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: MaCroX95Quoting: scaineQuoting: Mountain ManQuoting: Luke_NukemQuoting: Mountain ManIf that's the reason they've abandoned Linux then that seems rather petty.Not even close to the level of pettiness shown by that vocal chunk that spewed forth a wall of toxicity towards those who were trying to help us out.
That's just the background noise you have to put up with when doing business.
Again, threats of violence are not "background noise". Can't believe so many people are trying to justify this.
Just imagine if you provided a physical service on the street - pretzels, shoe shine, whatever - and on the one hand, you have a group of people literally 10 feet away shouting that you should just fucking die because your service, in their opinion, is sub standard. Then on the other hand, a second group of people standing 5 feet away telling you to grow a thicker skin, just ignore those guys, pfff, just background noise.
Yeah, sure. This is one of the most depressing threads I've ever experienced on the internet. And, given Reddit, or the Steam Forums, that's really saying something.
And who would ultimately be wrong? People who judge you for not doing your job well or not keeping your promise or people who defend you for no reason, only to look moral? I mean sure, we should behave like people and not make threats and justify barbaric behavior but the answer isn't all that simple... I've seen so many polite critiques on internet where they diss every part of some games and yet they do come out and in some cases sell very well... it's just that we're small market and that's why we got the game cancelled. Even if we were the nicest people in the world when tw2 came out, tw3 would still probably get cancelled when they saw that SteamOS isn't going anywhere.
And I'm NOT justifying the threats to jaycee and his coworkers...
You're over-complicating this. Critique all you want. When you threaten me or my family because of some fucked up justification that my work doesn't meet your standard, you've crossed a line.
You say that we should behave like people, not make threats... but then claim the answer isn't that simple? Wrong. It's very, very simple.
1 Likes, Who?
Mountain Man Jul 4, 2017
Quoting: scaineQuoting: Mountain ManQuoting: Luke_NukemQuoting: Mountain ManIf that's the reason they've abandoned Linux then that seems rather petty.Not even close to the level of pettiness shown by that vocal chunk that spewed forth a wall of toxicity towards those who were trying to help us out.
That's just the background noise you have to put up with when doing business.
Again, threats of violence are not "background noise". Can't believe so many people are trying to justify this.
Just imagine if you provided a physical service on the street - pretzels, shoe shine, whatever - and on the one hand, you have a group of people literally 10 feet away shouting that you should just fucking die because your service, in their opinion, is sub standard. Then on the other hand, a second group of people standing 5 feet away telling you to grow a thicker skin, just ignore those guys, pfff, just background noise.
Yeah, sure. This is one of the most depressing threads I've ever experienced on the internet. And, given Reddit, or the Steam Forums, that's really saying something.
I'm not justifying anything. I'm just trying to put things into perspective. A hostile post on an internet forum is nowhere close to a mob threatening physical violence from 10-feet away, so your analogy doesn't hold water.
Last edited by Mountain Man on 4 July 2017 at 12:03 pm UTC
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Quoting: KimmoKMthe backlash at the time was 100% justified.
No, insulting people is never a good answer.
Maybe VP should have handled the release differently (early access, beta..) but remember that it was their first Linux port. Some Linux users are just spoiled brats.
4 Likes, Who?
Quoting: scaineQuoting: MaCroX95Quoting: scaineQuoting: Mountain ManQuoting: Luke_NukemQuoting: Mountain ManIf that's the reason they've abandoned Linux then that seems rather petty.Not even close to the level of pettiness shown by that vocal chunk that spewed forth a wall of toxicity towards those who were trying to help us out.
That's just the background noise you have to put up with when doing business.
Again, threats of violence are not "background noise". Can't believe so many people are trying to justify this.
Just imagine if you provided a physical service on the street - pretzels, shoe shine, whatever - and on the one hand, you have a group of people literally 10 feet away shouting that you should just fucking die because your service, in their opinion, is sub standard. Then on the other hand, a second group of people standing 5 feet away telling you to grow a thicker skin, just ignore those guys, pfff, just background noise.
