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.
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”.