Linux Gaming

Poor indie studio Epic games couldn't possible afford to support Linux, they only make about 5.6 billion a year and have a mere ~3000 employees, leave the little guy alone!

Absolute BS, all they have to do is enable proton support and people will go out of their way to play it. Tim Sweeney is simply being a slimy jackass.

Them not bother with Linux says all there is to say about their anti trust cases. Only thing that bothers them about monopolies is that they arent one, and even when there is an opportunity to enter into a market where there is no competitors they don't want to bother investing in it. They don't care about open platforms or investing in it first.

It's why they were late to getting a hold of PC distribution. And in the unlikely event Linux OS takes off be complaining about Steam's presence there.

So he want the game to get to 10 millions player on steam deck only then support it, but without supporting it the game won't get to 10 millions player. It's not a linux problem Tim, it's you.

Apparently they have enough developers to add in crappy emotes and crossovers but not enough to support one of the most popular operating systems.. makes sense

Valve has sold multiple millions of steam decks. Fortnite is a popular game. What better way to grow a platform than to develop a popular game for it? Am I not wrong in thinking you'd increase profits having invested in another area? Especially if it would only take "a few more programmers"? I know Tim Sweeney doesn't want to provide profit to Valve and I know he's also a fucking idiot, but more money is more money...

Important to note that Fortnite does launch on the steam deck, but the anticheat kicks you out a couple seconds into the match.

The game does run. It's Epic.

also why the fuck does Lego Fortnite require anticheat? it's a survival co-op, there's no competitive element, and yet from what I've read it still kicks you out when you're trying to play it on Linux.

what's fortnite's anticheat like? my understanding is that a lot of games that would normally have no problem running on some flavor of linux or another but their anticheat software requires some ridiculous level of privilege that linux won't (and shouldn't) give it

Compare and contrast

I mean we all know that, he didn't need to say anything. They want to make billions and they think Linux doesn't have enough users to get those billions going. Not worth it to them. But hey, fuck him, fortnite is a shit game anyway.

I think, people here look at it from the wrong side.

The code changes required for Linux support aren't the issue.

But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student's first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That's 3.7% of the whole world's population! (And it's also more than the number of total Linux users.)

So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.

They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.

And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.

So it's just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?

And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don't care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.

And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn't exactly hard to figure out.

I'm not saying that it's good, but top capitalists tend to be capitalists.

And in the end, I'm pretty sure someone who has all the business figures and frequently has to defend those in front of the shareholders probably knows much better what makes business sense than any of us. Someone like him goes where the money flows.

Needs more programmers in order to check the AC checkbox, can't afford that.

I bet Tim doesn't even know how to use terminal

If only they had the funds for just a few more programmers, but alas, they barely survive off their niche title as is.

it's just one checkbox in your fudging EAC. Why can so many windows only multiplayer games be played with EAC under Linux but not Fortnät?

Because fuck you, that's why

28 Sept 2023 — We are laying off around 830 employees, or 16% of jobs.

hmm...

"The Linux Problem" = "Not enough people using it for us to care"

Sadly he didn’t clarify why it’s the Linux being problem here. If there are any technical obstacles, why can’t he say something’s too broken on the Linux side of things so that community or Valve could fix it?

What if, and hear me out on this one, Epic Games really just love closed platforms for the built-in DRM of "secret sauce" and binary blobs to protect their intellectual property, even if the Steam Deck now has a TPM 2.0 equivalent. In fact, they would rather deprive the user of as much agency as possible to retain most of the control.

That might be a tinfoil hat take, but I stand by it.