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.

Archive.org copy

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.