> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no.

What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar.

It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs. Even if there's only 100 people who'd buy it only if it ran on Linux, that should pretty much cover the couple hours of dev time.

I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be supported across distros, which mostly means the Steam Runtime, which means you need to go learn about and understand that. You can't introduce any platform assumptions ("ehh, I'll just hardcode this path with a backslash... oops"). Once you release, you're talking support for dozens of different distros, different versions of distros, different package managers, different filesystems. I know what you're going to say: "Just support Ubuntu LTS and ignore everyone else". Well, now you've just cut your customer base by at least 75%[1], and your customers on other distros are going to demand support anyway. Do you tell a paying customer to F-off because they're not using a distro with only ~20% of the market?

Supporting Linux is hard. So is supporting Windows, but if Windows makes up 98% of your customer base, it's justified. 2%? Ehhhhh.

(P.S. I love Linux. See my profile. This is the kind of stuff I deal with every single day.)

[1] https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no...

Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.

Yeah, the solution to a platform not making enough money to justify supporting it is... giving away your game for free! The self-centered attitude of your comment is astounding, but all too common in open source communities.

You don't have to give your game away for free. I urge you to look into how prominent open source companies are actually making money and think about how it can be applied to games. It's not an impossible reality.

You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with and instead try to route around everybody and ship an untestable blob then that's your fault. The reason everyone tells you to just support Ubuntu LTS is because they are the only ones who have the resources to support all these random binary blobs for X amount of years, and that comes with all the pains associated with it, as you are well aware of.

> You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with

Alternative view: distros don't provide a stable platform that developers can target.

Some do provide that, such as Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Others don't.

Expecting every distro to have the exact same release & support cycle is nonsensical.

Linux LTS releases are not particularly stable from the perspective of someone who wants to distribute applications as binaries. Its API can change with every release, i.e. every two years. It's incredibly unlikely that a binary compiled for Ubuntu 18.04 will be able to run on Ubuntu 20.04 (as in Python etc.).

To contrast, if you take a Win32 game from 2003 that targets DirectX 9, it probably runs fine on the latest Windows releases. (You might have to enable some compatibility mode.)

"BUT BUT BUT if it's packaged with the distro it's no problem." Remember we're talking about proprietary applications (mostly games) here. Having these packaged with distros for years after the devs moved on to the next project is just a pipe dream.

My original statement was that if this is really a problem for you then you need to stop writing and distributing proprietary binaries and open source your game. I know this is a hard pill for game developers to swallow but there is no other way. Open source communities move fast, they are not going to slow down just to support some opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute or fix bugs in, and that the original developer doesn't even care about anyway. It is nonsensical to expect these communities to work exactly like Windows. These are not fortune 500 companies with billions in the bank like Microsoft that can afford to keep innovating while also supporting every single legacy program in existence forever. The only way open source communities can provide the same level of support is if you provide source code that other interested parties can keep up-to-date without worry of being sued.

These prominent open source companies that you're taking about make money from consulting or cloud services. There's no well understood and well rested way to do that as a game company.

It doesn't mean that there's no such way, but it does mean that attempting to find it is very risky. Making games is already a very high-risk, high-reward industry, do adding this amount of risk to the equation is advice that's insane for all but most successful companies.

A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. And a game that allows a certain degree of customization is analogous to a consultancy. Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. If you don't have any business customers/partners then get some, not having them is a much bigger risk than choosing any specific development model.

One of the ways these companies can reduce risk is actually by using other proven open source components. If they won't even make an effort to try to expand this, then there will never be a well-understood way.

> A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics.

No, it's not - this is an absurd statement. Cloud services get most of their income from big and medium companies, billing tens and thousands of dollars in privately negotiated agreements. Digital Ocean and AWS don't live on single developers paying them $5. All their real money is on B2B.

Multiplayer games either get a flat subscription from all their playerbase, or rely on micropayments. Either way, they spend much less on account management where they interact with customers as individuals, and much more on analytics, where they measure and work with their customers in aggregate. These are completely different business models, that completely shape companies that operate on them.

> Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions.

Games are not solving any problems - they are entiertainment product. I've seen people who have tried to reason about games in the terms you're using, and it always yelded hillarious (but also sad) results.

Open sourcing doesn't mean you need to provide all the souds/music/3d models/assets/etc. Those can all be copyrighted separately.

> Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship

Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.

The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.

....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.

You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any better.

