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.
Determining that a bug isn’t a priority is fine and doesn’t require burying heads in the sand.
Its not burying your head in the sand.
If it is isolated or people just don’t care? Then… it kind of doesn’t actually matter. You scan the forums and optimally have community managers/PR people to do the same to keep an eye out for “This was weird?” style comments but you mostly focus on the stuff that naturally rises to the top or that you identify as an issue.
The more bug reports you have? That is engineer time spent assessing what is and isn’t a priority. And the sad reality is that it is a LOT easier to say “we have our five thousandth number one priority” rather than to say something doesn’t matter. Because if stuff does go down? Suddenly you are on record saying the most important thing ever (whether it is a critical vulnerability or just something people fixate on) didn’t matter and you can bet everyone will throw you under the bus.
As a developer? I want every bug reported to me because I genuinely do want to make the best product I can. That said… if you don’t care enough about reporting a bug or it isn’t reproducible enough to matter… I am not going to complain about getting some extra time to work on things that actually interest me. Which may very well be trying to reproduce that “weird behavior” myself because it sounds like it could be bad.
And… as someone managing a project/team of developers? I can watch in real time as people become more and more drained as every single day is fixing all the “this would be low impact if we were allowed to call it low impact” bugs. And that person who clearly was bored and searching for the corneriest of corner cases (the bug that “nobody knows about”)… that causes significant psychic damage to the person who reads the report and has to fix it.
It is, just because people haven’t reported it doesn’t mean they haven’t experienced it. Maybe 90% of the people experienced that bug, but only the ones on Linux reported it. It had to be a very big number so that statistically less than 6% of the population experienced it enough to report it. Think about it, what are the chances someone specifically would get a generalized bug? If it’s 1% the chance that that 1% happens to be within the 6% of Linux users is very slim, for that to happen 400 times it’s inconceivable, those bugs were widespread, just not reported.
Again, you’re making an assumption, the bugs were probably not isolated, and we don’t know what they were so maybe they were big deals, just unreported big deals.
So you’re saying getting a bug with reproducible steps is worse than having to hire people to search the internet for posts and then pay engineers money to try to reproduce, so that you can finally have the same thing you would have gotten for free? Dude, sometimes people say “the game crashed, piece of shit” and that’s all the info you get in a forum, whereas a bug report is more akin to “When talking to NPC X the game crashed, here’s the stack trace, here’s my save file right before, I’ve confirmed that going and talking to X immediately triggers the issue”, but you do you, hire a community manager full time to read posts in case someone says the “the game crashed”, then pay a QA to sit on their hands until such report comes and then spend months to try to reproduce the issue, to finally get the same bug report that some random person would have given you for free.
No, engineers fix the bugs, project managers asses whether a bug is or isn’t a priority, or you thought their job was just to guide you through scrum practices?
All you have to say is “your bug has been reported, we will look into it”.
It sounds like you’ve worked in a pretty bad development environment in relation to bugs in the past
I think I found the problem. Have you never heard of triage?
This takes a hell of a lot more time than just reading a bug report and adding it to the list.
From your comment, I doubt you’ve ever done any software development before.