The Witcher 3 is something Linux users have been practically begging to have, but the problem is that it seems it will likely never come to Linux. An ex-Virtual Programming developer has taken to reddit explaining why this may have happened.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
QuoteI agree, things were not right on release... but the vocality of people went way beyond that. It was an all out hate campaign against VP, against CDPR for "lying about the port being native". I attempted to help people out in my own time and got absolutely roasted and abused for it.
The community needs to realise it simply cannot justify this sort of behaviour if they want to convince devs and publishers to support them. There is no excuse.
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
QuoteThe vitriol was unbelievable. Yes we messed up the performance on release but we put it right. However a huge hate campaign ensued. Both VP and CDPR got lots of vengeful hate mail sent to them. I cannot help but feel this damaged CDPR's view of the Linux platform irrevocably.
They certainly didnt blame us, because they had us work on a Mac port of Witcher 1 to replace the non-functioning Wineskin version. The same port would have ran on Linux too with very little extra work, but they were not interested in releasing it.
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: thelimeydragonCan't people put their anger into something more important:
Emacs vs Vi
(I hate both, I normally just use nano)
What about gedit or geany?
/me ducks :D
Also yeah, nano is handy as heck.
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To be honest given the state TW2 was released (and as of now it is the only VP port I have which crashes so much, even Bioshock Infinite with its memory leaks is not so crash prone) they should have marketed it as alpha and everyone would have understood. If you compare it with Arma 3 which is absolutely a stunning port everyone would have understood.
So clearly yup the community was disrespectul and has members to blame, but VP has also some responsibility at marking as "stable" something which was probably not even tested (I remember that at some time I could not even move the character... and the pad leads TW2 to crash...)
But now if they could release TW3 (I can support if necessary for bug reporting just the same way I do w/ Feral titles) it would be great.
So clearly yup the community was disrespectul and has members to blame, but VP has also some responsibility at marking as "stable" something which was probably not even tested (I remember that at some time I could not even move the character... and the pad leads TW2 to crash...)
But now if they could release TW3 (I can support if necessary for bug reporting just the same way I do w/ Feral titles) it would be great.
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Water has flow under the bridge. My son of 13 is currently playing TW2 bought on GOG on a modest pc (ubuntu, i3, 960, 8go) and enjoy it. Thank you Virtual Programming and CD Projekt RED for that game 'n port.
I would conclude from this story (I didn't known before)
We love all games and ports. We like companies that try porting, even if it falls short sometimes. If ports come unfinished, we can ask for better job with positive communication. If nobody answers or works on, then it seems that, as all communities in the world, we have our bunch of mad-haters to release from their leashes :)
Last edited by Geppeto35 on 4 July 2017 at 1:43 pm UTC
I would conclude from this story (I didn't known before)
We love all games and ports. We like companies that try porting, even if it falls short sometimes. If ports come unfinished, we can ask for better job with positive communication. If nobody answers or works on, then it seems that, as all communities in the world, we have our bunch of mad-haters to release from their leashes :)
Last edited by Geppeto35 on 4 July 2017 at 1:43 pm UTC
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Quoting: NyamiouWho know if this guy is really who he claim he is, jaycee_1980 doesn't bring any results anywhere except on reddit and he's only been here for a month. Also who would use this surname, Jaycee is the name of a girl who was born in 1980 and was abducted at 11 year old for 18 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Dugard. For me this guy is a massive troll, plain and simple.
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There are a lot of good points made in this thread. My own position about this is that there were several justifications for such strong reactions. We must analyse what's gone wrong in context.
Back when the Witcher 2 was released, people had great hope in Steam Machines, and we all thought such ports would be native. Nobody was expecting a wrapper at that time. They should have advertised this from the beginning.
Then, the product in itself was so badly optimised it was unplayable.
The fact that Wine could run it with twice the performance didn't help in any way.
To finish with, communication from the devs was a disaster. The were no clear answers to our questions, and at first we were left trying to troubleshoot the game ourselves, which took me quite some time, along others.
With all these elements taken into account, you can see why there was an escalation.
Now, to the positive side of things:
Both devs and community learned from each other. The community is no longer afraid of wrappers, and several ports from VP have been acclaimed since then. VP went on to contact the community and with all the data and testing customers undertook, I think they learned a lot about their target OS, as well as its audience.
When you spend that time on a project and end up with greater knowledge, it is ridiculous not to take advantage of it. Both the community and VP did, but not CDPR.
PS: oh and I forgot to mention that at the time we didn't have a strong media. GOL is now a reference for Linux gaming that both gamers and devs can rely on. Such problems wouldn't happen that often nowadays because now we have a place to send/get informations. Thank you Liam for what you've done.
