Re:DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux
by smaudet on Monday May 25, 2020 @04:42PM
(#23304758)
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.
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.