Tomb Raider's Linux port from Feral Interactive delisted on Steam

I see this as a confirmation that "porting", intended as a company reworking a game developed for Windows by somebody else, is a failure.
Games need to be developed in parallel for all the intended platform. Paradox interactive does this right.

I see this as a confirmation that "porting", intended as a company reworking a game developed for Windows by somebody else, is a failure.

I guess it works for say 10%, but not for 1%. And not against Proton.

Games need to be developed in parallel for all the intended platform. Paradox interactive does this right.

And some others. Klei, Zach, ...

(I bet it's some dozens when looking close, even if you say they'd need to have at least three multi-platform games out.)


Last edited by Eike on 15 February 2022 at 2:18 pm UTC

I see this as a confirmation that "porting", intended as a company reworking a game developed for Windows by somebody else, is a failure.
Games need to be developed in parallel for all the intended platform. Paradox interactive does this right.

Well yes and no. In this particular case it looks like Ferals license simply expired and they decided to not renew it (most likely there having been not many sales or the new license cost was too high).

Update - 15/02/22: Feral press replied to say "The Linux version of Tomb Raider (2013) has been removed from sale due to the license expiring for that specific title. Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are still available to purchase on Linux.".

But to be totally honest here, I have more often than not ended up forcing the Windows version w/proton on the games where there was a native alternative. It simply worked better.

Yeah, that's the case for many older titles with native Linux. Proton for sure isn't the ideal solution, but it is way better than haphazardly put together native builds.
I still prefer a good native version any minute, but proton is a really usable substitute until our marketshare encourages the devs to do properly optimized native builds.
Still - i only buy at (or near) full price if there is either a native version or at least a somewhat official commitment to keep proton working.

I haven't run the game itself for a while, but the benchmark in the native version runs fine for me and it's easy to get good framerates at 1080p (except on the Aya Neo Pro which has a lower resolution screen) on just about anything I throw at it. I have run it on the following hardware, and being as old as it is, it definitely runs faster than the newer installments of Tomb Raider, despite their use of Vulkan:

Aya Neo Pro (so 1280x800)
Ryzen 5 3600X with Radeon RX560 4GB
Intel Xeon E3-1245 v3 low profile workstation with RX560 or Radeon Pro WX3100 (essentially the same as the RX560, but clocked a bit lower so falls just a bit short in performance comparison).
Intel I5 4570 with the same GPUs as the Xeon above.

Of course it runs fine on the Ryzen 5 with a Vega 56 or my main gaming computer at highest settings and 1440p as well.

Edit: Also, it's been a long time since I have regularly used an NVIDIA GPU, but when I tested it on the Xeon listed above with a GTX 1650, it also seemed to run fine. That was in 2019 2020 when I was upgrading an old office machine to give my nephew for gaming (it ended up with Windows 10, but my initial testing was with Linux).

2nd Edit: I meant to add that I played through the whole thing on my Ryzen 7 1700 with a Vega 56 on the highest settings at 1440p with no unusual issues back when I first played it.


Last edited by CFWhitman on 15 February 2022 at 6:48 pm UTC

One of the worst ports next to Borderlands 2 on Linux, and currently I prefer to use the Windows version with Proton than the native one...

Considering that apparently even games with good Linux ports are getting switched to their Proton version it sure feels like Proton killed native Linux ports for the most part.

I've noticed all the people I have looked at saying "Proton runs better" are using a Nvidia card

Me personally both TR and BL2 run far beter native than Proton! OSS FTW

Considering that apparently even games with good Linux ports are getting switched to their Proton version it sure feels like Proton killed native Linux ports for the most part.

I don't think it's too far out of the realm of possibility that a single, open-source translation layer being worked on by dedicated devs and a large community with substantial backing and funding (wine/proton) has surpassed a few smaller companys' after-the-fact game porting tools ("after-the-fact" referring to the original game dev's outsourcing of their linux port). Especially when those tools generally also had their own translation layers (especially graphics api's).

On the one hand, I'm very appreciative of Feral's high quality ports. I own almost all the linux ports they've released over the last 7 years, and I hope with increasing marketshare from the steam deck the number of companies looking to make new official native ports will increase (larger studios that require more control over the game and it's ports are unlikely to leave a large playerbase in the hands of a potentially volatile translation layer (proton) that not only has to support their game, but others as well).