I'm not making a case for shipping on the "Linux desktop" because that doesn't exist and has never been a real platform. Most smaller distros are not trying to be "relevant" to whatever the gaming community's fad of the day is. They're perfectly fine filling what niche they do. If you want to target those smaller distros as a platform, you can give them some source code to work with, or you can pay all the cost of maintaining things yourself, or you can just ignore those. They will do fine without your game.

So what are you saying? Developers should just choose a major distro and target that, then get all the flack for issues their product has on every distro that isn't supported? Because that's basically what's already happening and developers hate it, which is why they often don't ship on Linux at all.

And many proprietary pieces of software license components from other proprietary pieces of software, so that even if they did want to open their code they'd have to strip pieces out of it anyway which doesn't really help the cause of distros integrating it. And even if it did, then the developers are reliant on the maintainers for their relationship to their customers. Have an issue with the product? Oh, it turns out that's because of this patch made by the maintainer of the package for that distro, who now has to be contacted and convinced to fix it, which they may decide not to for arbitrary reasons. Even open source developers have problems with this!

In general, distro maintaners can't help you with legal conundrums you created for yourself (you signed restrictive NDAs and proprietary license agreements and didn't consider the fine print until it was too late) or with other unrelated market problems (lack of popularity, lack of developer interest in supporting your game).

If you need to strip out some parts and there is enough will in the community to replace those pieces that you stripped out, then it will happen. If you have a product that is anywhere near being popular among the FOSS developer communities then I don't think it makes sense for you to claim that this will doesn't exist, or that distro maintainers will lose interest.

> What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar.

For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that if none of your code is Windows-specific and works exactly the same on the Linux distribution you are targeting. Once you start using your own middleware and libraries from outside of the default engine, you need to make sure every single one works across all the platforms you're targeting. Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised?

There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux.

> It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that.

For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I've been a producer on large games, and the QA process starts very early on. You don't 'finish' a game and then QA starts - It's an ongoing process that consists of significantly more than just launching a game.

>We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs

Some people don't see it that way though. People who have paid for a product have the right for it to work properly. Tickets for Linux support are often higher [1], so the time investment against payback can be problematic.

GPU driver support on Linux can also still be problematic. From feature differences against Windows, to crashes. These all take additional development time. Linux developers are often more difficult to acquire in the game dev world. QA even more so.

Game dev is really hard. Some of it is hidden by engines like UE4 on the surface, but as soon as you start digging down into serious development, it's difficult.

[1] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760

Probably the most relevant issue here is the DirectX stack or using some windows specific API (why? DirectX I maybe got at one point, the others speak to some absurd Microsoft-Is-Best-Cause-I-Paid-Money-ism).

> Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised?

Outside of truly exotic window managers, the biggest issue I've ever seen with ports has to do with dependencies. Flatpack/Snaps solve most if not all of those problems.

> There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux.

That's assuming anti-cheat systems are ethical, even. Most games I play I want to be multiplayer, and moddable. Most games I play can do both of those things and work in a cross platform modding language. Not hard. I don't want any anti-cheat systems for a complex game with tons of modding.

The only place anti-cheat systems make sense is with e-sports style games. Of which, the best anti-cheat systems work server side. Anything else is invasive and tantamount to illegal spying. Shame on you, go burn in peeping Tom hell you perverse game dev.

> For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing.

I find this incredibly hard to believe. If you are working within the engine the majority of the time, the majority of the game will play wherever the engine works. Which brings us back to one of your first comments:

> For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that

For which games are you not just using the UE4 stack? I.e. what specific problems are game devs normally experiencing causing their code to be non-portable? A bunch of low level assembly code and non standard C++?

> but as soon as you start digging down into serious development

I challenge you to define 'serious' development. That sounds suspiciously like you're wasting your time fighting infrastructure, or just doing things in a non-portable manner. Solving problems is cross platform, so you can't be doing much serious game coding, its probably problem solving for your particular platform (e.g., as I already mentioned, doing a bunch of work in DirectX shaders or something).

Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because you want to support gamepad with minimum hassle for the player), and million of unknown unknowns that hopefully will be found by QA, but realistically, by very angry players, I'd budget at least a couple of man-months for this. With sales in hundreds or even tens of thousands, we can expect to get about 2% of audience from Linux, which will account for single-digit thousands, or hundreds of copies sold. With a price tag of $10-20, after Steam cut, taxes, regional prices, sales and refunds, it's about $5-10 of revenue per unit, so in total, about $10k.

If that would just be the money a single developer got for 2-3 months of work, it could still be fine for some regions (not everyone on HN is from US). But with a studio, you also have to spend money on marketing, payroll taxes, rent, and development of future projects, which most likely sell even worse.

