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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.

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.
Tags: Action, RPG, Steam
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Anonymous Feb 19, 2014
[quote=commodore256... The only Linux OS I see them supporting is SteamOS because it's standard because it's hard to support a lot of different distros with different places where libraries are located.[/quote]
The steam client runs just fine on most any modern distro. SteamOS is just going to be a linux distro that boots into the steam Big Picture mode, (and will allow and exit to a standard linux desktop). You don't just release for Steam OS, but the steam client on Linux, which I believe does a certain amount of dependency management for you.
oldrocker99 Feb 21, 2014
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It should be noted that Steam downloads are not .deb files, but .tar.gz files, which should work on any GNU/Linux system which has adequate video drivers. I know a lot of people love to hate on Canonical (when it is so simple to avoid Unity annoyances by simply installing a different *buntu flavour), but IMHO, Canonical has been good for the GNU/Linux world.
Hamish Feb 21, 2014
I know a lot of people love to hate on Canonical (when it is so simple to avoid Unity annoyances by simply installing a different *buntu flavour), but IMHO, Canonical has been good for the GNU/Linux world.

Not that I want to start an unrelated flame war here, but I really do have to question your understanding if you think that Unity is the only reason people tend to be distrustful or suspicious of Canonical; if you do, then you are just plain kidding yourself. And there is a world outside of the *buntu family, and not every member inside that family is even treated equal in the first place.

Which is all beside the point, as this article has nothing to do with Ubuntu or Canonical in the first place.
jlibster Mar 2, 2014
More nonsense. If other game developers can make games that primarily support Ubuntu (or Linux Mint) the answer seems clear. And for gamers, the only Linux distros that show any signs of getting a critical mass are Ubuntu, Linux Mint (both based on Debian), Fedora and possibly OpenSuse (I've not see so many uses of OpenSuse myself). So many game coming out using this model on the Unity engine. Although Projeckt Red said that "learned their lesson" this could be a way of playing with the DRM system in SteamOS (Steam's DRM system is most likely tightly integrated with their OS). I've yet to see anyone out there officially supporting 5 distros. The most I've seen is 2. (mostly 1). Comments if there is legitimate information to the contrary but the Ubuntu based support model is by far the most dominant one I've seen,and it appears to work fairly well.
Brandon May 26, 2014
These guys have no clue. I've already had my meltdown when TET was spewing the same BS over here so I'm not going to start again...

Good thing is that they did not outright say "no". At least they gave a reason, even if it's a dumb one.

Pretty sure they have more of a clue than you, there the one developing award winning games on multiple platforms after all.
DrMcCoy May 26, 2014
Actually, they're only developing it on one platfarm. Which is kinda the issues people are talking about.
Guest May 26, 2014
These guys have no clue. I've already had my meltdown when TET was spewing the same BS over here so I'm not going to start again...

Good thing is that they did not outright say "no". At least they gave a reason, even if it's a dumb one.
Pretty sure they have more of a clue than you, there the one developing award winning games on multiple platforms after all.

Took you that long to finally come up with the above comment eh? My post was written in Feb, it's probably less valid now since GoG have officially announced support for Linux or it may still be... The recent Linux launch of The Witcher 2 was a fiasco...

Drop me a note again in 4 months... take your time to write something just as insightful.
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