Looks like Subnautica from the Natural Selection 2 developers won't get Linux support

I bought this game before migrating to Linux - it has a fresh setting and really beautiful graphics. With VR support it could be amazing! Today I do only buy games which are already available for Linux - I don't spend money on promises any more... :-/

Quoting: FratmI'm just tired of the empty promises. We have had a lot of them lately. It's down right dishonest of the developers to claim they will support our platform, and then after all the hype they dump it.

-Fratm

Most of those promises happened back when it seemed that Valve cared about SteamOS, GabeN announced that Linux is the future of gaming and Steam Machines were The Next Big Thing, together with the Steam Controller. When Steam Machines and SteamOS were all but abandoned by Valve, Linux market share remained stuck at less than 1%, many companies revisited these plans.

I don't think it is dishonest, they anticipated a trend that didn't materialise, so they adjusted their strategy. Sure, it would be nice if all these developers admitted that openly.

I'm kind of fine with it, as there are enough games which were actually released on Linux. Witcher 3 is the only huge disappointment for me :(

I knew it wouldn't be long before the fabled 1% figure would rear it's ugly uninformed head yet again, no-one knows what percentage of Steam users are on Linux because the survey is NOT accurate & never has been, unless they shove it out to every steam user all at once they'll never know how many Linux users there are, but it's damn well more than 1% that's for sure.

Well, I hope they do get back to getting it running on Linux at some point as it really does look like a game I would like to throw some money and time at.

Quoting: chuzzle44"it is not as easy as clicking a button"

Well pardon my French, but no shit, really? I seriously question the intelligence of a developer that would think it was that simple.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but with how rampant this line of thinking seems to be, I'm starting to wonder if most of these developers know what the hell they are doing. Has game development become so dumbed down that any idiot can throw together a game? We've certainly heard this line a few to many times.

The worst part is that I have actually seen quite a few incompetent fools bring their "games" to Linux. It takes a special kind of stupid to completely back yourself into a corner, knowing from the beginning that you shouldn't.

I would like to apologize for my rant of a comment, but I can't be the only one who's frustrated by this.

First the article mention the tweeter as a developer but in the tweets he clearly states not being a programmer.

In my experience is code departments are typically pressured into feature deadlines. So when they are doing overtime already even those interested in ensuring a Linux version works have no energy left to do that. An production people usually have no interested in an OS which doesn't generate much money compared to having a new feature which is supposed to make the game much better (which then drives more sales).
My point is, rarely are the developers/coders themselves to blame. If any they are pushing for it out of interest.

Quoting: chuzzle44"it is not as easy as clicking a button"

Well pardon my French, but no shit, really? I seriously question the intelligence of a developer that would think it was that simple.

I would guess this is aimed at all those none-developers who actually think it's that easy. You can find lots of them in the Steam forums...

Actually from what I've seen for some games using Unity it IS as simple as pressing a button to port it to Linux, but I'm willing to haggle the point.

Quoting: PublicNuisanceDisappointing but oh well. Plenty of other games worth supporting.

Quoting: ElectricPrismReleasing on Linux isn't only about including ever piece of the pie or capturing a cult market for PR, SEO, or entering a market with little competition to dominate a genre, it's also about immortalizing your game.

Do you really think any publisher has interest to immortalize their games? Publishers probably hope for the next big, incompatible platform they can rerelease and resell their classic games for.
That's why Steams cross-platform sales might not completely be a positive thing. It definitely helps to keep new users satisfied, but for publishers -> A small platform where a big part of the user base already owns the licence means even less money.

Sometimes these things can change very quick. It wouldn't be the first time that one of the programmers is experimenting with Linux and exports it and finds it works pretty well. It is a Unity 5 game, which is apparently not that hard to get working.

And as others have said. If it's not released, there are plenty of other games to play these days. No sense worrying about this one.

Quoting: lucifertdarkActually from what I've seen for some games using Unity it IS as simple as pressing a button to port it to Linux, but I'm willing to haggle the point.

From my own experience - it's sadly not really simple.

As an example - In one case, I had segfaults because of the structure of my UI-System (based on the then relatively new UI-system). It would run perfectly in editor-mode and as a windows executable.
You hit the linux button and it compiles, but the resulting executable produces a segfault somewhere in the UI-Interpreter.
Debugging such a thing can be really frustrating, especially since the Linux-version of the Unity-Editor is still terribly immature itself. It's easier to deactivate parts of your UI System and search for the component that causes the failure. You then have to iterate through all kinds of alternative setups, till it works.
In most cases I found that I indeed had not used the system in perfect accordence to the spec, but it was not my code that caused the segfault - it was content I created with the editor and only caused problems in my linux build.
That's why - for bigger and complex projects - having a linux executable in QA from the start of development is really necessary to have a smooth export. If the "port" fails after you made some changes, you can guess where to look for the problem. If you just hit the button on a finished project and some obscure interpreter-errors occur, bug-hunting can become really really troublesome.

Funny thing - the windows builds of the problematic states always ran flawlessly in wine.


Last edited by const on 25 August 2016 at 10:34 am UTC