The Wild Eight is another game funded by Kickstarter that decided to delay the promised Linux version

Quoting: SirBubblesI'd like to chime in. After being burned by Kingdom Come: Deliverance and The Mandate, I'd be really hesitant about touching anything from Kickstarter. Getting a cheaper price isn't quite the same as buying a product you can have some certainty about. Delayed for years and not supporting the platform you use is not good enough. And here is another dev saying "can't be arsed supporting linux. Too hard".

Did you read the steam discussion? Their first post was:

QuoteThank you!
Yes, Linux version will be available!

And yes I can absolutely understand that you focus on one platform if you want to push out updates on a daily frequency or similar during EA. Actually, I'd recommend not being bitchy to dev for that since the result will be less games on Linux.

Of if anyone promises and Linux release and but there won't be any at all it's a completely different story.

Quoting: micha

Quoting: SirBubblesI'd like to chime in. After being burned by Kingdom Come: Deliverance and The Mandate, I'd be really hesitant about touching anything from Kickstarter. Getting a cheaper price isn't quite the same as buying a product you can have some certainty about. Delayed for years and not supporting the platform you use is not good enough. And here is another dev saying "can't be arsed supporting linux. Too hard".

Did you read the steam discussion? Their first post was:

QuoteThank you!
Yes, Linux version will be available!

And yes I can absolutely understand that you focus on one platform if you want to push out updates on a daily frequency or similar during EA. Actually, I'd recommend not being bitchy to dev for that since the result will be less games on Linux.

Of if anyone promises and Linux release and but there won't be any at all it's a completely different story.

Knowing the route many games took (yes, there will be EA, yes there will be a 1-day release, yes we will publish linux builds later, yes it's still definitely coming, no it's not going to be released for Linux) I've had my hands enough burned not to kickstart anymore except for developers who have a linux track record. Why? They know what they'll face. Obviously, a lot of game developers underestimate the time to port, test and fix for other platforms. While I appreciate the effort, I did learn that I can not trust in what developers say at kickstarter, and because Linux is a low priority it is at high risk to be dropped.

I know that is a hen/egg issue there, without the funding they can not even try, but the rate of games which do not see a release in the end is getting higher and higher, and I'm not willing to accept this, since I'm personally on the good-will of the developers to return my money because they didn't publish on Linux. It's an investment, and in Linux a higher risk investment than on Windows.

I buy products that I can use immediately. Kickstarter does not work that way.

Quoting: micha

Quoting: SirBubblesI'd like to chime in. After being burned by Kingdom Come: Deliverance and The Mandate, I'd be really hesitant about touching anything from Kickstarter. Getting a cheaper price isn't quite the same as buying a product you can have some certainty about. Delayed for years and not supporting the platform you use is not good enough. And here is another dev saying "can't be arsed supporting linux. Too hard".

Did you read the steam discussion? Their first post was:

QuoteThank you!
Yes, Linux version will be available!

So what? That's what they said about KC: Deliverance, too. They even promised Beta access...

Quoting: GuestI find this kind of excuse highly suspicious personally. It's really not difficult to have a build server these days, triggered by any code commit, and that can target build for multiple platforms. Or just do it manually, depending on the code size, team size, etc. Either way, they should have a build setup in place - literally press a button / run a command to say "build".

So, pushing out a fix shouldn't be difficult to do across all platforms simultaneously.

Of course, I've left out other things - maybe there's truly some platform specific code and some level of QA they want to do that means the game needs to be played to some extent. Even that should be able to be automated to a degree (it's called a benchmark). So a basic level of sanity is still available with that.

Of course, I would assume that platform-specific code is minimal as well. They should have had file naming, screen handling, input handling, etc, all sorted. If they actually want to do cross-platform at all, that should have been sorted by now - otherwise, they'd have to redo a lot of things later, waste a lot of time later, and then probably end up blaming everyone else but themselves.

tldr; the "excuse" doesn't pass the smell test. If that was truly blocking them, it's not a good impression of their capabilities on _any_ platform, let alone anything cross-platform.

