GOG is not a tiny store. And games like above (Life is Strange and etc.) are already there, so publishers have interest. Feral in particular has some problem.

For games like Life Is Strange, without Feral there wouldn't be a Linux version available at all, not just no Linux version on GOG. Game devs don't want to take on Linux support even if they've already made a Linux version. It's expensive and they're scared of it.

That's because they had no experts for it. Of course it's expensive to hire people. Increasingly they have them now, so the support is not a problem for them.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 6:41 am UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: PublicNuisanceMore and more indie studios maybe but not more and more AAA studios.

Stadia happened, so that includes what you call "AAA" studios (I dislike that term though, it's pretty useless).

Stadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Quoting: ShmerlThat's because they had no experts for it. Increasingly they have them now.

They'll (hopefully - I've said myself that more general competence will be a good outcome from Stadia) have people that can make a game run on one Linux configuration, with help from Google. That might translate into game devs being able to use the Steam runtime with help from Valve. Game devs throwing themselves straight into the wild-and-wooly Linux ecosystem through GOG, when GOG don't care about Linux and won't give them any help, is a stretch too far.

Feral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing. What we want is for game devs to realistically look at the costs and benefits of supporting us and say to themselves, "yes, that is profitable. We'll do that." Even if they do that, most of them won't be on GOG.

Quoting: ShmerlIncreasingly they have them now, so the support is not a problem for them.

The support is all the problem.

Quoting: PublicNuisanceStadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Stadia developers are Linux developers. So these big studios have them now. Before they didn't have them. Whether they want to release for Linux or not is another question, but in the past when they wanted, they had to work with someone like Feral to do it. Today - not anymore.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 6:57 am UTC

Quoting: CatKillerFeral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing

It's not a bad thing. It just means the previous business model became obsolete these days. They can do something else. Like I said, for example make their own games.

Quoting: CatKillerThe support is all the problem.

Skilled support is a problem. Now they have someone to address it or they are training these people in-house. I see it as a much better situation, than studios looking for external experts.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 7:02 am UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: CatKillerFeral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing

It's not a bad thing. It just means the previous business model became obsolete these days. They can do something else. Like I said, for example make their own games.

Quoting: CatKillerThe support is [i]all the problem.

Skilled support is a problem. Now they have someone to address it.

Of course it's a bad thing. Your wish to buy your games on GOG has blinded you to the realities of the situation.

Making games for Linux is no harder than making games for Windows. Lots of people manage it. You'll likely need to learn different tools, but it's fundamentally the same stuff.

Making your games work on Linux from the start makes making games easier: you have another path to finding bugs, which makes your game better faster. You avoid platform-specific assumptions. The people who can do this already do.

For all the rest, they have one platform that they're familiar with and they can bludgeon their code to work on other fixed platforms if the market share has made the tools that will do that for them widely available and easy to use. Sturgeon's Law applies to game devs just as much as everything else.

They are absolutely terrified of ballooning support costs from supporting "all the fragmented Linux environments." They don't understand it, they don't use it, and their normal habits make things way harder for them and increase their costs from the start. Soothing those fears is the service that Feral provides: "your costs will never be higher than our fee and our royalty from all the extra sales we generate." If Feral, with their years of experience, can't keep that profitable, then what chance do green devs, who are likely to cock up at least one thing, have of making the case that it's viable for their company?

Support costs are what scare them, and losing Feral will scare them more.

The relevant metric is whether the Linux marketshare is big enough so that every corner-cutting dev can still make a profit from their inadequately-tested game release that uses middleware they chose with no regard to which platforms it worked on. The ones who try that when the market isn't big enough go and whine on Twitter about it and scare away others, and rile up Linux gamers which scares away more.

People that can develop properly will continue to develop properly, and some fraction of those will release games for Linux.

If Stadia is moderately successful, which is still an open question, then the corner-cutting devs will be throwing together a Vulkan game rather than a DirectX game, which is a win. They'll have tested their game on at least one version of Linux, which is a win. More of the middleware that they grab off the shelf without thinking is likely to work on Stadia, and so Linux, which is a win.

Maybe that will be enough to lower costs. Maybe the marketshare will grow enough organically so that the revenue is there. But it still needs to be profitable, and it needs to be seen to be profitable. The failure of the only porting house that gives a damn will be a blow to that, no matter how much you'd really like a high-profile Linux game on GOG.

