Meanwhile back in 2004, Epic released Unreal Tournament 2004, with a dedicated Linux installer on the first disc.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it was hidden on the last disk! (And the box did not mention it in any way)
Good times.
I conveniently had my UT04 retail box sitting on the shelf next to me. I can confirm there’s a little penguin on the back of package, and under OS requirements they list Linux with an asterisk explaining it’s not supported by Atari (publisher).
There is nothing else in the manual indicating how to use the Linux version, which disk to use, or any additional information that I can find.
Edit: geez I miss game manuals sometimes. All the game mechanics are so nicely explained, and it has instructions to setup modding tools!
You may absolutely be correct, I only learned of it a decade after I bought the game.
Still awesome to include a native Linux version of the game back in 2004!
(Copied from a comment I made in another community about this)
There’s an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.
They’ve presented it as “it doesn’t make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count.” But they don’t need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say “yeah, we don’t support this, do it at your own risk.”
From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don’t even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.
They are worried that there’ll be graphical bugs or something and that’ll make Fornight look bad, so it’s better for their brand image to just block everything they don’t have control over.
It’s a worrying pattern I’ve seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.
… Or maybe it’s just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their “enemies”.
I have been wondering why they don’t just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an “official” launcher. It’s probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.
Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than “lol 2% market share” as they present it.
Linux support is almost free.
It also gives you a lot of value, since Linux users are better at reporting bugs(i saw a post from a developer who called this out) and therefore it’s easier to find and fix them. A bug free game is something everyone benefits from. If Linux users see bugs more often and therefore report them more often you save a lot of money since you don’t have to pay people who test your game.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
And not even a little.
The current HW survery says that about 1.9% of Steam users are on Linux. According to 3rd party sources, there’s on the order of 120M to 130M people who used Steam this year. Extrapolating the HW survey, that’s about 2.5M Linux on Linux users.
Fortnite is leaving money from ~2.5M possible customers on the table because of stupid ideology.
Isn’t official support legally binding, or seen as that by a regular consumer, or their board? Like, they just don’t provide anything to other OS unless they can troubleshoot here. And they are donation-based too, meaning they are very alarmed about any liability, or any unpredictable sutuation at all, since both cash and questionable consent are involved.
I don’t thing Deck can take a dent here, but there are a lot of cheap chromebooks and the likes in edu, where their primary targets are. I think they can bank on it. But it’s good they weren’t as smart to do so.
Instead of asking for Linux support maybe we should be asking companies for wine/proton support, since that works for Mac and Linux. Not ideal but probably more realistic and that would solve issues for all the non-windows desktops. I would also imagine it’s less work for the company to just ensure it works on wine, than it is to compile a seperate client for Linux. I don’t know about anti cheat stuff but personally I wouldn’t run a game that wanted that level of access to my system.
Let’s just take a moment to recognize his struggle to find a few more programmers
Maybe if we pool together and buy just one more pack of gems (or whatever they call them) they can pull off what must surely be a truly Herculean technical feat
Kinda weird when both Unreal Engine and EAC, both owned by Epic, actually already have Linux/Proton support, yet games that exclusive to Epic Store won’t support Linux, or drop Linux support once they become Epic Store exclusives.
Rocket League dropped its native Linux support to upgrade to DirectX 11. If the move to Epic were the reason and the justification is fake, why did the game also drop Mac support despite it being supported by the Epic launcher?
Previously, games like Rust and Valve’s own CS 2 stopped supporting Linux and Mac without any store changes.
You raised a good point about rocket league, which seems to be using the ancient unreal engine 3. Epic basically updated ue3 to support directx11 but neglect updating vulkan/metal support on the old engine. But Fortnite is using unreal engine 5 though, which has excellent Linux support. Epic had a presentation bragging about how they got Fortnite running on Vulkan as “same game, not port”, so the decision to not support Linux is certainly not a technical one.
What a tool. Fortnite generated $6 billion in 2022. He could throw hundreds of programmers just at Linux compatibility and it would still be obscenely profitable.
Imagine being the editor of a cross-platform game engine and pretending you don’t have enough developers to port the games you developed for other platforms…
What’s your message here Timmy huh?
“Our game engine is so shitty that even us can’t afford to develop our games on Linux with it”
What a fraud…
fyi you can play fortnite in a single gpu passthrough win10 vm on linux if you configure your vm to hide the hypervisor status.
Despite how much people hate this dude, which is understandable because he’s only doing this for money, it’s good that Google’s shady practices were brought to light. I do wonder if it’ll actually have an impact. The judge hasn’t spoken yet, correct?
What did he meant by The Linux problem?
He means they have a problem with Linux users. What other reason would there be to buy up games and remove native Linux support the second its removed from the steam store? (Rocket League for example)
I think he means the whole “Not enough users to justify porting applications, users don’t use it because applications don’t support it” thing.
The problem is that logic has been dead for years. Users are here. The Steam Deck is wildly popular. Tim Sweeney is just a dumbass.
If only we had more programmers
MFer you just fired like a thousand of them
