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Update: They changed their minds on this, they've put the native version back up. See here.
Original article below:
It seems Transhuman Design have removed the Linux version of BUTCHER after users reported issues, opting instead to ask Steam to add it as an approved Steam Play title.
Announcing it on Steam, they said this:
Sadly, BUTCHER spontaneously stopped working on Linux. The most likely cause seems to be some incompatibility between the old Unity 5.6 Linux builds and new GPU drivers.
Since moving the codebase to a newer Unity version is potentially a titanic task (including testing, debugging, and hair-pulling) and the sole programmer of the game is tightly involved in another project to keep him afloat, we decided to request the game to be whitelisted as fully compatible with the new Steam Play feature.
Before it's officially accepted, you can try it now yourself and hopefully enjoy your game working on Linux again!
After digging into the Steam forum, I came across this forum topic started in August, where four users mentioned trouble starting the game. That doesn't seem like a lot of people to make such a big decision, but it's understandable that with a tiny team and little time they're trying to make it so Linux gamers still have a good experience. Probably a good case for Valve to allow people to have a choice between native and Steam Play's Proton.
Obviously the problem with them doing this, is that it no longer shows up as a Linux game on Steam, that is until Valve decide what they're going to do about showing Steam Play on store pages (if anything).
I'm pretty curious to know what the actual issue is here. Is it Unity once again messing up in their older builds, is it a driver update that broke it? We know so little.
Worth noting this is only on Steam of course, the native Linux builds are still available from Humble Store, GOG and itch.io.
What do you think about such a move? Keen to see some thoughts on this.
On the other hand, it reminds me of Xenonauts, where the dev coudn't keep the Linux version updated since it was ported by a third party, and they left us Linux users to play a dated version (which locked us out of many MODs and the CE). I mean, I'd rather play the latest version via Proton than be locked to the dated one.
I don't know. I'm all for virtualization, but since there's no big bucks in porting games for Linux, this might discourage developers from supporting linux and just leave us to emulate their games if we want to play them.
I hope once the developer unclutters their schedule they'll make some time to make a proper Linux port.
Anyway, I'll try to keep my money on Linux supported games and just regretted having bought a couple of Windoze only games, that run pretty good on Proton.
Last edited by Linuxpunk at 20 September 2018 at 10:12 pm UTC
Years are passing by and those issues don;t get fixed, making you ask yourself why do those game even have a Linux version at all if it is not working at all?
Yeah, it's an ugly thing when you drop a native port for a compatibility layer, but I'd rather have non-native games that work, instead of native games that are buggy or don't work at all.
And I've heard in different occasions about other games suffering the same problems - with unplayable Linux versions, so it's not isolated to just 2-3 games.
Last edited by Hori at 20 September 2018 at 10:18 pm UTC
Which is precisely what the Xenonauts developers did.
So it will be a problem for itch.io and GOG users at least. Therefore it's not a satisfactory solution. For me it could be acceptable it it were availlable on Steam only.
So it sounds as if, in this particular instance, it may indeed have been a bit of a cop-out. But in principle, I think this sort of thing is beneficial. As Liam says, maybe Valve making it possible to decide which version to run in the Steam client would be a good idea.