Facepunch are no longer selling the Linux version of the survival game Rust (updated)

Did that mean that i loose the ability to play that game(I already bought it)
Did they stop to support linux version for existing customers
In witch of previous cases I can ask for refund ?

We don't know yet. The only thing we know is that they removed their steamos icon, but the linux version is still there and playable.

The likely result is that they'll provide a linux client, but they will not offer support. Again, we don't know yet though and we'll have to wait for further clarification.

Not very playable for me. I experience crash before loading any server. Don't know what is the reason.

Did that mean that i loose the ability to play that game(I already bought it)
Did they stop to support linux version for existing customers
In witch of previous cases I can ask for refund ?

We don't know yet. The only thing we know is that they removed their steamos icon, but the linux version is still there and playable.

The likely result is that they'll provide a linux client, but they will not offer support. Again, we don't know yet though and we'll have to wait for further clarification.

Not very playable for me. I experience crash before loading any server. Don't know what is the reason.

That's the nvidia bug.

-SNIP-

So, I cannot answer for liam but I'll but my own view here:
Garry said that 3 years ago, and they've kept supporting linux despite it.
Does he like linux? Who knows. Does he find linux to be worthwhile for his game developers to target? Clearly, at least until these last issues with Unity and nvidia.

Don't take that old tweet and think of it as hate. It's a blunt, sarcastic guy that likes riling people up a bit. That's what he does.

Fair enough, but if you want to go this route, find me a more recent quote of him taking that back or saying anything at all but negativity about Linux. If you can do that I will retract my statement and say publically I'm wrong about Garry and his attitude toward Linux.

So, you are the one saying he is toxic, you are the one who should provide the proof here as his entire twitter history is full of him being sarcastic about everything. However, I did find another very recent tweet for you. It's out of context, but it does halfway fill your requirement, as he is talking about both windows and linux:

Would love to drop windows and Linux m8

Other than that, he doesn't really seem to have any recent tweets that shows any hatred towards linux at all.

I have almost 900h on this game so this news is unfortunate, and I haven't experienced nearly the amount of trouble people complain about but then again my distro is not bleeding edge and is a few versions behind on both GNOME(3.22) and Nvidia drivers(390.67), so facepunch is not solely to blame for those issues.

Here is the thing though, with the nvidia problem and unity issues on top of that the linux version didn't make facepunch look good. And there is very little they can do about those issues. Dropping official support seems logical enough considering...

If the 0.5% takes up a significant portion of troubleshooting and fixing, well, it's just not logical to keep doing it.

They don't have to do a lot, out of report the problem to Nvidia and Unity (how many resources do you need for that?). In fact, Nvidia gave a workaround for the problem.

This is an old discussion, but when you buy software you don't only pay a license to play the game, you also pay for support. If the guy that sells this says something like "We don't test Linux versions because Linux community is way too small", then he should announce that on their store page.


Last edited by x_wing on 27 July 2018 at 7:38 pm UTC

Fair enough, but if you want to go this route, find me a more recent quote of him taking that back or saying anything at all but negativity about Linux. If you can do that I will retract my statement and say publically I'm wrong about Garry and his attitude toward Linux.

So, you are the one saying he is toxic, you are the one who should provide the proof here as his entire twitter history is full of him being sarcastic about everything. However, I did find another very recent tweet for you. It's out of context, but it does halfway fill your requirement, as he is talking about both windows and linux:

Would love to drop windows and Linux m8

Other than that, he doesn't really seem to have any recent tweets that shows any hatred towards linux at all.

Your defending Garry for being outspoken and a jerk but you're condemning me because I'm just stating facts? That's kinda what it feels like here...

Sorry, but you're not stating facts at all. Garry has never outright said he doesn't like or hates Linux. Don't take random blunt Twitter posts as hate. I made that mistake before, don't be me.

People (including me) talk random junk on Twitter all the time.

Cracking jokes and being blunt about something, do not equal that person hating something.

Fair enough, but if you want to go this route, find me a more recent quote of him taking that back or saying anything at all but negativity about Linux. If you can do that I will retract my statement and say publically I'm wrong about Garry and his attitude toward Linux.

So, you are the one saying he is toxic, you are the one who should provide the proof here as his entire twitter history is full of him being sarcastic about everything. However, I did find another very recent tweet for you. It's out of context, but it does halfway fill your requirement, as he is talking about both windows and linux:

Would love to drop windows and Linux m8

Other than that, he doesn't really seem to have any recent tweets that shows any hatred towards linux at all.

Your defending Garry for being outspoken and a jerk but you're condemning me because I'm just stating facts? That's kinda what it feels like here...

Not really, just pointing out that I found your requirement strange. At least I provided you with the most recent linux mentioning tweet I could find, which also says the exact thing about Windows.

Look, I'm not saying he is a great guy. I don't know. I just know that they've supported linux decently(or at least as bad as windows). However, if you take a few minutes of your time to read his tweets you'll see that he bashes everyone, everywhere, all the time.

If someone being sarcastic, liking to rile up people and fucking around is equal to hating linux, then alright, you have your view.

Main point: Old tweet, many tweets sarcastic about everything over the years, decent support regardless over the years. If he hates linux he isn't good at showing it.

Garry has posted about it on his Twitter now https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1022929143791542272

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

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.

And

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.

Edit: Fixed wrong quote, added link.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 27 July 2018 at 7:44 pm UTC

-SNIP-

If you read the tweets above you, you'll see that they are stopping selling it officially to Linux gamers as they can't give it the QA it needs. They'll be shipping it and keeping it up to date, but they don't officially support it.

That, to me, sounds like a decent reason. It's not based on hatred, it's based on logic.

He also states that the linux community should stop being abusive, demanding and rude to the developers who actually support us. Everyone should take that to heart.

EDIT: Saying something positive doesn't matter. You seemed convinced he hates linux, I argued against that. I never said he likes linux.


Last edited by nox on 27 July 2018 at 7:49 pm UTC

Garry has posted about it on his Twitter now https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1022929143791542272

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

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.

And

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.

Edit: Fixed wrong quote, added link.

This should be mention too:

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.

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?

Well, 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.

Well, 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.

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?

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

ARK 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.

It is ever possible to infer that a person hates something or someone without an explicit statement saying so? Just based on their actions and words? I am just wondering.

Fair 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.
/Jason

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.

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.

ARK 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

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?

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.

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.

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.

This part is very , very odd.

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.

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.