After a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2018, developer Eggnut released their post-noir narrative adventure Backbone in June 2021. Sadly, they've decided not to go through with the official Linux support on it.
This is a crowdfunding campaign that did very clearly have Linux down as a platform from the beginning, so it's not the best of looks. Especially to get the announcement that it's no longer planned eight months after the initial launch. What's the reasoning being given? Here's what they said in the Kickstarter announcement:
We're very sorry to announce that we won't be porting Backbone to Linux in the near future. We did our best to do it in-house, but it took immeasurable amount of time and effort, and making it work properly would require creating a dev environment to work in which we don't have the resources for because we're deep in production for our next game. We are not in the financial position to hire another party to do the porting for us. We absolutely understand the frustration these news might bring, and we're ready to offer you these solutions:
For backers, they've offered a key for any other platform or a full refund if you prefer. That is at least a lot better than some, as we've seen plenty of other projects decide not to do Linux after including it in funding and not offer anything. Still, it's a frustrating situation, especially to be told they don't have a development environment set up for it — after being in development overall for multiple years and already being supported on Windows for over half a year.
What about Steam Play Proton, can you run it there? Reports seem mixed on it, although there's not many, with the big problem being cinematics not playing.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Well, refunds are okay, trust is gone nonetheless.
Though missing cut-scenes sounds like: Proton-GE to the rescue!
Or just wait until Valve has re-encoded the videos, like they already did for many others (Exo One).
But I guess I'll take a copy for the Switch then.
Single player, no anti-cheat or anti-tamper as far as I can see, it's using FMOD, XAudio, Bink2... so what was the problem here?
soulsource Feb 10, 2022
Quoting: dpanterAnd yet, somehow they managed to make a Mac version of this Unreal Engine 4 game.
Single player, no anti-cheat or anti-tamper as far as I can see, it's using FMOD, XAudio, Bink2... so what was the problem here?
I can only think of one potential explanation:
They focused fully on Windows development, and treated all other platforms as "let's get those working later". This means that all engine issues they encountered and fixed/worked around during development were those that affect the windows build. If you have one of those per week of development, well, that's filed under "overhead".
All engine issues that are specific to Linux were left undiscovered until they finally started the porting process, and they probably were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of problems...
In other words: "Expected that porting to Linux is clicking a button in the Editor, but turned out it's actually a list of 100 Unreal Engine bugs we need to work around or fix. We don't have the resources for that."
(But again, this is just a potential explanation for which I am sadly speaking out of experience with another Unreal game and another target platform - which happened in the end, but one year after the Windows release. I do not know if this applies to this particular case.)
slaapliedje Feb 10, 2022
AussieEevee Feb 10, 2022
Last edited by AussieEevee on 10 February 2022 at 10:33 am UTC
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me