I'm not sure I'm going to buy the game any time soon. I'll wait for CDPR to make an effort to release the game for desktop Linux, or the game to go on a major sale on GOG first, to play it in Wine.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeHow much cash did Google hand off to AMD for this? (I can only guess they're using AMD CPUs there too?)

Hard to say, but Google has the money to pay as much as needed I'm sure. Yes, they are using AMD CPUs too.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeMy guess has always been that it's just a massive virtualization platform that spins up a new VM instance whenever someone launches a game. That'd make far more sense than them porting Dx12 games over as quick as they have been.

Except it's not the case. Stadia is using Debian Linux + Vulkan. See here:

https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/about/ [External Link]

Scroll down there and click "See Software Stack".

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Quoting: GuestROI must include support costs. If it was just release into the wild and forget about it, that would be a different story. Updates, patches, all that testing, customer support (someone to answer the emails) - and not to mention public image - are very relevant.

Yes, but these costs are manageable for them and they also directly benefit Stadia port itself. Any improvement in their Linux codebase improves their Stadia release too. So from ROI perspective it's not an issue.

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Quoting: x_wingCDPR will simply not port their games to a desktop Linux distro because the ROI doesn't fit with their company expectations. Any other excuse regarding why they "can't" is just a lame excuse.

My point is, after Google already paid for it and CDPR did all the heavy lifting - the rest is simply peanuts. So ROI arguments aren't relevant there anymore.

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Quoting: jensHaving the technical part solved does not imply that there are no support costs. These are very different things.

It implies that support costs are affordable and not an argument against expanding into Linux gaming market. CDPR CEO said so himself, so I'll refer you to him. So I'm not even going to argue about support cost point - it obscures the real issue.

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Quoting: jensI really don't believe that.

It's up to you, but for me it's obviously a political problem. Technicalities were solved already or can be solved by anyone who doesn't care about the petty politics part.

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Quoting: jensIt is quite a difference to offer support for 10.000 sold copies vs 2.000.000 or more copies. I don't think you can compare both cases.

The support argument is used as an excuse, but the real problem is different - see above. I.e. without solving the actual issue, even if support costs would be zero, they still wouldn't care.

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Quoting: GuestMultiple distros become suddenly a single target. This is what I suspect to be Valve's long term goal with that collaboration.

If they are still on board with that - great. But they practically stopped all the outreach to developers (may they aren't ready?), so it looks like nothing is happenning.

About open source community - that's a good point. Community can create a distro that is targeted for gaming specifically with the focus of promoting it to developers first and foremost, and invite more collaboration from all interested parties. It shouldn't be limited to Steam or whatever (that's why I think SteamOS was a bad name for it). It should be more neutral to invite collaboration.

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Quoting: GuestIt would have been akin to Stadia - a single platform to develop against. That was the idea. It....didn't turn out that way, which is somewhat annoying.

I think even Linus Torvalds mentioned it - no one stops games developers from making some distro their standard target. Other distros won't have hard time adjusting to run such games if needed. So it's not a cost and not even a technical problem by far and for a long time already. It's totally political.

Valve tried to push that idea with SteamOS being that standard target. But in reality it doesn't have to be SteamOS, it can be anything. Problem is, without anyone actually advocating a specific example for developers anymore, it falls back to the above issue - having to decide for themselves doesn't fit into their mental model of always requiring a platform owner telling them what to do and as a result they don't do anything.

To put it differently, Linux gaming is bitten by lack of collaboration in the messed up gaming industry and no one taking the lead role of advancing Linux gaming in general from the above perspective.

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