Last edited by omer666 on 4 July 2017 at 10:19 am UTC
Back when the Witcher 2 was released, people had great hope in Steam Machines, and we all thought such ports would be native. Nobody was expecting a wrapper at that time. They should have advertised this from the beginning.
Then, the product in itself was so badly optimised it was unplayable.
The fact that Wine could run it with twice the performance didn't help in any way.
To finish with, communication from the devs was a disaster. The were no clear answers to our questions, and at first we were left trying to troubleshoot the game ourselves, which took me quite some time, along others.
With all these elements taken into account, you can see why there was an escalation.
Now, to the positive side of things:
Both devs and community learned from each other. The community is no longer afraid of wrappers, and several ports from VP have been acclaimed since then. VP went on to contact the community and with all the data and testing customers undertook, I think they learned a lot about their target OS, as well as its audience.
When you spend that time on a project and end up with greater knowledge, it is ridiculous not to take advantage of it. Both the community and VP did, but not CDPR.
PS: oh and I forgot to mention that at the time we didn't have a strong media. GOL is now a reference for Linux gaming that both gamers and devs can rely on. Such problems wouldn't happen that often nowadays because now we have a place to send/get informations. Thank you Liam for what you've done.
Last edited by omer666 on 4 July 2017 at 10:19 am UTC
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Quoting: MilesI'm not sure I understand. How is this different from the Windows platform complaints of the same type? I still chuckle at all the various comments from the Windows users complaining about extreme problems with WB's Arkham Knight (my favorite saying that it was like watching a PowerPoint presentation, the graphics were so broken!). This seems like a an unfair double-standard showing that they have very thin skin for business acumen. This won't serve them well on any platform in the long run. I ended up purchasing Witcher II despite the problems because I had faith that they might fix it. I was proven right and for that, I would have given them good word or mouth, reviews and more purchases. I know that this is being reported as just rumor but if this truly is their reasoning and it's later confirmed as true, however, I will no longer be interested in buying their products on ANY platform, much less Linux and I will be sure to mention their attitude and thin skin.
It's different to windows since on windows (and other consoles) they have their largest customer base.
If you had a restaurant and 1% of people had a special dietary need and when you try to cater to it they threaten you , would you bother ? I know I wouldn't.
Also this isn't about being thin skined.
It's about threats to someones family.
This is criticism:
"Your game is bad. I will not buy from you again"
This is not :
"I hope your family dies"
A few trolls you can ignore , sure , but when you get these in the tens or hundreds , then what ?
Last edited by razing32 on 4 July 2017 at 10:27 am UTC
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Quoting: heidi.wengerThrough Wine it's getting better and better. Games are getting easier to port later on now that there is Vulkan taking over, game engines get better Linux support..These two points combined, Wine already supports Vulkan, it just passes the calls through without any noticeable overhead because the API is the same on Windows and Linux. So in the worst case a Wine-wrapped port is almost always possible (except if the game is protected with Denuvo crap or such). Honestly, I stopped caring about the port techniques. If it works fine out of the box it's enough to be a good port.
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Quoting: HexDSLthe port was crappy when it was released. people complained because they couldnt play crappy port.. port fixed, people stop complaining...
The message that the porting team SHOULD have taken from this "dont ship broken game!"
The message they DID take from this was "screw them for calling us out on broken shit, lets not give them anything else"
Ill be honest, if THIS is their attitude, im not even sure i WANT their port any more.
They should have expected complaints and criticism, sure. They should not have expected, nor should they have received, hate mail and death threats to personal mailboxes.
On the other hand, I too don’t believe that such Internet shitstorm was the reason further work on ports were discontinued. I don’t want to believe that CDPR people decided to dump Linux just because of some Internet guys with anger-managements issues.
I live in Poland, I work in IT (not in gamedev though), and my hypothesis is that the business people, the shareholders, might have opposed the Linux ports since the beginning and used that whole shitstorm to stop all the Linux efforts without a rational reason, just because of their personal agenda – because eg. they have some irrational(?) fear that maintaining Linux port will eat up all their money and give no revenue back, and Windows is what they know, what their kids play on, and so what they believe in. The fact that SteamOS did not catch on did not help too.
Last edited by silmeth on 4 July 2017 at 10:53 am UTC
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Eventhough Jayce got personally offended in the backlash I can understand his emotions and why he thinks that CDPR and VP cancelled the port, but I can't share the opinion in this case.
CDPR was hoping that SteamOS would evolve and adopt very well and when they saw that valve did very poor with these machines they decided not to produce the game for 2% of the PC market from which not everyone will buy the game. Whining of the community wasn't a huge factor I believe.
CDPR was hoping that SteamOS would evolve and adopt very well and when they saw that valve did very poor with these machines they decided not to produce the game for 2% of the PC market from which not everyone will buy the game. Whining of the community wasn't a huge factor I believe.
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