We will start the day with a bit of sad news, as the latest version of the popular Football Manager series Football Manager 2019 is not coming to Linux.
Announced today, Football Manager 2019 is only listing Windows and Mac on Steam. A user on Twitter reached out about the missing Linux version, to which the director of Football Manager simply replied that it was correct.
We followed up to ask why that is and the reply was this:
cost/benefit analysis. It unfortunately wasn't selling enough on Linux to cover the QA costs, let alone the dev cost. :(
Sports Interactive first put the game on Linux back in November 2013, which was considered a really good thing for Linux gamers considering how popular the title is. Looking at the 2018 edition, right now it has over thirty thousand people playing it (the peak today being nearly double that), so to have a game as popular as that no longer support Linux is a bit of a loss.
If it's not selling enough as they say to cover the costs, then you can't really argue against that. It sadly doesn't make sense for all games, even if they're popular on one platform they won't always be on another.
Again: I didn’t buy FM2018 because of the price and I would continue not buying it because of it.
Same goes for NBA2K17. I’m not buying 18 because of the price for a 1 year game.
If the company were to update the teams I’d be happy to buy every two years or so. Under this model, no way!
I almost bought FM2018 when the price dropped but then I thought: what for? 2019 is almost here and then I’m stuck with an old game for nothing.
Also IMO FM is really not the biggest "timesink" out there, the reason being that it's unique in allowing you to do a lot of other stuffs at the same time with all the between-match processing, e.g. going over Anki flashcards for learning a new language. The real timesink is repetitive online games, such as DOTA or PES. I played tons of PES Online Division mode and usually remain top 1% by ranking. However I've sold PES 2019 this year already as it takes me a tremendous amount of time and I wouldn't be easily getting anything new out of it, unlike an RPG where I can read the story and learn a foreign language by setting the voiceover/subtitles etc. Unless I can make playing PES into a profession (which I of course still fall short of), I really need to go on with my life.
I feel abandoned, to read that lack of support by the Linux community, what a joke. What do you think I have been doing, must have been spending monopoly money, I would normally upgrade hardware new Apple Mac but they are no longer up-gradable total waste of money.
FM 2019 means moving to windows which is never going to happen, Microsoft has added Linux to the latest Windows 10, they are heavily invested so what is wrong with the Sega FM team.
They are heading in the wrong direction and loosing support hand over fist as specially now, my addiction is now over as even the IPad app is total xxxxxx. No support, where's my refund for years and years of it?
There are already, spanning Linux native, Windows DXVK/Wine, and all the other emulators tens of thousands more games than I would have time to play in 2-3 lifetimes available on Linux. If we think we're a small market now, think of how much smaller that becomes when a game can be played, in 4K streaming, instantaneously on anything with a *browser*, including a *Chromebooks* and Android phones, anywhere on the planet with a decent internet connection...
It's going, to some measure, be successful, and change everything. Microsoft's "big" announcement about streaming gaming was virtually non-existent at E3, as Stadia has sent them scurrying back to the drawing boards.
So, bye-bye native FM, and for now, screw you guys, but likely see ya again on some streaming service, be it Stadia or Valve or whatever in 5 years, because that's where a *lot* of people will be. Pretty soon, even the idea of a Windows version of something will seem like a small, niche market... As long as we make sure these services can be run on Linux, we'll be fine...
Last edited by iiari on 16 June 2019 at 1:36 am UTC
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