this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
263 points (96.1% liked)

Steam Deck

18063 readers
154 users here now

A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Link to our Matrix Space

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 49 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Mango@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Pro individual agency? Linux.

You'll own nothing and be happy? Micrapple

We can take an easy guess at which one if these things Epic is.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

In the case of fortnite, this isn't really true. The issue of fortnite is the anti cheat system is not designed to play nice with Linux and allowing Linux without having the anti cheat on point would lead to players getting mad at cheaters and the collapse of fortnite. It's happened to several games in the past that couldn't prevent people from cheating.

[–] cobra89@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Easy anti-cheat stays on. Several other games have implemented it on Linux without problems. Easy anti-cheat made it as easy as the developer (Epic Games) checking a box to allow it to run on Linux. That's what the person you're responding to is referring to. It's a recent development that happened earlier this year.

[–] EveningNewbs@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's happened to several games in the past that couldn't prevent people from cheating.

And those games are...? There are plenty of games that have allowed anticheat to work on Linux and haven't imploded, but I don't know of a single one that has. Care to encourage enlighten me?

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 years ago

I don't specifically mean games that used anti cheats that ran on Linux. I just mean games that couldn't keep from too many people cheating and it ruining the online aspect of a game. A couple different Diablo games come to mind. COD:Warzone got pummeled for a while. Fall Guys had a very rough season 1.