Yeah, sure. This is one of the most depressing threads I've ever experienced on the internet. And, given Reddit, or the Steam Forums, that's really saying something.
And who would ultimately be wrong? People who judge you for not doing your job well or not keeping your promise or people who defend you for no reason, only to look moral? I mean sure, we should behave like people and not make threats and justify barbaric behavior but the answer isn't all that simple... I've seen so many polite critiques on internet where they diss every part of some games and yet they do come out and in some cases sell very well... it's just that we're small market and that's why we got the game cancelled. Even if we were the nicest people in the world when tw2 came out, tw3 would still probably get cancelled when they saw that SteamOS isn't going anywhere.
And I'm NOT justifying the threats to jaycee and his coworkers...
You're over-complicating this. Critique all you want. When you threaten me or my family because of some fucked up justification that my work doesn't meet your standard, you've crossed a line.
You say that we should behave like people, not make threats... but then claim the answer isn't that simple? Wrong. It's very, very simple.
No sir :) I said that the behavior is barbaric and is not justified anyhow. I just said that eventhough the backlash was there they can't justify not porting the game for the whole community as if we were all responsible for the backlash. My point was just that we're small and nobody cares about us. We got tw2 because of the hype for SteamOS and tw3 was announced in that hype as well. Later when they've seen how it turned out they just cancelled it.
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Quoting: MaCroX95Quoting: scaineQuoting: MaCroX95Quoting: scaineQuoting: Mountain ManQuoting: Luke_NukemQuoting: Mountain ManIf that's the reason they've abandoned Linux then that seems rather petty.Not even close to the level of pettiness shown by that vocal chunk that spewed forth a wall of toxicity towards those who were trying to help us out.
That's just the background noise you have to put up with when doing business.
Again, threats of violence are not "background noise". Can't believe so many people are trying to justify this.
Just imagine if you provided a physical service on the street - pretzels, shoe shine, whatever - and on the one hand, you have a group of people literally 10 feet away shouting that you should just fucking die because your service, in their opinion, is sub standard. Then on the other hand, a second group of people standing 5 feet away telling you to grow a thicker skin, just ignore those guys, pfff, just background noise.
Yeah, sure. This is one of the most depressing threads I've ever experienced on the internet. And, given Reddit, or the Steam Forums, that's really saying something.
And who would ultimately be wrong? People who judge you for not doing your job well or not keeping your promise or people who defend you for no reason, only to look moral? I mean sure, we should behave like people and not make threats and justify barbaric behavior but the answer isn't all that simple... I've seen so many polite critiques on internet where they diss every part of some games and yet they do come out and in some cases sell very well... it's just that we're small market and that's why we got the game cancelled. Even if we were the nicest people in the world when tw2 came out, tw3 would still probably get cancelled when they saw that SteamOS isn't going anywhere.
And I'm NOT justifying the threats to jaycee and his coworkers...
You're over-complicating this. Critique all you want. When you threaten me or my family because of some fucked up justification that my work doesn't meet your standard, you've crossed a line.
You say that we should behave like people, not make threats... but then claim the answer isn't that simple? Wrong. It's very, very simple.
No sir :) I said that the behavior is barbaric and is not justified anyhow. I just said that eventhough the backlash was there they can't justify not porting the game for the whole community as if we were all responsible for the backlash. My point was just that we're small and nobody cares about us. We got tw2 because of the hype for SteamOS and tw3 was announced in that hype as well. Later when they've seen how it turned out they just cancelled it.
Ah, right. Sure, I misunderstood. Fully agree.
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Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: scaineQuoting: Mountain ManQuoting: Luke_NukemQuoting: Mountain ManIf that's the reason they've abandoned Linux then that seems rather petty.Not even close to the level of pettiness shown by that vocal chunk that spewed forth a wall of toxicity towards those who were trying to help us out.
That's just the background noise you have to put up with when doing business.
Again, threats of violence are not "background noise". Can't believe so many people are trying to justify this.
Just imagine if you provided a physical service on the street - pretzels, shoe shine, whatever - and on the one hand, you have a group of people literally 10 feet away shouting that you should just fucking die because your service, in their opinion, is sub standard. Then on the other hand, a second group of people standing 5 feet away telling you to grow a thicker skin, just ignore those guys, pfff, just background noise.
