The Witcher 3 is something Linux users have been practically begging to have, but the problem is that it seems it will likely never come to Linux. An ex-Virtual Programming developer has taken to reddit explaining why this may have happened.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
QuoteI agree, things were not right on release... but the vocality of people went way beyond that. It was an all out hate campaign against VP, against CDPR for "lying about the port being native". I attempted to help people out in my own time and got absolutely roasted and abused for it.
The community needs to realise it simply cannot justify this sort of behaviour if they want to convince devs and publishers to support them. There is no excuse.
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
QuoteThe vitriol was unbelievable. Yes we messed up the performance on release but we put it right. However a huge hate campaign ensued. Both VP and CDPR got lots of vengeful hate mail sent to them. I cannot help but feel this damaged CDPR's view of the Linux platform irrevocably.
They certainly didnt blame us, because they had us work on a Mac port of Witcher 1 to replace the non-functioning Wineskin version. The same port would have ran on Linux too with very little extra work, but they were not interested in releasing it.
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
In the same way that Croteam has done with Serious Sam 1,2,3 in creating the Fusion system, adding a Vulkan graphics back-end: It would be great if CDPR could get familiar with Vulkan technology and create a Witcher 3 beta which supports Vulkan. [For the uninitiated, Croteam did this in order to train up their skills on Vulkan on products they know well, and then be able to use Vulkan properly in future projects.]
They get to improve their in-house expertise with Vulkan, they can concentrate on Vulkan for their future games (rather than multiple versions of DirectX across multiple versions of Windows.)
AND... If Vulkan was in their products, then even if they don't create native Linux ports, anyone in the Linux community who wants to play their games, has the choice of playing the Windows version of the game in WINE with practically no problems.
They get to improve their in-house expertise with Vulkan, they can concentrate on Vulkan for their future games (rather than multiple versions of DirectX across multiple versions of Windows.)
AND... If Vulkan was in their products, then even if they don't create native Linux ports, anyone in the Linux community who wants to play their games, has the choice of playing the Windows version of the game in WINE with practically no problems.
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Quoting: damarrinQuoting: libookamiWhiny and demanding wall of text
And here's why we can't have nice things.
I ask you politely to explain yourself and to state your points clearly so we can discuss them properly. I don't think i did anything to deserve being attacked like this, my first guess is that it's a misunderstood.
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Quoting: elmapulwell, looking at the bright side, at least this prove one thing: our voice makes an impact, its not pointless to shoult, we actualy have the power to change something with our voice.
its a shame that we change it for worse, but if we have this power, we certainly can change it for better with other titles/companys.
Yes, when our voice is for negative we're likely to get such excuses as "well your community sucks" and if our voice is for positive we'll get "well you know you're nice and all, but we can't justify the development for 1% of the market". We can change nothing with our voices, we can only change things by actually growing in marketshare and making them money. A lot of companies have proven that already.
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Quoting: scaineQuoting: omer666There are a lot of good points made in this thread. My own position about this is that there were several justifications for such strong reactions. We must analyse what's gone wrong in context. <SNIP>
Justification for threats of violence? Death threats? Yeah, real classy. I didn't even read past that opening sentence.
I must confess I didn't read the thread thoroughly before posting, which is a shame as I see you getting quite vocal about my comment. I stayed on the positive side of things which is a mistake, and I should have indeed stated that I do not agree in any possible way with such threats.
On another hand many of us reacted in a decent manner and that is the kind of reaction I was referring to.
I would not be silly enough as to call these "background noise", it's a problem indeed, but I tend to think it's a problem with the internet in general. It's sometimes so dehumanised that you get some inhuman behaviours, and it's not getting any better in recent years.
I just hope you're not thinking I'm a complete douchebag because I didn't take the time to study the whole thing beforehand.
Last edited by omer666 on 4 July 2017 at 2:16 pm UTC
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I agree with the posted quotes, and I'm not at all surprised by this outcome nor the reasons behind it.
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Quoting: damarrinWishing someone to die or the like is never ever an appropriate reaction to anything that might happen in a relation between people pertaining to a digital product. It's completely unacceptable no matter the built-up expectation, the amount of money paid, time spent waiting or whatever.
Companies are made of people and while most decisions tend to be made based on objective grounds, emotions do play a role.
If 100 Windows users send a developer death threats, they will grow tougher skin, wish they could tell them to fuck themselves but try to ignore the hate and keep on working on their game hoping other non-hate-spewing people will buy it.
When 100 Linux users send a developer death threats, they'll do what they wished they could do to the Windows people: say screw you fuckers, I won't release my game for you. Lots of satisfaction ensues, with very little (if any) financial consequence.