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that other games didn't have low-quality ports. If I had to choose between a low-quality port and running the actively-maintained win32 version through proton, I'd take proton any day. And if the lower cost of support/maintenance of proton results in a game being officially tested/supported on linux, I'd call that a win.



Purely speculative, but I wouldn't be surprised if game-porting companies started offering a proton-compatibility service, wherein game studios could pay to have their games vetted through proton and tested with each new version to ensure it remains fully operational. Those services could also partner with Valve to make sure those games only use versions of proton that have been vetted by default, and contribute upstream to proton when issues are encountered. In that way, game devs could still pay to "officially" port their game to linux, but without the overhead, delays, and split project code of creating separate, native binaries.


Last edited by lectrode on 15 February 2022 at 9:18 pm UTC

i mean tomb raider runs miles better in proton than the port. proton has come so far that at this point we can just be happy that a title is fully playable.

I started up a game of Civilization VI recently, and out of curiosity decided to compare the native Linux version to the Windows version in Proton. I was stunned to find that the game performs substantially better in Proton. Using the graphics benchmark, native topped out around 25 FPS. In Proton, it's 70+ FPS!


Last edited by Mountain Man on 15 February 2022 at 9:58 pm UTC

i mean tomb raider runs miles better in proton than the port. proton has come so far that at this point we can just be happy that a title is fully playable.

I started up a game of Civilization VI recently, and out of curiosity decided to compare the native Linux version to the Windows version in Proton. I was stunned to find that the game performs substantially better in Proton. Using the graphics benchmark, native topped out around 25 FPS. In Proton, it's 70+ FPS!

But does it help turns flip over faster? For me the big thing with any Civ is, once I get into the later game, you're like waiting forever for the computer's turn.

i mean tomb raider runs miles better in proton than the port. proton has come so far that at this point we can just be happy that a title is fully playable.

I started up a game of Civilization VI recently, and out of curiosity decided to compare the native Linux version to the Windows version in Proton. I was stunned to find that the game performs substantially better in Proton. Using the graphics benchmark, native topped out around 25 FPS. In Proton, it's 70+ FPS!

But does it help turns flip over faster? For me the big thing with any Civ is, once I get into the later game, you're like waiting forever for the computer's turn.

I don't think it makes the AI run any faster.

i mean tomb raider runs miles better in proton than the port. proton has come so far that at this point we can just be happy that a title is fully playable.

I started up a game of Civilization VI recently, and out of curiosity decided to compare the native Linux version to the Windows version in Proton. I was stunned to find that the game performs substantially better in Proton. Using the graphics benchmark, native topped out around 25 FPS. In Proton, it's 70+ FPS!

But does it help turns flip over faster? For me the big thing with any Civ is, once I get into the later game, you're like waiting forever for the computer's turn.

I don't think it makes the AI run any faster.

Oh well.

It seems odd to me that they would have a time-limited license, since the vast majority of the work happens up front, but I suppose they can negotiate lower costs that way, and renegotiate/cancel in the future based on recent revenue.

I got that Tomb Raider port in a sale a few years ago...
Lately I've decided to stick to only buying indie games built with cross-platform engines, and, those seem to run more smoothly.

The native port has some black textures when using the recent NVIDIA drivers, but, other than that, I didn't have a single problem with it. It runs very smoothly on my GTX 1080, and even the multiplayer part works well (though it's virtually impossible to play with anyone, because there is no cross-platform multiplayer).
On the other hand, I understand why Feral don't bother with renewing the license.

i mean tomb raider runs miles better in proton than the port. proton has come so far that at this point we can just be happy that a title is fully playable.

I might try that. Always thought the port ran like ass so I never bothered to finish it or even get the other games.

Myself I don't find much problems running Tomb Raider 2013, it is sad the port is being removed.
It would be nice if these ports continued selling...

I guess people saying Proton runs better do that due to some almost religious reasons, as many run windows versions of native games "because they are intended to run this way" or "native Linux ports are not the same as original Windows games and I want original experience" and other obscure reasons, like save games compatibility. And most of them do not even check native port, which is very sad.