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Are 3rd-party ports good for Linux gaming?
Mountain Man Dec 5, 2016
Feral is probably the most prolific Linux developer in the gaming industry today, and I'm thrilled with the games they've brought to our humble platform. Without Feral, we'd probably have never seen games like XCOM 2, Tomb Raider, Shadows of Mordor, Total Warhammer, Mad Max, and others on Linux. Aspyr has similarly contributed to the growing Linux gaming catalog, and there are probably one or two other smaller porting houses that I'm unaware of. I know some developers (particularly the smaller indies) produce their own in-house ports, but when it comes to big-budget, high-profile games, we're almost entirely dependent on porting shops.

While I love the fact that I've been able to nuke my Windows partition without having to give up AAA games, a couple things do concern me: there are far more developers than there are porting houses, so the porting houses will never be able to keep up with the games coming on the market. Secondly, since porting houses have been willing to pick up the slack for Linux, developers have less incentive to develop their own in-house Linux expertise to give us 1st-party Linux support.

So have 3rd-party Linux ports really been good for Linux gaming? It's a good start, I think, but we need developers to start treating us like valued customers instead of an afterthought.
Ehvis Dec 5, 2016
You can remove the "linux" from that story. A substantial number of Windows versions of AAA games are console ports done by third parties. Would that make Feral ports a fourth party port? :P It's nothing more than an arrow pointing at the larger groups of customers.
tuubi Dec 5, 2016
Of course Linux ports are good for Linux gaming. Ten cases out of ten, I'd rather have a third party port than no port at all.

(I actually wrote a much longer answer but then decided it included too much speculation to be constructive.)
g000h Dec 5, 2016
Well I prefer a game to be written to support all platforms from day 1, even if only one platform is released at a time. Porting isn't great when it is converting between one format and another, e.g. DirectX converted to OpenGL and then outputting as video. Hoping that Vulkan will help to consolidate that.

However, I prefer a game released with porting (and porting issues) than no game at all.
Mountain Man Dec 6, 2016
Interesting comment about how a lot of Windows games are ports, but they're usually treated like first-party titles instead of as an afterthought (Arkham Knight being an example of a notable exception). I love the work Feral has done; I just wish they weren't practically the only ones doing it. If we had just two more Linux developers as prolific as Feral then we'd be set. It would also guard against having all of our eggs in one basket.

I suppose we've cleared one big hurdle with every major engine officially supporting Linux. I just hope more developers take advantage it so that engine makers will continue that support going forward.
Guppy Dec 6, 2016
Quoting: Mountain ManInteresting comment about how a lot of Windows games are ports, but they're usually treated like first-party titles instead of as an afterthought (Arkham Knight being an example of a notable exception).
I could name a few game reviewers that disagrees with that notion


Quoting: Mountain ManI love the work Feral has done; I just wish they weren't practically the only ones doing it. If we had just two more Linux developers as prolific as Feral then we'd be set. It would also guard against having all of our eggs in one basket.

We have Feral Interactive, Virtual Programming and Aspyr Media as 3rd party porters, back in the day there was only Loki so that's 3 times as many.

Honestly I prefer a small number of teams doing this rather than 100s with little to no experience, hopefully tho in the future the "native porters" will get invited as consultants earlier in the process to make sure the code base is actually cross platform and help setup compile & test environments.
Mountain Man Dec 6, 2016
Quoting: Guppy...hopefully tho in the future the "native porters" will get invited as consultants earlier in the process to make sure the code base is actually cross platform and help setup compile & test environments.
This is what Firaxis and Feral did for XCOM 2, and that port was flawless, matching and even beating Windows in performance.
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