this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers? This is a business decision, nothing else. Most likely, some MBA looked over the numbers, saw a few hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux, and decided that Proton was good enough. Most likely, no programmer was even asked whether Linux support should be dropped.
And yes, even if you know what you are doing, every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested, and that costs time and thus money, which is something every experienced cross platform developer should know.
Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn't magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: "maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content". My point is regarding the "maintaining [...] across many distros" and not the "taking time away". A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.
Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.
This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.
The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as "Industry-leading multiplatform support" with the motto "Create once, ship anywhere".
So my argument still stands. And as I said, it's not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.
Unless you're developing graphics-heavy application that uses platrofm-specific API for optimisation. Like a video game for example.
Are you talking from experience?
Not a game, but I was involved in making a graphics heavy app. Significant amount of times we had to grapple with question " that's a nice feature you are making, will this work on all the platforms", and significant amount of times the answer was "obviously, unquestionably no".
You should get some experience using modern game engines so you can see firsthand how easy it is to develop cross-platform games.
Supporting multiple platforms is a job for the engine developers.
And you should get some experience developing something more complicated than a simple unity project.
Done.