Especially if they use an engine that natively supports Linux, they have no excuse not to release a Linux version.
Yes, they do. There is more than just the engine at play on compatibility. The main reason is actually usually the anti cheat.
Looking at Destiny. Game worked okay on Linux before they integrated Battleye, which HAS Linux support, but Bungie just doesn’t want to interact with it.
This is why it’s mainly larger developers that care about their community that implement Linux support. Take valve for example. Wonderful company that cares about their playerbase more than the average game development team. They have Linux support on almost all of their games as far as I am aware. Bungie is a decent company but most of their community doesn’t want to play on Linux anyway, so they won’t bother with it. However most teams that are smaller or care more about money than players won’t do it.
Valve is definitely an exception. I am not sure why, but it is pretty much in the open that Gabe Newell has a bone to pick with Microsoft and he has been throwing money at Linux for over a decade to break their monopoly on gaming. I’d argue that this has nothing to do with their love for the community and more so with Gabe’s personal vendetta against Microsoft.
Reality is that most game devs, most executives and most people in marketing don’t really care about Linux. It is good PR to support Mac and Linux, and some of the geekier developers will go the extra mile to support it, but I think it is common in the industry to assume that Linux users are not gamer, or that they have enough knowledge to install a dual boot. They don’t care in the sense that they don’t even think about it, its not even on the radar for most game companies. Most studios probably never even had a discussion about it. That is how irrelevant Linux has been to gaming. Hence why Proton is such a tour de force.
There are tons of reasons my dude. You can still have platform-dependant technologies in your game even if the base engine itself supports linux.
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I believe the PS5 is partially based off of FreeBSD and I don’t think there is as strong of a gaming scene on BSD (even relative to the size of its userbase). I feel like there would be some rather large leaps going from a tailored console OS to a more widely available alternative OS.
From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.
Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.
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In an ideal world everything would work out, but for some business it is a pretty huge commitment for what was less than 2% of the market just a few months ago. We certainly lost money porting our game in Linux at that last place I worked. It was before Proton though. Obviously each case is different, and some games work on Linux out-the-box due to Photon so this become a non-issue.
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Not sure I want to name the game because this would make me very easy to identify from my post history. It’s a game on Steam that sold over 250k copies. My boss promised a Linux version very early on because they thought it would be easy, but we ended up being stuck with that promise.
The kernel in use is literally meaningless. Sony’s userspace is unique and the graphics stack is fully proprietary. Same for Nintendo.
I find that to be an annoying thing with Japanese software in general, gaming or otherwise: more proprietary garbage than Western software and practically hard-coding it to 100% force you to use the software in the way THEY intend for you to use it, not how YOU want. Makes for worse Linux compatibility at best, if any at all, compared to Western software. Note that I’m purely talking about native or straight Wine Linux compatibility, not Steam/Proton, which works around those issues well.
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Does “plays on linux” mean native , or just ‘works fine with WINE (edit: or proton, apparently)’?
There are plenty of games that are very specifically targeting Proton compatibility at a very minimum thanks to the Steam Deck, so I’m perfectly happy with any game that’s developed with that in mind.
Being verified on Steam Desk is my parameter for deciding if I’ll consider a game or not, even if I don’t have a Steam Deck (yet). I’m perfectly fine with that, not asking for a Linux native version as long as the game works as it should on Proton.
Verified is probably a stricter metric than you need/want. Many games aren’t verified just because of font-size issues and the like on the small screen.
I’m on Linux Mint right now and when I go my library and toggle the “Show only games that run on Linux” button, nothing happens. I don’t think Valve cares about the distinction, so long as it runs.
if you have proton enabled the library shows all games as linux compatible. If you disable proton in the steam settings on linux the filter will only show games that run natively
So that options is really just useless. It’s a remnant from the dark ages, from a time before proton. I do not like to reminded of those days.
Proton* Proton is the way. Granted, proton uses wine… but, makes getting games running nearly effortless is the majority of cases.
Also, has a nice website, protondb.com, which tells you how well / if a game works on linux.
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To be fair, game programming is very often hot garbage. Most things I run do not respond for a while at startup. How difficult can it be to decouple your threads?
I was just thinking about this the other day…like games are optized for windows usually, but windows is not optimized for games. A fresh Windows 10 runs at 2gb ram on idle. It all went down hill for gamers when Microsoft killed xp
If there’s a game that can’t run on Linux in the current year then that’s intentional and it’s not worth anyone’s money.
You almost have to go out of your way to make a game incompatible with linux. Considering wine/proton and their various forks cover the vast majority of things at this point.
Even with ACs, the two most used ones completely support Linux. One is completely out of the box, maybe even as far as linux support being opt out. The other requires you to contact its developers to enable compatibility their end iirc.
Yeah, there’s this very obscure match-3 game I wanted to play because of nostalgia. The series peaked with 3 and 4 (and those are the ones we played on the family computer circa 2015) and worked perfectly on Windows. Now 3 works perfectly (in terms of compatibility) but 4 was better (in terms of gameplay). 4 is marked as borked, last I checked. For anyone wondering, it’s The Treasures of Montezuma series.
I don’t agree. There are cases with Windows only root kits for DRM, but there are also games that don’t work because of bugs. You see games coming out that barely work on Windows.
There’s some BS happening around Linux support from some devs. e.g. Metro Exodus is Linux native, Metro Exodus Enhanced is Windows only and doesn’t work with AMD GPUs.
I bought the game twice (made a mistake and bought it on Epic at launch and now bought it again on Steam to support Linux development and companies that release native builds).
I’m disappointed to see I’m unable to play the Enhanced version.
