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

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.

Such comments really disturb me and it happens again and again. If a company invests in Linux gaming and drops out or just skips a title for any reason, everyone screams evil and boycot.
Easier to ignore us. If valve makes the game somewhat playable, people will buy.

Feral had a key role in making LinuxGaming as awesome as it is today. It's sad they are not profiting from the current momentum. At the same time it's awesome we are not dependent on porting houses and their ability to get publishers into a contract any more. These contracts often were strangely restricted, we are aware of that for a long time. It's not their games and if the publisher doesn't make it worthwhile for them, they have done their job and are not forced to do work for no pay. Times have changed and they are free to go on. We should wish them luck and maybe they will play a role in the future.


Last edited by const on 21 February 2022 at 7:28 pm UTC

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

They are still porting Warhammer III to Linux. Other than that, they having been mostly porting to iOS. They have done some Switch and Android ports as well.

https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/ios-games/

Quoting: rustybroomhandleMany Windows-only games are being updated for Steam Deck. Controller support, correct controller glyphs, readable text, support for the quick suspend mode, on-screen keyboard support.

This is not the job of a porter though - it is something that needs to be fixed in the ported source.
Porting is not about altering the content or functionality of the source at all - not even font sizes - it's about making a code base run on another platform.


Last edited by Beamboom on 21 February 2022 at 8:05 pm UTC

Quoting: fagnerlnI 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.

good point, as an reminder, we CANT blame feral for only supporting one distro, its the fragmentation fault that things wich work on one might not work on others to begin with, not feral fault.

Quoting: Alm888

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 hope you at least play the games even if you have to pirate then, otherwise the only one losing will be yourself, and you will regreat it later looking back.

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

Android, iOS, switch ports (and a few mac/linux) there will always be a market for ports.
https://www.feralinteractive.com/br/upcoming/

Quoting: pbTo 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.

they have the know how for sure, and it would be a better use of their know how to work on a general purpose solution than individual cases.
maybe it dont make sense for their bosses cause that will hurt the demand for the company , but it would make sense for their employees to work at proton.

Quoting: elmapul

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.

Is it? I'm under the impression most of these porting companies use wrappers, don't they? It's not like they all rewrote the binary and renderer into openGL. Maybe some did, but Valve has toGL, I forget what Aspry's wrapper was, etc. I'd bet some of these older ports looked a lot like a windows game under the hood, and the proprietary porting tech worked a lot like wine in some cases. Heck, there are even projects using DXVK as a wrapper for porting. I believe there are a number of Linux releases on GOG that are essentially wrapped with Wine.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in a sense, we've put the power to "port" into our own hands, at a level simple users like me can leverage. And if a "native" port is just using its own wrappers and layers under the hood, is there really a huge moral difference there?

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: fagnerlnI 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.

good point, as an reminder, we CANT blame feral for only supporting one distro, its the fragmentation fault that things wich work on one might not work on others to begin with, not feral fault.

I'd expect the contract to port to be very specific with regards to what they are porting to, probably down to a specific distro/version. Imagine if you were told to port a game to "every Linux distro"; it would be impossible! Maybe some people here who do porting or freelance work have better insight, but it seems sensible to me to be very specific on the deliverables as a protection from client abuse/allegations.

Quoting: denyasisIs it? I'm under the impression most of these porting companies use wrappers, don't they?

People throw around the word "wrapper" as if it makes source code tools the same as runtime translation like WINE and nothing is really native.

To quote Feral: "It depends on your definition of Wrapper and Native, if you mean was the game developed from the ground up for Linux then it's not native as it is based off the Windows source.

If you mean was the game compiled from source on Linux and optimised for Linux specifically without any runtime wrappers (like WINE) then yes it is a native port."


Last edited by Raaben on 21 February 2022 at 8:43 pm UTC