Book of Demons no longer getting a native Linux port, developer plans on 'supporting' Steam Play (updated)

I can't help feeling that this is less a case of "Tsk, tsk, there goes a native port lost in favour of Steam Play" than a case of "Steam Play rescues a game for Linux that would have otherwise been abandoned by yet another Linux-benighted band of devs." Trying to support multiple distros of Linux when all they had to support was Ubuntu tells me that these guys brought their problems on themselves.

Off the top of my head, "extra work, not enough profit" seems like the most common reason promised ports go missing (the second most common reason would be no reason ever being given.) Since many, many devs manage to produce perfectly functional (if not functionally perfect) Linux ports of games, I refuse to accept whinging excuses of devs saying anything that doesn't sound like, "Golly, we got in a little over our heads with Linux."

I look forward to all the future games that will come to Linux, saved from well-intentioned-but-naive devs crying, "Linux is hard." And I'll take a Steam Play supported game over an abandoned Linux port any day. More and more, Steam Play will mean that weaker developers won't be able to abandon Linux gamers, Linux gamers will abandon them.

... And this is exactly what the pessimists were worried about.

And it's also what the optimists were hoping for. Instead of maybe just giving up Linux support completely, the developer now looks out for Steam Play compatibility at least. What's the harm in it? If you want the game, you will be able to play it on Linux.

What's the harm? That's easy to answer, actually:
In order to become healthy gaming platform we need games built on and for our platform. We don't just want ports.
No healthy gaming platforms are happy with being a secondary citizen. The console gamers don't want pc ports. Windows gamers don't want console ports. Why? Cause they don't fully utilize their platform. There's always a sacrifice.

To develop for a platform one need platform experience. If Steam Play provides them an exit from even making ports it degrades us even further and makes the goal of a healthy gaming platform - a platform That don't just receive subpar ports, even more distant.

Now, I bet it's a surprise when I now say I'm not totally against Steam Play. I'm not, not at all. But I am very aware that this is not just a good thing. The critics do have a very valid point.

I am a bit confused.

Some people try to make a living from developing games on PC and they manage to never talk to someone explaining to them it is fair enough to support the distro steam supports which is a couple ubuntu's and steamOS ?

I know, right? It's just weird.

... And this is exactly what the pessimists were worried about.

And it's also what the optimists were hoping for. Instead of maybe just giving up Linux support completely, the developer now looks out for Steam Play compatibility at least. What's the harm in it? If you want the game, you will be able to play it on Linux.

What's the harm? That's easy to answer, actually:
In order to become healthy gaming platform we need games built on and for our platform. We don't just want ports.
No healthy gaming platforms are happy with being a secondary citizen. The console gamers don't want pc ports. Windows gamers don't want console ports. Why? Cause they don't fully utilize their platform. There's always a sacrifice.

To develop for a platform one need platform experience. If Steam Play provides them an exit from even making ports it degrades us even further and makes the goal of a healthy gaming platform - a platform That don't just receive subpar ports, even more distant.

Now, I bet it's a surprise when I now say I'm not totally against Steam Play. I'm not, not at all. But I am very aware that this is not just a good thing. The critics do have a very valid point.

The underlying hen egg problem here has been discussed a lot. In the light of those discussions I'd say proton could be harmful to some native versions, but all in all we're dead in the water without it.


Last edited by Nevertheless on 6 Nov 2018 at 7:09 pm UTC

Just revisiting this again and realised that I'm angry at their play-testers for pretending to be running Ubuntu, but later were discovered to be running Arch. That's a bit of a dick move and it's backfired here spectacularly: the devs have been scared off launching for Linux, believing that this might be a common practice. And honestly, I think they might be right.

I'm now revising my earlier suggestion that devs "only need to support Ubuntu". Because people will simply lie in order to get support. And taking a hard line on those people will just foster ill will.

As much as I hate to say it, I think Thing Trunk are doing the right thing here. Especially if they're willing to have another go after release.

I'd say proton could be harmful to some native versions, but all in all we're dead in the water without it.

Are you serious?

So, eight years of native ports (too many to list here) were "dead in the water"? Be they few in numbers, it doesn't matter, you can't argue that we lived without "Proton" up until now and slowly progressed.

And now "Proton", or rather, PROTON emerged and we all must enable "All Hail Gabe!!!" mode praising our savior?!

I'd say, without proton we had big publishers going "We are so big, we can't afford wasting resources on Linux for additional $100 of income, you know, rate of investment… yadda yadda…" while small-time and novice developers sometimes considered Linux versions. Now we have the above (please, prove me wrong, name a single AAA developer who switched her/his stance) plus "Just Use Proton"™ from small-time ones.

MISSION -FSCK***- ACCOMPLISHED!!!

I'd say proton could be harmful to some native versions, but all in all we're dead in the water without it.

Are you serious?

So, eight years of native ports (too many to list here) were "dead in the water"? Be they few in numbers, it doesn't matter, you can't argue that we lived without "Proton" up until now and slowly progressed.

And now "Proton", or rather, PROTON emerged and we all must enable "All Hail Gabe!!!" mode praising our savior?!

I'd say, without proton we had big publishers going "We are so big, we can't afford wasting resources on Linux for additional $100 of income, you know, rate of investment… yadda yadda…" while small-time and novice developers sometimes considered Linux versions. Now we have the above (please, prove me wrong, name a single AAA developer who switched her/his stance) plus "Just Use Proton"™ from small-time ones.

MISSION -FSCK***- ACCOMPLISHED!!!