Yeah, sure. This is one of the most depressing threads I've ever experienced on the internet. And, given Reddit, or the Steam Forums, that's really saying something.
I'm not justifying anything. I'm just trying to put things into perspective. A hostile post on an internet forum is nowhere close to a mob threatening physical violence from 10-feet away, so your analogy doesn't hold water.
Well, my point is that if you threaten my family from 10 feet away, or via the internet, I'm (personally) still going to do everything in my power to see you jailed. This isn't a question of perspective - I maintain that while my analogy might not hold water for you, and doesn't for many others, it should.
The internet would be a more pleasant place if people didn't think that an anonymous handle on a website hosted in a country they don't live in lets them act like utter fuckmuffins.
5 Likes, Who?
I think gamers in generally seem to be expressing a lot of weird frustration over the products they use. Games do tend to become very personal to the practitioners. Just like drugs. :)
Usually none of this should really matter to the producers of a game as they're tracking sale numbers rather than love. I find it to be a weird reason to cancel a port to linux because of lack of love. How much does it cost to do a port? How many people can you get to buy it? If the difference is positive, then it's economic madness not to port. It does seem to be too expensive to write ports for linux still. I wonder why that is... We as a linux game community should invest in finding out how the costs could be lowered for game production companies. When we solve this, then all games will be ported (unless there's some irrational linux hatred)
Usually none of this should really matter to the producers of a game as they're tracking sale numbers rather than love. I find it to be a weird reason to cancel a port to linux because of lack of love. How much does it cost to do a port? How many people can you get to buy it? If the difference is positive, then it's economic madness not to port. It does seem to be too expensive to write ports for linux still. I wonder why that is... We as a linux game community should invest in finding out how the costs could be lowered for game production companies. When we solve this, then all games will be ported (unless there's some irrational linux hatred)
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I've worked in technical support half my life and a lot of customers can be rude, even corporate customers that I'm dealing with now, let alone garden variety video gamers. So when they say they didn't port the game because people were rude to them, I can't help but laugh. People are quite often rude when your product is buggy and Witcher 2 for Linux on release was buggy as hell.
Port didn't make money, that's the only real reason we didn't get Witcher 3. I'm quite sad about that and hope they change their mind at some point. It's quite silly that we ended up only with the middle game which is considered the weakest of the three, we don't have either beginning or the end of the story.
Port didn't make money, that's the only real reason we didn't get Witcher 3. I'm quite sad about that and hope they change their mind at some point. It's quite silly that we ended up only with the middle game which is considered the weakest of the three, we don't have either beginning or the end of the story.
1 Likes, Who?
well, looking at the bright side, at least this prove one thing: our voice makes an impact, its not pointless to shoult, we actualy have the power to change something with our voice.
its a shame that we change it for worse, but if we have this power, we certainly can change it for better with other titles/companys.
its a shame that we change it for worse, but if we have this power, we certainly can change it for better with other titles/companys.
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In the same way that Croteam has done with Serious Sam 1,2,3 in creating the Fusion system, adding a Vulkan graphics back-end: It would be great if CDPR could get familiar with Vulkan technology and create a Witcher 3 beta which supports Vulkan. [For the uninitiated, Croteam did this in order to train up their skills on Vulkan on products they know well, and then be able to use Vulkan properly in future projects.]
They get to improve their in-house expertise with Vulkan, they can concentrate on Vulkan for their future games (rather than multiple versions of DirectX across multiple versions of Windows.)
AND... If Vulkan was in their products, then even if they don't create native Linux ports, anyone in the Linux community who wants to play their games, has the choice of playing the Windows version of the game in WINE with practically no problems.
They get to improve their in-house expertise with Vulkan, they can concentrate on Vulkan for their future games (rather than multiple versions of DirectX across multiple versions of Windows.)
AND... If Vulkan was in their products, then even if they don't create native Linux ports, anyone in the Linux community who wants to play their games, has the choice of playing the Windows version of the game in WINE with practically no problems.
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