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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CD Projekt Red folks really surprise me with being so clueless on this subject. Usually they do proper research. I think it's complete unfamiliarity with Linux of their top management that is the problem here.
About dropping Windows - you don't need any Windows to play Witcher 1 and 2, they perfectly work in Wine. Witcher 3 will be a problem however, because it will use DirectX 11 and will be 64 bit. So native version would be really great.
In the past, GOG folks at least said they considered supporting Debian, Mint and for some reason Chrome OS (which is pretty weird, since stock Chrome OS does not support native applications, you need to unlock it in developer mode to be able to install native stuff).
To me that statement sounds like "Crap, I'm gonna miss the bus. Don't run, stay cool! I'll have to pay a fortune for a cab but at least the others won't laugh at me. I'll just tell them I prefer cabs to crowded busses."
Of course it makes sense to let others scout the territory if you're scared of it but now the best they can hope for is to become a "me-too" brand.
Well, "fragmentation" is obviously a smoke screen they are trying to hide behind.
Not that it is a non-issue, steam games run better on some distros than on others (OpenSuse, I'm looking at you!), but that's the problem of the Distros in question not Steam's.
GOG and CD Project know this. If not, if they really didn't get it by now, they're doomed.
They'll bring The Withcer 3 to Linux, but they'll do in Steam (DRM and game-as-a-service annoyners) and not in GoG.com.
I hope this is only at start, and when they realize Linux don't byte, jump fearless into it, adding support in GoG.com, not only to W3, but to all games in their cathalog that have a native Linux version.
And who says they "cared" about any of the other OS's per-se ? all of them are basically a means to an end.
However when you see that you can start making a platform "your own", you start caring a lot more for it.
ALSO, a lot of technologies and drivers have matured.
an Army of indie developers have adopted open technologies (specially on Web and mobile) , html5, openGL, etc.
HIB, kickstarter and early access are helping fund those devs.
OpenGL is defacto in mobile and 4.x is feature parity with DX.
Android has inspired many of the new OSs and shown that there's life after Windows.
There's a lot of pieces in this chicken/egg puzzle, Valve is finally polishing and pushing those pieces and getting the mainstream (and bigger companies) to consider transitioning.
For my love for the sequel I'd probably go for a Windows installation again to play it though, but on SteamOS or how ever you call it .. wonderful. I'm sure I'll get it running on Debian/Tanglu as well myself (even though, I'm considering getting a "steambox" for the living room, but I'm yet undecided on that).