The Witcher 3 didn't come to Linux likely as a result of the user-backlash from The Witcher 2

If 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.

If 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 Jul 2017 at 12:03 pm UTC

the 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.

If 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.

If 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.

If 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Whiny and demanding wall of text

And here's why we can't have nice things.

I ask you politely to explain yourself and to state your points clearly so we can discuss them properly. I don't think i did anything to deserve being attacked like this, my first guess is that it's a misunderstood.

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.

Yes, when our voice is for negative we're likely to get such excuses as "well your community sucks" and if our voice is for positive we'll get "well you know you're nice and all, but we can't justify the development for 1% of the market". We can change nothing with our voices, we can only change things by actually growing in marketshare and making them money. A lot of companies have proven that already.

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. <SNIP>

Justification for threats of violence? Death threats? Yeah, real classy. I didn't even read past that opening sentence.

I must confess I didn't read the thread thoroughly before posting, which is a shame as I see you getting quite vocal about my comment. I stayed on the positive side of things which is a mistake, and I should have indeed stated that I do not agree in any possible way with such threats.

On another hand many of us reacted in a decent manner and that is the kind of reaction I was referring to.

I would not be silly enough as to call these "background noise", it's a problem indeed, but I tend to think it's a problem with the internet in general. It's sometimes so dehumanised that you get some inhuman behaviours​, and it's not getting any better in recent years.

I just hope you're not thinking I'm a complete douchebag because I didn't take the time to study the whole thing beforehand.


Last edited by omer666 on 4 Jul 2017 at 2:16 pm UTC

I agree with the posted quotes, and I'm not at all surprised by this outcome nor the reasons behind it.

Wishing someone to die or the like is never ever an appropriate reaction to anything that might happen in a relation between people pertaining to a digital product. It's completely unacceptable no matter the built-up expectation, the amount of money paid, time spent waiting or whatever.

Companies are made of people and while most decisions tend to be made based on objective grounds, emotions do play a role.

If 100 Windows users send a developer death threats, they will grow tougher skin, wish they could tell them to fuck themselves but try to ignore the hate and keep on working on their game hoping other non-hate-spewing people will buy it.

When 100 Linux users send a developer death threats, they'll do what they wished they could do to the Windows people: say screw you fuckers, I won't release my game for you. Lots of satisfaction ensues, with very little (if any) financial consequence.

I totally agree with this. People on this thread are repeatedly arguing that CDPR should grow thicker skin, that verbal attacks from some don't justify not making a special linux release for the rest of us...

The truth is they don't NEED to justify it. (And they didn't this was just one guys opinion, not the offical CDPR one.) We are a very, VERY small community and a minuscule part of their income. They tried to do something nice for us, they got a bunch of rudeness (not helpful criticism, not polite requests for changes or even apassionate bug reports. Rudeness.) Rudeness so over the top that it actually decreased their stock value. They don't NEED our dollars, and they really don't need us to cause them to lose money.

People arguing that it's OK because that sort of vitriol can be found from Windows users missed the point that we are NOT windows users. We don't have the majority of the gaming market behind us.

If we want respect, we need to act respectable.

He can be a totally rude jerk, and the fact that he invented the OS of our choice doesn't change that he needs a crash course in basic manners.

Sorry to go off-topic, but what he did was not to invent an OS -- rather, he reverse engineered the kernel of an OS that was ~20 years old at that point. This is not to detract from his achievement, of course; but I suspect part of the reason why he's such an insufferable **** is that we casually tend to give him credit for developments in computing that he had nothing to do with.

People laugh at Stallman and the FSF for what sounds like an inane obsession with the 'GNU/' nomenclature, but they do have a point. Besides, a few things could have happened at slightly different times around 1991-1993, and we'd all be hailing UC Berkeley Department of CS & McKusick et al. as the inventors of our free OS. Also, Ritchie & Thompson probably deserve to be have 'household name' status as well, just as much as Linus.


Last edited by walther von stolzing on 4 Jul 2017 at 2:41 pm UTC

Wow... Some of the commenters here actually say they deserved the backlash. Being a game dev must suck. Getting second thoughts about my dream to make my own game...

It certainly can.
And the abuse increases by orders of magnitude for (including but not limited to) each of the following that you are (I have witnessed all of these firsthand): a woman, a member of a nonwhite/nonanglo ethnic group, openly gay, openly transsexual, and not openly hostile to any/all of the aforementioned groups.

Exhibit A:

Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on Windows with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.

Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Windows users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.

Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Windows, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.

* * *

Exhibit B:

Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Mac OS with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.

Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Mac OS users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.

Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people, while inappropriate in their actions, were still just speaking for themselves and their own emotions. The operating system chosen by both the developers and the users had nothing to do with the inappropriate behaviour of some of the game's worst critics. Users of Mac OS, while united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, are not expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on any public relations level, despite the comparitively smaller user base they represent, because there's a corporation officially handling that side of the business. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from the product being flawed in the first place.

* * *

Exhibit C:

Event: Highly-anticipated Game X gets released on (or ported to) Linux with a completely inexcusable amount of problems.

Result: Amongst the constructive criticism and less-eloquent (but still well-deserved) bashing of the quality of the product itself, a small minority of Linux users take things way too far, escalating to harassment, threats, insults and libel towards the developers of the game itself.

Conclusion: These angry, vitriolic people were inappropriate in their actions. Furthermore, they were speaking on the behalf of the community of Linux users as a whole, despite the aforementioned constructive criticism and attacks directed towards an inanimate object, which obviously doesn't count, because feelings were hurt. Users of Linux, because of how they are united by their choice of operating system and their penchant for helping each other troubleshoot and understand the complexities of their OS, and because of how small a user base they're representing, should be completely expected to make good examples of themselves as a "community" on a public relations level, despite the existence of many private and public corporations that deal in PR for various distributions of Linux, as well as the kernel itself being managed by a registered nonprofit. Ultimately, the anger stemmed from Linux users being far too quick to judge, having far too high standards, not giving the developers enough time to fix the problems post-release and not being able to rein in and censor the worst of their people.

* * *

Hmm. I always knew that Windows and Mac OS liked to break standards, but I didn't realise things were this bad.

I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports.

Really? When people pay for something, they expect it to work (and work well). People aren't going to be thankful for a bad product. This isn't people spitting in the face of free content, this was a commercial product.

What you're doing is telling people to be thankful for any old shit - "Please Sir, can I have some more?"

Also blaming an entire community for a handful of people's actions is moronic. Are you saying I could get a friend or two together and get anything I want cancelled by pretending to be a member of the target demographic and giving a few people grief? There's obvious issues with that mentality.

sad part about this is that 99,99% of these keyboard cowboys who write these way out of bounds reactions in a forum don't have the nerve to say these things in person to someone, they just feel safe behind there screen.

If its not something you would say in person to someone then don't post it in a forum, rethink it and rewrite it or take a deep breath, delete it and go on with the important things in live which does not include a bad port.