It seems rather irrational of a company to turn away paying customers, right? Except his view isn't at all unique. They judge that Linux and its user base isn't big enough to be worth much of their time, but it's not like they're the only ones.
Of course if you include the first half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious that I was talking about engineering when it comes to "knows what he is talking about." The question of whether Linux is worth supporting is at least half a marketing question. I doubt they're wrong about it, but I try to keep an open mind...
I think Tim took the right approach for the both the right and wrong reasons. We don't need more system programming, but more agnosticism.
This is what SteamPlay and tools like proton and WINE solve. Why develop for Windows when you can build with respect to tools like those, and if the customer base exists, then allocate resources?
> objective metrics to the contrary
Of the 2ish% of the market gaming on Linux, what subset will buy your software? If I had one customer in 50 who submitted nearly half of all of our support tickets for development that wasn't transferrable to the other 49 and I couldn't charge them to cover it, I'd fire them, too.
I expect macOS is cheaper to support and develop for (if for no other reason then because it's a well supported Unreal Engine target) and judged to be, at least potentially, more profitable. But I imagine the relationship with Apple carries a huge amount of weight in a decision like that as well, and I can't even guess how that factors in.
UE supports Linux (via Wine/Proton) just fine. There are tons of games that use it. The main issue is the anti-cheat solution, which does support Linux, but needs to be enabled (they have not). While I am sure there would be issues beyond that, they would almost certainly be minor.
> at least potentially, more profitable.
This is because MacOS is more widespread as a general purpose desktop operating system. Those statistics are irrelevant here. Linux is a more widespread gaming operating system. Dogma is pointless drivel.
Of course if you include the first half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious that I was talking about engineering when it comes to "knows what he is talking about." The question of whether Linux is worth supporting is at least half a marketing question. I doubt they're wrong about it, but I try to keep an open mind...
> objective metrics to the contrary
Please do share.