President Of Blizzard Responds To The Linux Petition, Petition Owner Creates Childish Response

I stopped dual booting and using wine some time ago.

I am glad to see Linux ports, and I'll support the companies doing them with my money. Despite the fact that I can't stand the "fiddeling" around getting games running decently on wine, and I don't own a windows copy :D.

We're even getting a MMORPG with SotA if that's what you like, and we're getting some nice RTS games in future too as it seems, we have dungeon crawlers like Torchlight 2. I don't see a particular reason to throw my money at companies who produce Windows only Games which are considerable hard to play on linux! Though, I do love StarCraft and always will, even when I can't play it anymore :).

They are still benefiting from the fact that we didn't used to have games on Linux. I know I bought some of their games back then and ran them under Wine, but why would I do that now that I have tons of their competitors games available to me?

**Facepalm**

that's all I have to say about that..

So now i've got to find a way to use my nVidia card and driver under a Virtual machine (virtual box) to play Diablo III

So now i've got to find a way to use my nVidia card and driver under a Virtual machine (virtual box) to play Diablo III

Diablo 3 actually runs really well in WINE

Wow this post was like a kick in a hornets nest.

I can be quite dispassionate about the whole thing as I do not play any blizzard games.

I do think that the CEO if blizzard is entitled to run his business AS IT PLEASES Him and the shareholders, management etc.

The response from the creator of the petition was juvenile and non-constructive.

I understand the frustration for people who really want to play wow on Linux but as the editorial team of gol has stated, this is not the right approach.

We are not entitled to games on Linux, we should be thankful and encourage with our wallets developers who do give us a chance.

Well. I don't like any of Blizzard's games. So, I don't have a horse in this race at all. I'd have been nice, but even if they did great ports I still wouldn't buy any of them. But its his company, I mean, if he wants linux customers then he can get them any time he wants. At some point he probably will, and then it'll happen.

It's sad that even within the Linux user base there are people that can be that childish. Aside from that however, Blizzard stopped being relevant to me since they ruined the Diablo franchise. They can continue to pump money out of their WoW cash cow for all I care and I'll continue to play games that I enjoy and run natively on my chosen OS.

I'm kind of indifferent to this little drama as well. Blizzard games are not something that I crave. I can see both sides of it. I can understand the frustration of the petitioner but the reaction from Blizzard was rather predictable.

On the other hand, my most wanted but not yet ported games are from a studio where I know the owner. So I will provide gentle nudges from time to time.

Might even remind him of when he was a mere team lead and was eager to GPL a game when it was only 1 year old. '-)

Why don't we take such steps against EA sports as well?

I really can't stay away from OpenGL discussions - so I'm going to briefly deviate from the main topic. It's not so much the OpenGL driver overhead that's the problem, so much as it's lack of developer experience in coding to avoid driver overhead. Actually, done right, the overhead of OpenGL is far less than that of DirectX - but DirectX is probably more friendly to work with (certainly Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting developers to program properly with it), and so OpenGL will require more attention to "get it right".
Note that I'm not commenting on the end result of this, just clearing up a misconception of the root cause. Vulkan will be OpenGL with all the years of cruft removed, which is going to be amazing. Though more difficult to begin with, I think Vulkan will ultimately be easier for developers - they will have more direct control over the video card, rather than trying to find the "fast path" with a higher level API.

You are correct and obviously you know more about this stuff than I do, so thank you for clearing this a bit and I do totally agree now that I think about this a bit more thoroughly. :)

Saw that coming from a million miles away. If they wanted to support Linux they would have a long time ago. At one point they had a working WoW client for Linux that some of the employees used internally. I don't know if it is still up to date or not but if it worked at one point I would think it would be trivial to make work now if it happens to be out of date.

It would be nice to see them bring their games to Linux as they are popular games, but they really have not made anything good (IMO) since Warcraft 3. I own Diablo3, played through it one time, it was just "meh", I also own the original SC2 and it was "meh" as well and I didn't even bother with they other SC2 "DLC". Blizzard lost its soul the minute they let Activision buy them out.

Honestly I think support is probably their biggest hold up. I'm sure support is already swamped with all the people they have playing on windows and adding Linux would probably be a nightmare for them. Like everyone else they would need to choose one distro to support and sorry to the others. Those WoW kiddies already get their panties all in a bunch when they have problems.

If Valve succeeds in turning Linux into a really viable gaming platform then maybe Blizzard will change their tune. Until then this is all we are going to get out of them.

That's fine, they just won't get any of my money.

O-Oh no...

Please, petition owner. We need a professional response, not a knee-jerk emotional one.

If I need a Diablo "fix" I can play Torchlight II instead

Din's Curse is another worthy alternative to Blizzard's offering, and it has a few unique concepts not seen in Torchlight or Diablo.

Note: Andrew doesn't represent me.

That said, there _is_ a way to settle this. How about all of us who want a Linux client stop playing blizzard games for a few months, say from May 1, 2015 (or the release of Legacy of the Void, whichever comes first) to August 1, 2015, so the company can actually measure the impact?

I know it would be hard not to play, but we can make a point. If Blizzard observes a 2% decline in players and decides that it cannot care less, so be it. However, if they see a 10% decline and decide that's something they have to address, we may just see that Linux client developed.

If you are with me, please spread the word (otherwise the whole thing would be useless).

This relating forum post: http://us.battle.net/en/forum/topic/16543665086

So now i've got to find a way to use my nVidia card and driver under a Virtual machine (virtual box) to play Diablo III

I don't think that will work with Virtualbox, you might be better off with KVM.

I for one even felt no desire whatsoever to state a response after that condescending reply from no one other than the president...
Give the guy some media training!

For a president to use an assumption instead of an actual fact/statistic is really sad. Even more so since he states the nice 2% fact right before that. And that even without giving the source where he got the actual percentage from.

Then again, like most people in this thread, I gave up on believing they would ever support Linux. As said over and over, they have all the resources available. They just choose not to.
Which I would think would have been a far more fair response to the Linux community. Just tell us you are not interested in Linux as a whole without telling us we are a minority and will most likely have more than 1 computer with different OS's.

But as also stated by loads we have loads of titles available and other great ones coming. So nothing lost here.
Maybe when hell freezes over it can change.. but that would take a mighty strong Blizzard ;)

Just my 2 cents...

Blizzard, like many other corporations out there are just simply greedy. this is why we don't see any ports of EA or any other major game company. Not that EA really matters that much, but they do have some games that are hugely popular. I'm sure this is all about money in the end. The one aspect of Blizzard that I do appreciate is that they do make it a point to try and make their games playable in wine.
It's one of those situations where IF Valve where to start to gain some major traction with SteamOS/Linux with Steam, like above 20% of the market within a year then we might start to see newer games from these companies ported over. Until then, I'm under the assumption those of us that are 100% Linux users are just SOL. and have to deal with using wine. As it stands Blizzard is the only company with games that I like to play that are not ported, so for me it's not a major deal.

So now i've got to find a way to use my nVidia card and driver under a Virtual machine (virtual box) to play Diablo III

One thing I love about playonlinux is you are able to setup mulitple wine environments easily, the one setup that was automatically created by playonlinux for Hearthstone has worked really well for Diablo 3 as well. The one change i've made is that I removed the dpghelp override.