this is a great thing, as a person who only runs linux, I'm super excited at the idea of getting the older games updated to this version and potentially running on Linux. :)
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.
Maybe 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.
it 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).
It sure is, I'm a Linux-exclusive gamer ever since Steam on Linux came out, but I try to look realistically at reasoning of developers who never did this before.
But then "Windows PC" would be the correct term. "Windows OS" would imply that it also runs on e.g. Windows Phone, which is usually treated separately.
Playonlinux 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.
This is the biggest concern. The linux community is crazy hostile. Heaven forbid your game doesn't work on some wonky setup that would be 100% unreasonable to support. We also see this in Android where reviews for games are sometimes, "Zero stars, doesn't work on $49 $obscure_chinatablet."
Even if a company picked a reference Linux distro, like the current Ubuntu, it would be still displease a lot people, especially if the game only worked correctly on closed video drivers. There's really no winning in such a fragmented environment, unless you're willing to invest a serious amount of your budget here. Its not just "push a button."
What people seem to have a hard time understanding is that Linux is not an operating system, it's a family of operating systems. Someone running Gentoo with OpenRC and Xfce, someone running Debian with sysvinit and GNOME and someone running Arch with systemd and KDE are all "running Linux." This is more difficult than Windows or OS X, where you can rely on the low-level system plumbing staying the same from machine to machine (versions of OS X are all closer to each other than Linuxes are to each other and there's a lot fewer of them).
Valve are doing a lot to help here by distributing Steam with a known set of libraries that will be used by any games launched via Steam. There's still going to be some variation, but developers can at least know which version of key libraries they can rely on
I think their new refund policy will also help a lot. Being able to try a game to see if it works, and get your money back hassle-free if it doesn't, ought to take a lot of the anxiety out of the fragmented-target-OS issue.
Sure, the refund happens but now the devs have to contend with all the pissy reviews on their game's store page because the game didn't work with their very specific use cases. Its easier to just not bother unless you want to devote significant support and development resources to making the game run on any linux frakenputer.
I keep hearing we're crazy hostile and I don't see it. I have a crazy wonky linux setup and when games don't work, I don't flame the devs on messageboards. I even have a crazy wonky setup on windows - having a display with 240ppi, and I've seen plenty of games render badly, mess up my windows, etc. If it runs on Windows 8.1/latest Ubuntu on a beige Dell box, it's good enough for me, I'll always be able to work-around any problems.
You're talking about something completely different though; I'm talking about numerous releases/kickstarters which promised Linux support before they were funded, but then when they realized that it's harder than they thought they started saying "yeah, we didn't really mean «on release», it will maybe come later, or actually we outsourced it to volunteers", like with Divinity: OS or Skullgirls.
> 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.
That'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.
You can ship GLES games on desktops no problem. And anything remotely notebook / desktop class graphics wise is so much more powerful than some Mali GPU that you can ignore "performance characteristics" for the most part and assume brute force will be fine. If your game runs on a feature phone, it will run with GLES on desktops.
What I was getting at with the performance characteristics comment - though don't ask me why I didn't act like normal people and just say this, because I've no idea - was that the game will probably look crap on a PC. That means you'll have to spend some time making it look a bit nicer, if it's to be competitive. This is all going to involve a bit more than a simple button press.
It does, every driver independently advertises GLES 3, and while it doesn't support full 4.3, every driver supports GLES 3. That post is like three years old now.
Unfortunately, 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.
Release 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.
Support 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.
Games 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.
But 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.
Your 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.
I 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.
But 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.
I 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.
Microsoft's E3 presentation put a nail in the coffin. There was a huge XBoxOne sign on the stage and many XBoxOne exclusive and time-exclusive games. There was no "Windows 10" sign. Windows exclusive games, nada. New Microsoft Game Studio games (Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, etc. anyone?), nope. Kinect 2 was absent. And after the HoloLens Minecraft showcase, it turned out the field-of-view is tiny and the device twice as expensive as their console: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8809323/microsoft-hololens...
On the other side, the PC gaming platform is thriving, especially in certain parts of Europe and Asia. The PC was able to render Witcher 3, Watch_Dogs and The Division in all its graphical glory without the need for a Console-downgrade. Also many former PlayStation exclusive titles are released on PS4 and PC. And Steam and GoG are big too. So great, despite the little effort from Microsoft itself.
I'm in total agreement, Linux really is the future of the desktop (though Microsoft seems to be improving some things so I'll give them that). If I were Canonical I'd be worried they come out with Microsoft Linux and ditch Windows by 2020.
this is a great thing, as a person who only runs linux, I'm super excited at the idea of getting the older games updated to this version and potentially running on Linux. :)