Quoting: CatKillerSoothing those fears is the service that Feral provides

We aren't talking about some stupid studios who don't know left from right about software development and have some "fears" and other irrational ways to make their plans. I'm talking about professionals. And they either have experts or they do not. What Feral offer is expertise, not a "way to sooth fears". That's the usual choice. Either hire experts / train them in house or outsource the work to external "consultancies". Feral offer the later approach. What's happening today is growing in-house expertise with Linux development for gaming. Those who are not professionals and handle things through fear and paranoia aren't going to change, Feral or not. I don't think they even are worth any attention.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 9:17 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlI'm talking about professionals.

Read any of the interviews that Liam has done, or go to the places where game devs sit round the campfire. The only thing is whether the revenue from sales is higher than the costs of support. For almost all game developers, those who aren't interested in Linux as a gaming platform in its own right, support costs are really high because they did it as an afterthought, way out of proportion to the revenue they're likely to get. And other devs hear those stories and shy away. That's just how it is.

Costs can come down, revenues can go up. I hope they do. But we aren't there yet. Stadia might help, or it might not, but we don't know either way yet.

Quoting: ShmerlEither hire experts / train them in house or outsource the work to external "consultancies".

I'm going to reiterate this point, because it's really important.

For a competent dev, the cost of making a Linux version is likely negative in a lot of cases. You find bugs faster, which means that you either have time to add new features, or you can release earlier meaning you don't need to pay staff and costs for as long before you get to move onto the next thing.

The cost of supporting a Linux game is an entirely different thing.

If you're a competent dev, support costs are likely still low, but non-zero. You need to test. You need to have support staff that know what they're talking about. You need a distribution channel. You need to minimise the weird stuff that your game does. You need to be responsive to changes in your customers' environments as upgrades happen, and drivers change, and so on.

Most devs won't have built their game multiplatform with Linux in mind from the ground up. There will be middleware that needs to be replaced. There will be assumptions that were made that are only true on Windows, so code will need to be redesigned. You need to pick your target from an overwhelming variety of distros that you know nothing about. Trying to do it after the fact is a nightmare. And for apparently less than 1% of the market.

That is the part that Feral takes off the devs' hands, and where their expertise is. They take something made with no real consideration of Linux and turn it into revenue and good reviews with no particular extra effort on the part of the devs themselves.

More native games from developers will be nice, but there are an awful lot of developers for whom Linux is not a primary target and won't be for quite a long time. If it were a primary platform for them, making the Linux game would be cheap, but it isn't, and so supporting the Linux game is really expensive.

To add to that, first line and second line support is usually not done by the actual developers (of course there are exceptions). Offering Linux support means also to train or hire these kind of people. My guess is that finding good support stuff is sometimes even harder than finding good developers. Now try to find support stuff with Linux experience ...

All of the above (development and support expertise) is growing in-house now. So what I said above applies all the same. Feral's business model is now less and less in demand. Making their own studios and their own games sounds like the best option for companies like that today.

Alternative option would be help training developers, for those who actually are building up that expertise, working with studios directly. That's what Google are doing when helping those who release for Stadia. Since you said that experts are hard to find so far, that should be a good option for a while still.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 4:19 pm UTC

At least on Linux there is probably less and less demand, I agree. And may be there are already offering consultancy as a service, we don't know. Though I would expect that they would advertise this on their site. My bet would be that they will shift their focus even more to mobile ports. My hopes are actually pretty small that Linux will see future products from Feral :(

I don't think Feral will just start developing their own games, that's a whole different world imho. That said their mobile ports are already quite different than the originals with regard to UI and controls, so the results are already more than just straight ports.

Making their own games is a different thing, but they have engine developers. They just need other game developers as well (designers, artists and etc.) to complement whom they already have. At least that's an option.

I don't see porting companies continuing what they are doing in the long run. Both commodity engines supporting Linux well and studios building all that expertise in house means there won't be enough need for them.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Jun 2020 at 6:28 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: PublicNuisanceStadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Stadia developers are Linux developers. So these big studios have them now. Before they didn't have them. Whether they want to release for Linux or not is another question, but in the past when they wanted, they had to work with someone like Feral to do it. Today - not anymore.

Wake me up when a Linux version gets released due to Stadia. Any game at all. Until then I refuse to drink the kool aid.

Sure, it would happen no doubt. But we might not necessarily get clear reasons unless developers will say so explicitly.

Last edited by Shmerl on 10 Jun 2020 at 5:09 am UTC

Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: PublicNuisanceStadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Stadia developers are Linux developers. So these big studios have them now. Before they didn't have them. Whether they want to release for Linux or not is another question, but in the past when they wanted, they had to work with someone like Feral to do it. Today - not anymore.

Wake me up when a Linux version gets released due to Stadia. Any game at all. Until then I refuse to drink the kool aid.

[Metro Exodus](https://steamdb.info/app/412020/history/)?