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Sad news, Facepunch are no longer selling the Linux version of their survival game Rust [Official Site] after removing mentions of Linux support yesterday from their Steam page.
Linux support has been available in Rust since 2013, along with continued support during Early Access and after the official release earlier this year. It was a bit of a surprise that we got an email from a reader, to mention that the Steam store page for Rust was no longer showing the SteamOS/Linux icon or listing it in the system requirements.
Thinking it was a mistake, since nothing was announced, I reached to Facepunch to which they replied with:
Hey dude - yeah we stopped selling Rust for Linux.
I did request more information as to why and will update this article if I receive any further information. To be fair, they haven't had a lot of time to respond again yet, but I feel it's important to get the word out.
It's possible it's due to issues with the Unity game engine, which has suffered some nuisance problems with their Linux support lately. We've gone through black screens, no input in fullscreen and the latest being double-input issues—all issues that have plagued a number of games that use Unity. All of which have been solved in updated versions of Unity though. Still, it has become more of a hassle for developers to support us due to issues like this repeatedly coming up.
To be clear on something though, it might only mean that they're not actively advertising it as a Linux supported game, while still allowing Linux users to buy it and play it—something a few other developers do as well. I highly doubt they would actually remove the Linux version, after it being around for so long.
Really sad about this, we have an active community-run server with plenty of people enjoying themselves on it. Sin has livestreamed plenty of it on our Twitch Channel, purchased skins and all. With all the additions to the game, it was really becoming quite interesting. Even I was also going to be jumping back in soon, so this has me a little down as I did quite enjoy the game as well.
As always, please remain respectful in the comments. Issues like this can become quite heated, but let's not go throwing any insults around. Now is a time to show your support, not have a war of words.
Updates
Garry responded on Twitter and said this:
We stopped selling Rust on Linux because we won't/don't give it the QA support it needs. There are situations where there's a Unity Linux bug that pops up, and we ship with it - because it's the right decision for 99.99% of our players.
And while 60% of Linux users are fine with this, they understand their position in this world, it's probably not the right thing to act like it's fine. So while we're still going to ship Linux updates and keep it up to date.. we're not going to sell it anymore.
Also Linux Community - being abusive, demanding, rude to the few developers actually shipping games to your favourite OS isn't the way to go. It makes me regret ever shipping Linux versions.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Developers are human, people do need to understand that and not resort to throwing insults around right away. Even so, if you sell a game on any platform you should be doing QA on it—there's no excuse for not doing it.
Update #2 - Here's what another developer said on Reddit:
Linux is and will still be supported but the decision to remove Linux from purchase was mainly based on multiple issues in the current Unity version (2018.1.4).
We're currently unable to downgrade to a Unity version which corrects these Linux issues and we're unable to upgrade Unity to 2018.2 due to a number of new issues.
Linux is in a state of limbo in which we're unable to resolve, instead of selling a broken platform we decided to remove it from purchase but still offer it to existing players.
Once Linux is in a working state we'll review the decision.
Hat tip to Basiani for letting us know.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: liamdaweGarry has posted about it on his Twitter now https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1022929143791542272This should be mention too:
QuoteWe stopped selling Rust on Linux because we won't/don't give it the QA support it needs. There are situations where there's a Unity Linux bug that pops up, and we ship with it - because it's the right decision for 99.99% of our players.And
QuoteAnd while 60% of Linux users are fine with this, they understand their position in this world, it's probably not the right thing to act like it's fine. So while we're still going to ship Linux updates and keep it up to date.. we're not going to sell it anymore.And
QuoteAlso Linux Community - being abusive, demanding, rude to the few developers actually shipping games to your favourite OS isn't the way to go. It makes me regret ever shipping Linux versions.Edit: Fixed wrong quote, added link.
QuoteAlso Linux Community - being abusive, demanding, rude to the few developers actually shipping games to your favourite OS isn't the way to go. It makes me regret ever shipping Linux versions.
Don't know. How many resource do you need for Linux QA? Having a community like Linux doesn't make this guy notice that there are other solutions?
Quoting: GuestWell, we purchased a product while in EA. Facepunch choose to support the platform. Garry said way back when that they didn't even have Linux installed to test with because there were so few of us. This should create an outrage by the community. I've seen you rage a bit about Studio Wildcard and their support of Linux in my opinion is far better ( while still pretty darn crappy ) than that of Facepunch. So now, we bought a product, that was supported by Linux, to later down the road have that "support" ripped out from under us without any form of refund offered etc. I'm sorry guys, I'm not finding any love for Facepunch based on these actions. I'm simply in awe at your defense of Facepunch.
Did you actually read their reasons? And his last tweet? Take it to heart. They'll keep shipping builds, and as long as unity does its job well we'll be good. If unity fucks up again it's unity's problem and not them.
Quoting: GuestWell, we purchased a product while in EA. Facepunch choose to support the platform. Garry said way back when that they didn't even have Linux installed to test with because there were so few of us. This should create an outrage by the community. I've seen you rage a bit about Studio Wildcard and their support of Linux in my opinion is far better ( while still pretty darn crappy ) than that of Facepunch. So now, we bought a product, that was supported by Linux, to later down the road have that "support" ripped out from under us without any form of refund offered etc. I'm sorry guys, I'm not finding any love for Facepunch based on these actions. I'm simply in awe at your defense of Facepunch.There's a big difference. Rust for most of us, has run really quite well and had feature parity with the Windows version. The Rust developers have been active fixing issues in the Linux version too.
