if there are 20-30% Linux sales that many will be thinking "Well most of those are Proton, we don't have to do anything to keep support up there!". They will be thinking "20-30% of our sales are Linux and we're beholden to the tech debt of one of Valve's vanity projects and the effort of one volunteer who has just burned out and put his project into maintenance mode? We need to take control! We need official Linux support".
But there isn't 20%-30% of the sales are Linux. It is a literally a 1%. It is very niche.
> Comments like yours make me angry. Your whole attitude makes me angry. You're extremely offhand and dismissive of all possible Linux paths.
I am sorry that basic facts make you angry, your feelings are your own responsibility. I've been using Linux now for about 20 years. There was Cedega before proton (remember them?) . While the desktop situation is now okay e.g. I can normally get something serviceable without the headaches of the past. Generally everything is still a mess. Jaron Lanier in his book "You are not a gadget" explains why this will always be the case. Open source anything is very much like herding cats.
> I would accept that a 1% market share isn't an attractive proposition at the current time, that's a fair comment. I would accept that for the time being if Proton is filling a gap that developers currently aren't interested in or can't justify, but I absolutely refuse to accept that a larger player base who are willing to pay for a Linux first platform are going to be blithely brushed aside as not the developer's problem.
There no evidence that there is a large player base for this Linux first platform. Many companies have tried. A lot of Linux users in the past used (look at older phpBB forums such as JustLinux and LinuxForums) that constantly to boast about "not paying for software".
> I've been using Linux now for about 20 years. There was Cedega before proton (remember them?) . While the desktop situation is now okay e.g. I can normally get something serviceable without the headaches of the past. Generally everything is still a mess. Jaron Lanier in his book "You are not a gadget" explains why this will always be the case. Open source anything is very much like herding cats.
Sure, I can get behind this. I do, however, think that you're underestimating how much bad will Microsoft is building with its userbase these days. Sure, I don't think we're headed for 20-30%, but I do think there is a higher proportion of tech savvy users who, all else being equal (granted, big if), would prefer something like Linux that they will have control over. MS have pulled some amazingly ballsy moves with their latest iterations that have absolutely not been present in previous incarnations. Forced updates, ads, gaslighting Cortana setting, re-appearing icons, mandatory new apps, telemetry, forced Windows accounts, Candy Crush ads, lock screen ads - the list continues. What's more is that previous frustrations (blue screen of death) were a limit of the technology. All of the aforementioned are deliberate and arguably cynical decisions from MS. This makes a certain percentage of the population angry, and while the main playerbase is made up of those who are willing to make a compromise, if we make the compromise more attractive then you WILL see higher users. This time is different.
>There no evidence that there is a large player base for this Linux first platform. Many companies have tried. A lot of Linux users in the past used (look at older phpBB forums such as JustLinux and LinuxForums) that constantly to boast about "not paying for software".
Apart from the countless reports being made to ProtonDB? Or the 120k subscribers to the Linux_gaming subreddit? Or the increasing Linux Steam Survey stats? There is evidence.
>But there isn't 20%-30% of the sales are Linux. It is a literally a 1%. It is very niche.
It's like you didn't read my comment.
>I am sorry that basic facts make you angry, your feelings are your own responsibility.
> I do, however, think that you're underestimating how much bad will Microsoft is building with its userbase these days. Sure, I don't think we're headed for 20-30%, but I do think there is a higher proportion of tech savvy users who, all else being equal (granted, big if), would prefer something like Linux that they will have control over. MS have pulled some amazingly ballsy moves with their latest iterations that have absolutely not been present in previous incarnations. Forced updates, ads, gaslighting Cortana setting, re-appearing icons, mandatory new apps, telemetry, forced Windows accounts, Candy Crush ads, lock screen ads - the list continues. What's more is that previous frustrations (blue screen of death) were a limit of the technology. All of the aforementioned are deliberate and arguably cynical decisions from MS. This makes a certain percentage of the population angry, and while the main playerbase is made up of those who are willing to make a compromise, if we make the compromise more attractive then you WILL see higher users. This time is different.
While I agree that is all garbage a lot of it is more of a minor annoyance rather and almost all of it can
> Apart from the countless reports being made to ProtonDB? Or the 120k subscribers to the Linux_gaming subreddit? Or the increasing Linux Steam Survey stats? There is evidence.
120k vs how many PC gamers? Doing a cursory search put the number near about 1 billion. There is at least about 2 orders of magnitude between the two.
Whether I am one or not doesn't change the fact that it is up to you whether it upsets you. I haven't gone out of my way to upset anyone. I've just argued my point.
>While I agree that is all garbage a lot of it is more of a minor annoyance rather and almost all of it can [be solved with minor config/tweaking?]
It builds. It's the sort of negligence that leads to bubbles bursting or coup d'etats. Or mass migrations from Zynga games. It just needs for the alternative to be viable.
>120k vs how many PC gamers? Doing a cursory search put the number near about 1 billion. There is at least about 2 orders of magnitude between the two.
PC gaming has been viable for 30 years. Linux gaming for 18 months and it still missing some key titles. If we get Fortnite and PUBG, we will have more.
