Feral Interactive have no plans to update their Linux ports for Steam Deck

I love Feral and I respect a lot their work, they are amazing. But yeah, fragmentation IS a issue, and Linux do a little to support older softwares (which is comprehensive) while Windows has a system bloated to just works™.

As their ports doesn't runs in a container, sooner or later it will stop working.

Quoting: GuestAbsolutely disgusting statement from Feral but their GNU+Linux native games will work on any distro. It's not like they can restrict them to Ubuntu.

I'm not buying anymore games they've ported or developed going forward, which is fine by me.

dude its not like they had a choice, their choice was:
go bankrupt or do what they did.

no one should blame then for doing what makes sense business wise.
they arent trying to restrict stuff to ubuntu, they just said its not profitable to do Q/A on all distros, so they limit thenselves to ubuntu.

if steam deck flops, then they lose no money, if steam deck is a sucess, either people will install windows on it, or companies will see that its an sucess even without the help of feral, so they will see feral as useless again.

and if steamOS became an big market as switch is, to the point that it worth porting games to it to get the best performance instead of relying on proton, then companies will do that in-house as they do for consoles, instead of outsourcing it to companies like feral.

its a lose-lose-lose situation for feral, yet linux fanboys wish they go broke despite all the good things they did for us in the past?

Not surprised. Porting has been going downhill for years now, after Steam Machines turned out to be a bust and larger studios no longer bought in to the idea. We have seen fewer and fewer native ports of games that weren't made by Indie studios.
I know, some people are still clinging to the "No Tux, No Bux" mantra, but in reality, we're unlikely to see another major AAA game on Linux native anytime soon. If the Deck becomes a major hit, maybe this will change again, who knows. In the meantime, Proton is what we've got, and it does the job just fine. Instead of a handful of AAA titles that got selected to be ported, we get to play almost all of them. I don't care what makes a game run on Linux as long as it runs on Linux.

Quoting: KimyrielleI know, some people are still clinging to the "No Tux, No Bux" mantra, but in reality, we're unlikely to see another major AAA game on Linux native anytime soon.

And I'd say "Good riddance!".
NTNB FTW all the way!

I think Feral are out of porting business, so lack of support is not surprising. What are they doing these days?

Why would they update their old ports when the original publisher will get all the benefits without paying them?
I totally understand their position.

To be honest, I expected Feral and Aspyr do less porting-to-Linux and more facilitating-Proton-compatibility after the market had changed, but I guess it just doesn't make sense from business perspective, or maybe publishers were not interested in such services. I am grateful for what they did, when they did it, and have no expectations beyond what I got.

Disappointing, but not surprising. Seems that porting houses will always lag behind primary developers in terms of long-term support.

The Ubuntu thing is an internal standard since they started porting to Linux because it was the trending distro by then. Though they work on Fedora (and test on Ubuntu).
They've always been avoiding officially supporting any other distro because it's a mess to trouble shoot, what OS with which kernel on which desktop environment with which libraries, is it LTS or bleeding edge unstable repos, and so forth and so on.

So basically adapting their whole toolchain to switch to SteamOS 3.0 which is not released yet (though they could have asked for access), doing all the fine tuned adjustments for each and every game despite their philosophy to leave the original as much untouched they can, to finally dedicate most of their QA effort on Steam Deck units they would probably have not received in time.
All this for games they mostly already sold anyway within the lowest market share platform, for no further benefit working for Deck support.
Tbh I can't blame them.

Not to mention the Deck requirements are actually not trivial, fonts (which is a freaking nightmare, took them a couple years on Rome remastered to get it right), suspend and resume/cloud cross play, 720p, controls, battery life optimisations.
ONLY game devs actually understand how much effort is required for any single point of above.

Finally not even gonna talk about them kinda not planning more Linux projects, there is a "before" and an "after" Proton, it was great but I left for a reason.


Last edited by a0kami on 21 February 2022 at 7:09 pm UTC

Quoting: denyasisI guess it's another win for Valve and Open source successes. I guess I feel slightly conflicted about it. While I appreciate Feral's work, I'm also glad that open source tools like Wine/Proton have finally taken over in a meaningful way.

I guess it's both a loss and a gain.

it is a loss.
on one hand, its good that an general purpose solution like wine/proton is better than porting, but that says more about the porting process and quality than about wine.
the ideal solution is linux geting enough marketshare to be threated like an first class citizen and open apis like vulkan becoming the standard.
its almost like if we were living the flash era vs html5 era, flash was multiplatform but had an crap support for linux, where html5 would be the "native" solution, using open standards.
while wine is gpl, directX isnt.