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.
Did you read the post? It says, “This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone.”
Bugs that affect everyone are not bugs that nobody knows about.
And beyond this specific game, let’s remember that it’s very common for players to experience bugs without filing bug reports, but still complain (either to you or publicly) about your broken game. So you won’t have identified these bugs, but they will still be out there affecting player experience. If you don’t care about that, consider that they will also affect word of mouth and reviews of your game, and therefore your sales.
We’re all limited by hours in a day. That makes this all the more important: A bug fixed once is a bug that doesn’t consume support time (and budget) ever again.