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.
No, this is absolutely wrong. Most people don’t report bugs, they just stop using the product and move on.
Yes, time is limited, so you won’t be able to fix every bug, so you need to prioritize. How can you prioritize something nobody reports?
FOSS has a culture of reporting everything, but not necessarily fixing everything. Look at release notes and you’ll see bugs getting fixed that were reported 20 years ago. Does that mean they fixed all the recent bugs and they’re finally getting to the harder ones? No, some bugs reported today won’t get fixed for another 20 years. All it means is it finally got prioritized or someone really wanted to fix it.
Linux gamers don’t expect every bug report to result in a patch right away, they just want to add it to the pile. Maybe a dev sees it and fixes it along with higher priority fixes, idk, but it can’t happen unless it’s reported.
Sure. Most Linux users don’t ask for a native build, they just want it to work on their platform. But even Proton support requires some level of testing.
Whether you go with Proton or a native build, the takeaway here should be that you’ll get a lot of free QA and detailed bug reports, so even if you don’t break even on Linux sales, you should come out ahead with that added QA.