For a long time, an overwhelmingly popular view among game developers and publishers has been that offering Linux builds would involve too much work, because they had either tried it briefly or heard from other devs who had tried it, and found that their problem reports massively increased. Their conclusion was often that Linux causes too many bugs to be supportable. As a gamer, I was of course disappointed every time I read this.
More importantly, as a developer, I couldn’t help noticing ways in which this reasoning seemed flawed. I always felt that it was either poorly informed or not completely honest.
So, when this refreshingly different perspective from a game developer surfaced on social media, it warmed my heart. I thought the rest of you might find it interesting.
That was a few years ago. I imagine the influx of gamers using Linux since then (since it’s easier now) might mean a smaller portion of our group has the technical skills described in that post, but I think it still applies. I hope it also gives us something to aspire to when interacting with the people who make the games we play.
I’d assume that if it was 30% of sales it’d still be around 38% of bug reports.
And in what world are more big reports a bad thing. Except for spam?
I think the implication is that linux has far more bugs, so it’s not worth supporting it for such a small audience. That’s when more bug reports are bad.
This post is raising that only 3 of the 400 linux user bug reports were actually linux related, so it’s not that linux as a platform has far more bugs, but that linux users are much better at reporting bugs.