I totally agree with this. People on this thread are repeatedly arguing that CDPR should grow thicker skin, that verbal attacks from some don't justify not making a special linux release for the rest of us...
The truth is they don't NEED to justify it. (And they didn't this was just one guys opinion, not the offical CDPR one.) We are a very, VERY small community and a minuscule part of their income. They tried to do something nice for us, they got a bunch of rudeness (not helpful criticism, not polite requests for changes or even apassionate bug reports. Rudeness.) Rudeness so over the top that it actually decreased their stock value. They don't NEED our dollars, and they really don't need us to cause them to lose money.
People arguing that it's OK because that sort of vitriol can be found from Windows users missed the point that we are NOT windows users. We don't have the majority of the gaming market behind us.
If we want respect, we need to act respectable.
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wvstolzing Jul 4, 2017
Quoting: KimyrielleHe can be a totally rude jerk, and the fact that he invented the OS of our choice doesn't change that he needs a crash course in basic manners.
Sorry to go off-topic, but what he did was not to invent an OS -- rather, he reverse engineered the kernel of an OS that was ~20 years old at that point. This is not to detract from his achievement, of course; but I suspect part of the reason why he's such an insufferable **** is that we casually tend to give him credit for developments in computing that he had nothing to do with.
People laugh at Stallman and the FSF for what sounds like an inane obsession with the 'GNU/' nomenclature, but they do have a point. Besides, a few things could have happened at slightly different times around 1991-1993, and we'd all be hailing UC Berkeley Department of CS & McKusick et al. as the inventors of our free OS. Also, Ritchie & Thompson probably deserve to be have 'household name' status as well, just as much as Linus.
Last edited by wvstolzing on 4 July 2017 at 2:41 pm UTC
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Quoting: AlveKattWow... Some of the commenters here actually say they deserved the backlash. Being a game dev must suck. Getting second thoughts about my dream to make my own game...It certainly can.
And the abuse increases by orders of magnitude for (including but not limited to) each of the following that you are (I have witnessed all of these firsthand): a woman, a member of a nonwhite/nonanglo ethnic group, openly gay, openly transsexual, and not openly hostile to any/all of the aforementioned groups.
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Exhibit A:
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on Windows with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Windows users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Windows, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.
* * *
Exhibit B:
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Mac OS with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Mac OS users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Mac OS, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, despite the comparitively smaller user base they represent, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.
* * *
Exhibit C:
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Linux with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Linux users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people were inappropriate in their actions. Furthermore, they were speaking on the behalf of the community of Linux users as a whole, despite the aforementioned constructive criticism and attacks directed towards an inanimate object, which obviously doesn't count, because feelings were hurt. Users of Linux, because of how they are united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, and because of how small a user base they're representing, should be completely expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on a public relations level, despite the existence of many private and public corporations that deal in PR for various distributions of Linux, as well as the kernel itself being managed by a registered nonprofit. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from Linux users being far too quick to judge, having far too high standards, not giving the developers enough time to fix the problems post-release and not being able to rein in and censor the worst of their people.
* * *
Hmm. I always knew that Windows and Mac OS liked to break standards, but I didn't realise things were this bad.
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on Windows with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Windows users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Windows, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.
* * *
Exhibit B:
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Mac OS with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Mac OS users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Mac OS, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, despite the comparitively smaller user base they represent, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.
* * *
Exhibit C:
Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Linux with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.
Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Linux users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.
Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people were inappropriate in their actions. Furthermore, they were speaking on the behalf of the community of Linux users as a whole, despite the aforementioned constructive criticism and attacks directed towards an inanimate object, which obviously doesn't count, because feelings were hurt. Users of Linux, because of how they are united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, and because of how small a user base they're representing, should be completely expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on a public relations level, despite the existence of many private and public corporations that deal in PR for various distributions of Linux, as well as the kernel itself being managed by a registered nonprofit. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from Linux users being far too quick to judge, having far too high standards, not giving the developers enough time to fix the problems post-release and not being able to rein in and censor the worst of their people.
* * *
Hmm. I always knew that Windows and Mac OS liked to break standards, but I didn't realise things were this bad.
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QuoteI hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports.
Really? When people pay for something, they expect it to work (and work well). People aren't going to be thankful for a bad product. This isn't people spitting in the face of free content, this was a commercial product.
What you're doing is telling people to be thankful for any old shit - "Please Sir, can I have some more?"
Also blaming an entire community for a handful of people's actions is moronic. Are you saying I could get a friend or two together and get anything I want cancelled by pretending to be a member of the target demographic and giving a few people grief? There's obvious issues with that mentality.
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