For a long time, an overwhelmingly popular view among game developers and publishers has been that offering Linux builds would involve too much work, because they had either tried it briefly or heard from other devs who had tried it, and found that their problem reports massively increased. Their conclusion was often that Linux causes too many bugs to be supportable. As a gamer, I was of course disappointed every time I read this.
More importantly, as a developer, I couldn’t help noticing ways in which this reasoning seemed flawed. I always felt that it was either poorly informed or not completely honest.
So, when this refreshingly different perspective from a game developer surfaced on social media, it warmed my heart. I thought the rest of you might find it interesting.
That was a few years ago. I imagine the influx of gamers using Linux since then (since it’s easier now) might mean a smaller portion of our group has the technical skills described in that post, but I think it still applies. I hope it also gives us something to aspire to when interacting with the people who make the games we play.
But people know about it, so much that they are reporting it, you don’t know about it, but everyone else does.
Exactly, without the report you wouldn’t know what type of bug it is that affects people.
No one claimed any such thing, have you actually read the article? He claims Linux users are just more used to making bug reports, so they keep doing that on games the same way they would on any other piece of software. It’s about the mentality than intelligence, most people experience a bug, curse/laugh and carry on. Let me ask you, have you ever reported a bug in a game you played? I’m sure you’ve experienced many, but have you ever actually reported one?
That is true, which is why the majority of games released for Linux are indie, since only indie developers have the necessary funds to carry such big overhead… But being serious, yes, there’s some overhead in setting a Linux build, but it’s usually one of the easiest to make, most games are already doing Windows/Xbox/Playstation/Switch adding an extra pipeline there should be much simpler than you’d expect.
How would you know things came up without bug reports?