You can thank Valve with or without Proton. Without their efforts we would discuss FOSS games exclusivly here (no, I don't doubt they're great too).
Why would any developer suddenly provide native Linux versions because of Proton?? That's not the way it's supposed to work. With Proton Linux gaming suddenly has a chance to get what it needs most: more users. People now can play those AAA games on Linux and are seen as Linux users by the developers of those games. People are no longer held back by a mostly incompatible Steam library. That hopefully leads to more users, which might again lead to more native versions. Of course that's not certain, but in my opinion we never had a better chance.

Xulima and Sheltered just don't play on Archlinux. Try it) or need hacks to work (DOS).

Hmmm.
I recall being able to run it when I was on Arch.
What error is it throwing ?

Just revisiting this again and realised that I'm angry at their play-testers for pretending to be running Ubuntu, but later were discovered to be running Arch. That's a bit of a dick move and it's backfired here spectacularly: the devs have been scared off launching for Linux, believing that this might be a common practice. And honestly, I think they might be right.

I'm now revising my earlier suggestion that devs "only need to support Ubuntu". Because people will simply lie in order to get support. And taking a hard line on those people will just foster ill will.

As much as I hate to say it, I think Thing Trunk are doing the right thing here. Especially if they're willing to have another go after release.

Incredible! They are imposing their completely unnessessary "upstream specific problems" on Linux gaming. That's idiotic!
Arch users should know what they're doing (and for the most part they certainly do!). It's not made for keeping compatibility with anything...
Hmm... maybe a Flatpak Steam installation could help (?)

I think that's how things are gonna work from now. Small developers will let Proton do the job and big devs will port their games through companies like Feral. We could see this one comng back in the day Proton was released

[quote=Guest]

They're just letting "Proton" handle things for them and see it as the easy way out.

I don't really agree with that remark. If you replace 'Proton' with 'SDL', 'OpenGL', 'PixiJS', or something similar, that'd be awkward. Game developers don't *need* to know certain stuff, as long as they can make their games work well.

There are differences between those things and Proton, of course, but if it's sensible to use Proton, I don't really feel bad about them doing that, as long as, of course, they're supporting it properly.

The whole proper support thing is what I've issue with. My suspicion is that there won't be - it sounds more to me like they haven't really done much, just relying on "Proton" to make it work.
I could be wrong. They might have tested it proper, they might continue to test and make sure it works. They might even check with wine proper. But I doubt it.

That's fair. I suppose it is call for some mistrust on their efforts. Still, if they prove they can make it work alright, I'll appreciate that. If they won't, that's reason for not buying their (future) games. I'm personally not inclined to buy games at launch anyway.

With each flavor of Linux came different issues.

And WHO excatly told them to support EVERY flavor? Just support Steam OS and/or Ubuntu. And for the most part it will work on any Distro.

In theory, yes, they should only support Ubuntu and SteamOS, but in practice users of different distros complain in the forums, give negative reviews and return their games as much as they have problems. So it doesn't help giving this advice, those users feel entitled to the game as much as any user of the support distributions.

I empathize with the developers on this. With Steam Play being much more uniform across linux distros, they'll have less trouble.

I realise this is necro, but steam provides this comfort to devs on regular linux ports. One of the big downsides of cracked steam versions of games is that they don't have the compatibility, your distro probably doesn't have the deprecated, 2 year old libcryto, etc..., but steam download provides you these libraries and uses those instead of system ones so the game runs without flaws. Targeting Steamos/Ubuntu with official support is which everyone does. It means it also runs on debian by default. Users of other distros usually come up with their hacks, which usually involve symlinking an older library (or compiling it).

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows. Also, blobs (let it be drivers or games or whatnot) were always the blob devs chore to keep updated, even on windows. When you turn on your windows gaming pc, your first few minutes are usually spent going over anti-virus, gpu, motherboard and cpu manufacturers website downloading their latest blob. Maybe they even upload it to some central windows server, so you don't need to search for it in the browser, but that is the equivalent of providing a .deb or .rpm file instead of .zip or a .run that will most likely corrupt your installation at some point. These library problems largely go away if the developer provides some libraries that they compile for you. (Just like Feral does in their ports) That way you can play old games.

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows.

This is true enough but not really a counterexample. Wine is specifically designed to operate as old versions of Windows. Windows could be better at running old Windows programs than Linux is at running old Linux programs, and yet Wine could be better still. And of course it traditionally isn't as much of a problem on Linux because active parts of the open source software ecosystem get maintained and updated along with the OS, so there is very little "old" software. But with games and other closed things, it's a bit different; maybe we need a "Wine" for running old Linux software.

Also of course incompatibilities have gotten significantly worse since Windows 7. But Microsoft used to work hard on making sure old stuff still ran.

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows.

This is true enough but not really a counterexample. Wine is specifically designed to operate as old versions of Windows. Windows could be better at running old Windows programs than Linux is at running old Linux programs, and yet Wine could be better still. And of course it traditionally isn't as much of a problem on Linux because active parts of the open source software ecosystem get maintained and updated along with the OS, so there is very little "old" software. But with games and other closed things, it's a bit different; maybe we need a "Wine" for running old Linux software.

Also of course incompatibilities have gotten significantly worse since Windows 7. But Microsoft used to work hard on making sure old stuff still ran.

Actually that's not a bad idea. It could be a Compatibility Mode, or a Classic Mode, not unlike what Microsoft or Apple does.

I guess I missed this thread. I got BoD for cheap, on sale plus a coupon because I own Darkest Dungeon, and DD got a coupon if you own BoD.

Yes, it does run on SteamPlay, and I will admit that I have bought a very few other Windows games that run perfectly. This is one very fun game, and has attracted a large community, with very responsive devs.

I, at least, highly recommend it. AFAIC, the three best indie games of 2018 were Book of Demons, Slay the Spire, and Towers of Time, all three of which I very highly and heartily recommend.