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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming
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No.
He wants the Steamdeck user base to be 10 million, so it’s large enough to support a player base that can generate revenue if targeted.
And frankly it’s not a him problem. Nearly every dev refuses to release on Linux (and Mac) because of its small user base.
They don't have to release on Linux at all!!
All they have to do is click a checkbox in the EAC SDK & contact Battleye to support Valve's Proton & that's it!!
It is a Tim Sweeney problem.
To be fair, you don't look at the whole picture.
Yes, generating a Linux build wouldn't require a lot of changes to the code.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student's first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That's 3.7% of the whole world's population! (And it's also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it's just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don't care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn't exactly hard to figure out.
They don’t even have to support Linux. They just have to stop actively preventing the game from launching on Linux platforms.
Then they get bad press for cheaters using Linux or whatever due to some bug they easily could've caught during the QA they didn't do. So they either need to scramble to fix it, or pull Linux support and block those older versions from connecting.
All of that is worse than never supporting Linux in the first place. So if they're going to support it, they're going to need to do proper QA and get their support staff trained to deal with Linux issues.
A smaller studio or something with SP only mode can get away with it, but it's a lot more tricky for big MP games.
If Apex can do it, then so can Epic Games.