>Whether I am one or not doesn't change the fact that it is up to you whether it upsets you. I haven't gone out of my way to upset anyone. I've just argued my point.
True. I do think you are someone who takes great pride in their arguments, the infallibility of their logic and drawing on what is quite clearly a great breadth of both personal and professional experience, however I feel that this is somewhat undermined by your rhetoric, your tone and your phrasing. Not terrible in and of themselves, but I think it has lead to blind spots that has meant this encounter has taken the path it has.
If the game works without problems and is performant I don't particularly care if it's native or Wine.
It would be nice if more games shipped in some type of officially-supported wrapper, but that's basically where Valve is going anyway with Proton. (I just wish it wasn't tied to Steam, because I'm the one person who dislikes using Steam.)
This is different than for native applications, where the UI inconsistency Wine introduces can be quite annoying.
Different platforms are better for different things. That's just a fact. This is why I use a desktop PC with windows 10 for PC gaming, Linux machines for my servers, and a Macbook Pro for programming work during the day.
Yeah but Windows isn't inherently better at gaming because it gives something the other platforms don't (DirectX12 can easily be replaced with Vulkan)
It's a matter of the market choosing it's main Target and sticking to that
That isn't true. Windows does provide something that other platforms don't. The APIs and program compatibility are supported forever in Windows.
I can run the original Quake and DOOM on Windows 10 without any problems. A friend of mine like playing GTA 3, it didn't work properly with Windows 8.1. In an update this incompatibility (I forget the exact reason why) was fixed.
Vulkan still lacks quite a few DirectX 12 features, LunarG SDK doesn't have anything comparable to DirectXTK, NVidia designs their hardware DirectX first and then retroactively applies the features as Vulkan and OpenGL extensions.
Intel drivers have been historically always much better in DirectX as in OpenGL, where they even used to lie about their available GL capabilities.
AMD, since they dropped my card from their FOSS drivers, I don't have much fate on their FOSS love.
If you want to game on a Mac just fire up Bootcamp. Always blew me away how much better games ran on Windows vs. MacOS on the same hardware. Just night and day difference.
I did that for a while but ended up buying a gaming PC for about $1000 and talk about a night and day difference to my $2000 Macbook. 100x the catalogue of games and 5x the performance.
given the popularity of WSL on Windows 10..i think we will see Windows becoming the best Linux platform there is.
A lot of gamers i know have switched to using WSL for development (unless they have political objections).
I think it will be more likely in the future that Linux gamers be asked to become WSL Gamers
In fact, WSL works so well (including Docker and Kubernetes stuff), that i have a strong suspicion that Microsoft sales staff have been leashed pretty deliberately for optics reasons.
After enjoying "the good years" on Mac, I've been a daily Ubuntu user for two years and given I'm not a heavy gamer, I don't jump into Windows that often.
That said, I'm in the process of building a new primary machine and it's going to be WSL because I want to have it all: functional SteamVR, titles that work by default instead of pleasant surprise, not having to accept whatever monopoly-building bully-tactics Apple decides to force down the pipe...
I know that, at least in Wall Street terms, Apple is now a lifestyle fashion accessory manufacturer that only supports Macs and OS X because they feel generous, but it still makes me really sad. They clearly don't want to play ball with the mainstream gaming world, that's for sure. And "Tim Apple" believes that AR is more important than VR, so I don't anticipate the VR front getting any love period.
And so I fold my hand. I used to feel like using Mac OS or Ubuntu was a legitimate power move and not just a political act, but these days the only people who deliberately choose Apple or Linux as a daily-drive OS are just masochists when WSL is so well implemented. If the Windows kernel ended up being the best Linux infrastructure, there's a dark joke in there somewhere.
Linux would probably never had taken off if Microsoft had taken proper care of the POSIX personality on Windows NT.
As proven by Mac OS X adoption by GNU/Linux refugees, at the end of the day what a large majority cares about is a POSIX shell and related POSIX C APIs.
Three decades later, it is easier to just provide WSL environment than POSIX source code compatibility, and WSL2 distribution is the one taking the desktops.
WSL has no real hardware access and still runs on NTFS which is terribly slow.
Windows developers will probably try to fix it somehow but it is not there yet
Another option is to run Windows on top of Linux. But it currently also has some drawbacks.
NTFS is a file system, which WSL 2 still runs on. WSL 2 is much better, but NTFS is still dragging it back. I hope one day, Microsoft will make a leap and introduce a faster file system or a proper support with good drivers for ext4 or something like this.
I've just submitted a refund request, I'm not sure if it will be granted but I'd hope that others who do not run Windows will also consider making a refund request (unless offline play is your preference anyway)
Qt doesn’t cut it; it’s designed for something completely different: windowed GUIs, not (3D) games. It’s the same reason why you wouldn’t make a game using WinForms. Basically, games use a different architecture than GUIs.
They could have used Unity to get good Windows and mac OS support, and theoretical Linux support, but that's a decision they would have had to make from the very start.
This does pose the question on what happens to Linux players who have invested into digital purchases. Online functionality will be disabled so all items will basically be void and the game becomes mostly worthless.
I also wonder if this means that Rocket League will not run on Google Stadia and its competitors, as those platforms mostly run on Linux systems.