Believe me it's not nearly as simple as that.

* Build times can be something like 8h after you press that button even if you have parallel build nodes for each target platform (that's not compiling code, that's fast. I mean converting models and other data, automated tests, ..). so to be clear, detecting a bug on a single platform during QA can worst case result in an delay of 8h which is at the very least a single work day.

* Even if QA runs only smoke test it's at least 2h if QA per platform before a small update. And you definitely don't want to only do that for most. Since going through user bug reports, reproducing them and formatting them so programmers can fix them quickly is even less efficient then a little longer in house testing.

* Usually DEVs try to ensure file naming, screen/input handling and other things (e.g. different render APIs) to work independently across the platforms. In reality however there's always something you miss initially if not tested for it. Even if engines like Unity3D deal with most of it.

Running EA or any alpha/beta each non primary platform costs actually a lot. It can be worth it but let's be honest. In most cases it's not.

Again promising something and not delivering always sucks. But having a Linux version during EA wich is either broken half of the time, or has other bugs won't give the game a good reputation either. Actually it might even hurt sales on the primary platform if word of mouth is really bad. And again making sure that it is not the case comes a price which shouldn't be underestimated. You know a game doesn't only costs 100-200k just because that's what the kickstarter raised. It's more likely 10x as much as people think. So is another platform during EA.


Last edited by micha on 14 February 2017 at 11:12 pm UTC

Quoting: michaYou know a game doesn't only costs 100-200k just because that's what the kickstarter raised. It's more likely 10x as much as people think. So is another platform during EA.

Muahahahhahaha

This last part is entertained me so much

Unfortunately, incremental conversion are not always possible and even if it still has changes are not to be underestimated since assets often depend in others. E.g. having any asset change in a level it might be important to completely re-process the exported level. At the very least incremental conversion are much more error prone which is why not a single studio I worked for does it, at least not fully. And a lot of time consuming processes are actually platform specific like converting textures into GPU supported compressed formats. E.g. when using Unity3D a platform switch (or clean import which is necessary since without we had random wrong assets in game otherwise every now and then) can take 1h for project which has Gigabytes of assets. A platform build for such a sized projected around ~30min (for Android it can be 5x as long).

Of course builds are typically nightly jobs. But again let's say one platform fails. That means one day of update delay, or one day with a broken live version (games without an online mode might get away with keeping the old version ofc). So lets say one of the game designers has scheduled a dedicated play session for the changes in that build, which means all his work & planning gets out of sync because one platform failed. This is just one example of many.

Also a dedicated full month of "porting" towards the release can be more efficient / cheaper. Let's say I'm in the middle of coding feature X but then one platform build breaks. That means I have switch context, find the issue and fix it and get my head back into the others problems to solve. It's another extra cost.

I agree with most of the bullet points though but still I think you underestimate the cost by assuming 'ideal' conditions which never are the case in my experience.

That said with our current project 'Albion Online' we have a Linux version continually since the first public release and I'm very proud of that. So it definitely is possible but I also understand if studios have different priorities.

I actually backed The Wild 8 myself and got excited when I received the Steam key recently only to find out I had to wait a little while longer. ;-)


Last edited by micha on 15 February 2017 at 12:36 am UTC

this behaviour wouldnt be that bad if there would be a betting platform where you can place bets like: "2 DlC´s are out before linux port" or something else :-)

Quoting: Mountain ManIt's about time for Linux gamers to boycott Kickstarter. With over 3000 Linux games currently on Steam, and more being released every day, we can afford to be choosy.

I think you're right.

Well, at least now I don't have to feel bad for removing them from my Steam Activity Feed. They were less spammy than others, but it was getting a little crowded. I like my feed to mostly have friend info with a scattering of updates from games I follow.