ARK has always been poor on Linux with poor communication. The one thing I value most, is communication.
Quoting: x_wingDon't know. How many resource do you need for Linux QA? Having a community like Linux doesn't make this guy notice that there are other solutions?
So, let's look at this from an interesting perspective.
We are the ~0.5% on steam, that's a fact.
They have a team of 40 people, according to their teams site. How many of those are actual devs? Not sure, so let's just guess that all of them do QA and development.
That means that, proportionally, they should have 0.2 devs working on our specific issues. Increasing that to even one full dedicated person would put it, proportionally, far above the percentage of linux players.
EDIT; Pair this with the amount of issues caused by the nvidia bug and unity issues, and you can understand why it just doesn't make sense to pour resources into it. It's sad, but it's understandable.
Last edited by nox on 27 July 2018 at 7:58 pm UTC
Quoting: liamdaweARK has always been poor on Linux with poor communication. The one thing I value most, is communication.
Not so well with today's news.
Don't know guys. I don't feel like we're "abusive, demanding, rude" community. If you don't do QA and people that pays money for something finds out that it doesn't work, I would really understand that some people piss off with me. I mean, imagine the scenario if you give the same QA to Windows community... Is really like a chicken-egg problem this.
Quoting: GuestFair enough. So have them offer refunds to all the Linux users that purchased the game. Then I will say, okay, we're good. If Unity is the problem, Facepunch needs to get on their rear. Facepunch said they would support Linux, if they can't well, that's business. You can't say one thing then do something else in business. Well, I guess that's only true if your NOT in game development.Would be good for them to offer refunds, but it would be hard to make fair, so let's depend on the steam refund policy here.
/Jason
If you simply feel like you haven't gotten your money worth, talk to them and they are usually reasonable. If the game still functions decently it's different though as you still have your product.
For me, I could never get a refund fairly. Over 1k hours in the game, even if the game did stop working I couldn't really say I didn't get my money worth.
So; regarding mass linux refunds. Let's talk about that when 1) nvidia has released a fix for the problem and that fix has reached most users, 2) The unity version no longer contains breaking bugs.
If the game still isn't good then, well, let's talk about linux refunds.
Quoting: x_wingQuoting: liamdaweARK has always been poor on Linux with poor communication. The one thing I value most, is communication.
Not so well with today's news.
Don't know guys. I don't feel like we're "abusive, demanding, rude" community. If you don't do QA and people that pays money for something finds out that it doesn't work, I would really understand that some people piss off with me. I mean, imagine the scenario if you give the same QA to Windows community... Is really like a chicken-egg problem this.
Sadly, we've seen this a lot over the years. People get pissed at developers and they back off.
Note: The Linux and Windows versions of Rust has been about as stable when I've tested them side by side. Until the most recent issues they have provided QA that is about on par with windows.
Last edited by nox on 27 July 2018 at 8:06 pm UTC
Quoting: noxQuoting: x_wingDon't know. How many resource do you need for Linux QA? Having a community like Linux doesn't make this guy notice that there are other solutions?
So, let's look at this from an interesting perspective.
We are the ~0.5% on steam, that's a fact.
They have a team of 40 people, according to their teams site. How many of those are actual devs? Not sure, so let's just guess that all of them do QA and development.
That means that, proportionally, they should have 0.2 devs working on our specific issues. Increasing that to even one full dedicated person would put it, proportionally, far above the percentage of linux players.
EDIT; Pair this with the amount of issues caused by the nvidia bug and unity issues, and you can understand why it just doesn't make sense to pour resources into it. It's sad, but it's understandable.
We should take in account their sales, from my point of view it should not matter the global statistics as they may be poisoned with multi-account and free to play.
We have had other publisher with way less people and they were quite supportive with our community. I cannot justify an statements as "we don't do QA because you're not enough for me". As I said before, there are other solutions, more than three years of nill QA sounds like he never care about us (and he really stated that in his tweets). I don't say he hates our platform, but this guys are definitely the type of devs I don't want to give my money.
Quoting: x_wingWe should take in account their sales, from my point of view it should not matter the global statistics as they may be poisoned with multi-account and free to play.
We have had other publisher with way less people and they were quite supportive with our community. I cannot justify an statements as "we don't do QA because you're not enough for me". As I said before, there are other solutions, more than three years of nill QA sounds like he never care about us (and he really stated that in his tweets). I don't say he hates our platform, but this guys are definitely the type of devs I don't want to give my money.
Here you can see the number of total sessions from all platforms: https://rust.facepunch.com/stats
Based on that, plus the fact that Unity + Nvidia has fucked shit up the last 3+months for them makes the decision understandable.
They can't pour enough resources into it to officially support it, and they are admitting that.
The fact that they'll keep building and shipping a linux version after all those issues, the outrage from the community and the tiny number of sessions is interesting and it makes me happy. It shows that they don't just want to drop linux, they just can't officially support it.
QuoteAnd while 60% of Linux users are fine with this, they understand their position in this world, it's probably not the right thing to act like it's fine. So while we're still going to ship Linux updates and keep it up to date.. we're not going to sell it anymore.
Why they still keep pushing updates to Linux version? Smells like a " workaround " to not giving existing users to chance for a refund , due to Steam policies.
We're still updating it , so we didn't drop supporting it. So all of these refund request are baseless.
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