So, no, I really don't see how porting to Linux would pay. Most of developers that I talked to who did it admitted that supporting OSX and Linus turned out to be a giant waste.

I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm).

But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.

> Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software.

Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews.

> it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work

For office work a lot of workload has moved to the web browser. Creating documents and working on spreadsheets for instance can now all be done online with Microsoft's Office offering and other competing products like Google Docs.

And why is it awful for normal users? ChromeOS for example is just linux, and that whole platform is targeted towards 'normal users'. I use linux on all of my personal devices and I use these devices to do very 'normal user' activities like watching YT, social media, blogging, etc. There are many communities that consist of 'normal users' like /r/Thinkpads or /r/LinuxOnThinkpad that are currently enjoying linux.

Precisely why do you think it's awful for normal users and office work?

> Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews.

These things are pretty much self evident.

> Linux is ok for certain types of developers

Web developers and HP computing. Game developers? Haha, no. Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux. Productivity and business applications? See below section on office work. ML? nVidia [apparently I'm incorrect on this one].

> it's still awful for normal users

Alright, this is a bit subjective, but is supported by the stats that show Linux Desktop still in a distant and well deserved third place. You list a few tasks that you seem to believe are "normal user" tasks, I submit to you that you drastically underestimate the things a normal desktop computer user does with their computer, since most of the tasks you listed are now things that people do on phones and tablets.

> abysmal for office work

In most offices, Microsoft Office is an indispensable productivity tool (which many HNers, having little experience with real office work, will underestimate severely) and it is only supported on Windows (No, the web version is not the same).

> Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux.

It's funny/surprising that you'd say that, given that Linux is the single most dominant OS in the embedded device space. What toolchains are you referring to? Here are some well known ones.

https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.ptxdist.org/ https://openwrt.org/

> ML? nVidia [apparently I'm incorrect on this one].

Not only are you wrong about CUDA, but Google's custom built chip designed for ML runs soley on Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit

ML almost exclusively runs on Linux.

> and it is only supported on Windows

Office also runs on macOS. You can also run Office in Linux using WINE.

> Alright, this is a bit subjective, but is supported by the stats that show Linux Desktop still in a distant and well deserved third place. You list a few tasks that you seem to believe are "normal user" tasks, I submit to you that you drastically underestimate the things a normal desktop computer user does with their computer, since most of the tasks you listed are now things that people do on phones and tablets.

It's really easy to say anything without providing any supportive evidence to substantiate your claims. Pray tell what tasks you are referring to that "normal users" partake that supposedly can't be done in desktop linux.

>It's funny/surprising that you'd say that, given that Linux is the single most dominant OS in the embedded device space. What toolchains are you referring to? Here are some well known ones.

No, and no.

The parent was referring to embedded development toolchains - compilers, IDEs, endless small utilities, debuggers, analyzers, etc. etc. Commercial tooling is almost all Windows-exclusive, even if it's using a smattering of open-source bits underneath.

Also no. The "embedded device space" is v a s t. New projects for phones and similar hardware profiles might choose an Android or other flavor of embedded linux, for sure. Even within sexytech consumer products you're more likely targeting something like VxWorks or QNX as not. The physical world, the domain of embedded devices, is not smartphones and SaaS. Unless you're talking about a very specific product category it's laughable to call Linux dominant here.

> The parent was referring to embedded development toolchains - compilers, IDEs, endless small utilities, debuggers, analyzers, etc. etc.

I know what the parent was referring to.

> Commercial tooling is almost all Windows-exclusive, even if it's using a smattering of open-source bits underneath.

No it's not. Literally both of the embedded OS' you mentioned (VxWorks/QNX) support Linux as first class hosts.

https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/software-solutions/embedded-so...

https://www.windriver.com/support/site_configuration/docs/wr...

What Windows exclusive tooling are you talking about?

And you are understimating the prevalence of Linux as the embedded OS for embedded devices.

ML is actually mostly done on linux. CUDA works absolutely great with nvidia binary drivers. Display performance is irrelevant.

Because when I open a 300-page, media-heavy game design document in Google docs on my i7, 32gb computer it still lags when I scroll it. And the last time I tried to use OpenOffice (or whatever was the fork called, I mix them up), I couldn't shake the feeling that UX was created by developers who just wanted to check the boxes in the list of features, without any field testing whatsoever.

> not a choice if you develop Windows software

A minor nitpick, but cross platform development is usually a painful work regardless of which platform you use.