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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Quoting: GuestFine, show me the economics in numbers behind it all if you know so much better than every single company out there. Include all support costs, and I'll give you a hint: there are more than what I wrote previously.

That's what Valve were doing for developers do dispel this nonsense (in the early days of SteamOS and Steam machines). They had a bunch of presentations on how to reduce cost of support when releasing for Linux. It worked, developers were educated on it. But Valve stopped putting this marketing and educational effort and things started falling back to ignorance or indifference at best.

Point is, those who care can do it right and afford it while being part of the Linux gaming market. Those who only care about platform politics won't lift a finger, even if costs them peanuts change to do it. So cost argument can be put to rest right away. The problem different.

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Quoting: GuestVast difference comparing that to general GNU/Linux desktop users running something locally. Stadia is almost the same as a console by comparison.

The difference is vastly overestimated. It's not vast, it's a minor difference. It's not a zero cost effort sure, but it's peanuts expenses for someone like CDPR.

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Quoting: GuestQuality Assurance, testing efforts, training of staff to handle customer support tickets. There are possibly additional IT infrastructure that needs including (servers for Continuous Integration, that kind of thing) - and the salaries of people to maintaining it. Or keep the salaries, but those people now have less time for other things, which can delay products.

CDPR are already doing all that, for Stadia. Adding more use cases for desktop Linux (like tests on more hardware) would be a minor cost in comparison.

I said that before and I'll say it again. The bulk of the effort and expenses on testing and support are already covered if they are releasing for Stadia. So there is no excuse not to release for desktop Linux, it's a minor addition.

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Also, add to that explicit statements by CDPR that they are interested in reaching more users even if it means releasing for more platforms. So they were OK with the idea of providing support. So we can discard this bogus claim of "oh, how horrible, we spent all this money to release it for Stadia, but we can't afford supporting desktop Linux".

What I think happened is that CDPR tied that support to platform owner mentality, like I explained above. And when Valve backed down from posing as the steward of Linux gaming, CDPR also stopped caring.

See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/The_Witcher_3_Linux_port

If Steam will deliver a constant Linux environment, call it SteamOS or anything like that, we would love to have our game there, because the more people play our games, the better for us.

The key part is that they want Valve (or someone) to be involved as the overseer.

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Quoting: GuestExcept that it _is_ normal. It's entirely normal for a company to look at the costs of support and factor that into whether a game is released on a given platform, regardless of technical viability.

No, I don't buy the support cost excuse anyone. It's bunk. Not when small studios with much thinner resources can afford it. It's platform politics in its worst form.

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Stadia totally runs native Linux games. According to Google.

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Quoting: GuestYou keep saying the same thing over and over again, and you are told multiple times why this is not happening. Have you anything to actually add?

And I'll keep saying it over and over again ;) Because some started thinking this is normal. It isn't.

Quoting: Avehicle7887I think this keeps proving my suspicion that porting games to Linux is not the issue, especially nowadays more than ever. I keep having the impression this is more of a "We don't want to invest in an additional OS support, after all PC=Windows right?".

It's not really about porting and support even anymore. It's about avoiding a platform without owner. In case of Stadia they can turn to Google. They don't know whom to turn to in case of Linux. Add to that the fact that they probably want to be paid by the owner to release anything in the first place.

Quoting: Avehicle7887EDIT: Ironically at the same time, smaller devs have no issue releasing for Linux. So even with all the above said, it's time for large companies to start including Linux as part of their release platforms.

Exactly. Small developers don't care about stupid platform politics. While they actually have less resources to do the porting and provide support. We should keep pointing out the hypocrisy of this situation for big studios that release for Stadia.

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So after going through all that trouble of making it use Vulkan and work on Linux, they can't go through adding a proper desktop release...

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