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Followers of the Penguin, Marcin Iwiński, one of the founders of CD Projekt RED, has spoken out about why the developer of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet shown any support towards Linux.
Citing an issue deemed a myth by many, especially by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon who took to busting this myth during the Steam Developer Days of 2014, Iwiński believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to take to supporting at least five.
Source (from 1:29:16).
There you have it. SteamOS will somehow negate having to support five Linux distributions and defeat the beast that is distro fragmentation once and for all.
How do you feel about CD Projekt RED's reasoning? Will SteamOS bring the desired changes? I, personally, can only keep on hoping and ask you kind folks to keep on voting for GOG, sister company to CD Projekt RED and reseller of its games, to finally add Linux support. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Citing an issue deemed a myth by many, especially by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon who took to busting this myth during the Steam Developer Days of 2014, Iwiński believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to take to supporting at least five.
Marcin Iwiński, CD Projekt REDFirst of all, we have a lot of respect for Steam and we think they are very, very good business guys and good gamer friendly guys and that's really, really important. We like what they are doing and with the Steam Box, if they will be able to deliver a cool console, definitely, we are interested in having a game there.
You know, one of the reasons we have not released The Witcher on Linux is that we most probably have to address five different versions of Linux and this is always terrible to support the quality of the games afterwards. The patches, the updates, and everything. If Steam will deliver a constant Linux environment, call it SteamOS or anything like that, we would love to have our games there because, you know, the more people play our games, the better for us.
Source (from 1:29:16).
There you have it. SteamOS will somehow negate having to support five Linux distributions and defeat the beast that is distro fragmentation once and for all.
How do you feel about CD Projekt RED's reasoning? Will SteamOS bring the desired changes? I, personally, can only keep on hoping and ask you kind folks to keep on voting for GOG, sister company to CD Projekt RED and reseller of its games, to finally add Linux support. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Good thing is that they did not outright say "no". At least they gave a reason, even if it's a dumb one.
The single best thing that Valve have done with bringing the steam client to Gnu/Linux is to pick a single distro and say that it will offer support on that distribution only (is it Ubuntu 12.04? I forget). By doing this, standards are introduced for any distro maker that wants to appeal to gamers. Introducing standards in this way negates the possibility of distro fragmentation causing problems to gamers.
There is no need to look to the future to wait and see if SteamOS will succeed because the Steam client has already nullified the problem that CD Projekt RED are stating exists.
Anyway, I would be happier if this was an actual announcement that Witcher 3 is definitely coming to Linux as I've loved the previous 2 games but have now cut all dependency on Microsoft software.
The cool things we get are driver support because Valve has the pull to nudge the likes of Intel, nVidia and AMD in the right direction and tools that were not previously available on Linux because nobody needed them that much, like the upcoming VOGL.
Hopefully, the companies involved, not just Valve, will realise that working together on production tools will help all of them to stay free of platform lock-in.
Didn't a lot of Windows games do the exact same thing? I haven't touched it since 2002, but back then I recall almost every game I had shipped with some version of DirectX, maybe the MSVC runtimes, VB runtimes, etc.
anyway send them this video ;):
View video on youtube.com
http://www.wykop.pl/link/1869416/eng-cd-projekt-red-rozwaza-wypuszczenie-wiedzmina-3-na-steamos/
Personally, I would rather people choose SteamOS as a standard than Ubuntu, as it is based on Debian and closer to upstream. Also, because it is gaming focused, it would be much better analyzed as a model for other distributions to follow in this regard.
That being said, most distributions already ship SDL as Gordon says, so that basically defeats the problem anyway, making this whole argument for the most part moot.
Maybe in game system requirements they should just say "requires at least SDL 2.x" like they used to say about DirectX back in the day?
Bring it on! *game face*
It is rather amusing, but if having Valve put together the needed libraries in SteamOS, rather than having to collect together the dependencies themselves, is what it takes to for some developers to be sensible about Linux... then we've got another thing to thank Valve for. I'm sure these guys aren't the only ones who need Valve's support as confidence-builder.