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.
John Carmack thinks it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Quake III had an official Linux retail release back in the day. It apparently broke even on id’s costs. Carmack said it was worthwhile, anyway, because code that works on multiple platforms tends to be better code. It makes fewer assumptions about the underlying system.
I fucked around once in the open source release of Q3, and yeah, it’s really good code. I had an idea for a game that would need specific joystick support, and with no experience with the code base and limited gamedev knowledge at all, I found exactly the place to change and made a working build within an hour. Carmack isn’t just good at optimization, he’s good at clean, organized code.
And, mostly starting in the Quake 3 era, iD was very much an engine company that sold video games to pay the bills. And the team in that era very much believed in the ethos of Open Source development (hence releasing the engine under a GPL when they were “done with it” as it were).
But they also were effectively just targeting PC. I THINK the Dreamcast port might have been first party but many of the console releases were done through third party studios handling the porting process. Which gets back to “hours in the day” and the realities of project management.
Oh yes, just targeting the PC, the magical fairytale console that only has one hardware configuration that never changes and is so notoriously easy to develop for.