It’s the Enhanced Windows version :(
I’ll buy Windows games at full price only if the developer has made efforts to better support Linux users (say by fixing a bug that only affects Linux users).
Jesus lol.
This is probably true for big games, but I wouldn’t get angry at any small developer for not supporting Linux. It’s just not worth it/still such a small base.
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Most of the time indie games actually do run on Linux, it’s the games from big studios that don’t (in my experience)
all the indies I play run completely without issues, even those that don’t use major game engines like celeste and rain world
This
Most off-the-shelf game engines these days have been well tested with Proton.
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Luckily most of the small inde games always support Linux. Most of those devs don’t have a need or time to go out of their way to botch the support.
I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2014. Gaming on Linux is so good nowadays, thanks to Proton, there are so many amazing titles available to play. Proton makes it all easy - thanks to it, it’s just a matter of hitting install and play on Steam (in most cases).
There are so many of them, If something doesn’t run on Linux, I just don’t care. My backlog of great games is so big, who cares about some singular titles that are not available.
I’ve recently been playing Baldurs Gate 3, ARMORED CORE VI, Anno 1800 and Battlebit Remastered on my Ubuntu rig. All run great. Neither need any special tweaks (I own them on Steam).
BG3 and Battlebit Remastered are especially stellar.
I recommend BG3 to anyone who likes true roleplaying games with great writing, reactivity and player agency.
Battlebit Remastered is a great multiplayer title with massive 256 player battles and it sits somewhere between Battlefield and Squad (a mixture of arcade and mil-sim elements).
Isn’t it still true that a Nvidia card is better for gaming with Linux than AMD or Intel?
Not for VR, unfortunately. Have a valve index collecting dust, streaming to the quest 2 via ALVR runs better.
I believe that AMD has flipped the script on this in recent years. From what I recall, AMD has been actively releasing a large amount (if not all) of their drivers as open source for integration into the Mesa driver (which I think is the same driver than handles Intel graphics as well). Arguably speaking AMD GPUs work more out-of-the-box now than NVidia do.
That said, I switched to an AMD card about a year ago as an upgrade from an Nvidia. My Nvidia never gave me issues, it was just getting a little long in the tooth (gtx 1050 ti upgraded to a RT 6600)
Isn’t it still true that a Nvidia card is better for gaming with Linux than AMD or Intel?
No. Intel has best drivers, AMD has decent drivers. Both are well-integrated into system. On nvidia there are nouveau and blob. Nouveau supports not every feature, blob just breaks system.
This comment sounds like chatgpt
I’m just some meatbag, unfortunately, though I’d happily merge with machine If I could.
But only if it’s an open source, penguin style machine.
I started reading it in that macOS Daniel robot voice that so many annoying YouTube videos use
This kind of mentality only works if you don’t play games with other people.
Multiplayer only folk usually have a friend group that plays multiple games. If they don’t work in Linux you’re SOL.
Back when I tried to use Linux and never boot Windows a good 2/3rd of games I couldn’t participate in and was left behind. So while it’s better than it was, it’s still not good.
It’s the internet, mate. The world is your oyster.
Get friends that only game on linux.
What are your specs? I’m trying to see if BG3 min reqs are a little bit over estimated
I have i7-7700k, GTX 1070 (nvidia driver version: 535.86.05), 16 GB ram, running the game off an SSD.
The game has been improving in a tremendous manner since release. They’ve been releasing meaningful patches really often. I’ve been playing it since the full release, and it’s been awesome to witness it improve so quickly in so many aspects.
Since the latest performance updates, I haven’t noticed the game dropping below 60 fps (it now sits mostly in the 60-80fps range) at 1080p, high settings, FSR set to off.
Thanks for the info!
Hmm, I wonder if I would be able to run it on my i5-3470 and Rx 550 with FSR, at 30+ fps
Modern (post DS2) From Software games tend to run flawlessly on Linux. They are one of the greatest developers now. No bullshit, just greatness all around.
I heard a lot of BG3, although I dont have any doubt that it is a great game, I dont think it suits my taste. Battlebit tho, I’ll check that otu.
It had nothing to do with From Software but Elden Ring actually ran better on Linux than on any other platform shortly after release (there was a silly bug that affected performance on all platforms that Valve fixed within Proton.)
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A friend recently asked me to play a game with him that had an anticheat that Intentinay made it impossible to play the game on linux
I had both linux and windows on my computer, but windows was broken
I tried to make a virtual machine and install windows on it, but i couldnt install it
He blamed all the problems on linux
Unfortunately for him, the game devs are the problem
I had the same with Genshin Impact; it refuses to install on Linux due to “cheating rootkits”, it even refuses to install on a Windows 11 VM in VirtualBox!
How does it do that‽VB is easy to detect
Wine and DXVK made it increadably easy to support Linux and if a company doesn’t even put in that much effort or intentionally breaks the game for you it’s certainly not worth your money! I pirate rather than use the refund window but the principal is the same since I do buy good games after all.
Cries in pipeline hacks for DirectX. Didn’t Space Engineers do this?
I am not really sure what you mean with that tbh
Probably space engineers more abuses the direct pipeline than uses it, in ways that translation layers wouldn’t be able to emulate the quirks.
Their goal is to be compliant not equivalent
True, it can’t add new ones ether because it’s a extra layer and not part of the actual game!
NGL it would be cool as hell if they did just for linux wine devs
Exactly. And some do other dirty hacks in DirectX.
everything is changing
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And we stopped to use horses to go to places, things changes.
Gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds. We’re now at the point where only a select few Windows games (usually due to the anti cheat) won’t run.
In my experience, the effort to fix Linux issues serve as a good litmus test as to how well supported the game is in general.
At least with games that aren’t from big studios.
