Overkill drops Linux support for PAYDAY 2

I am actually just glad if they keep supporting proton.
The fact is: proton is the only middle ware that guarantees support for the next 20 years. Not because it acts like windows, in fact it doesn't. Unlike windows, proton guarantees a fixed API and bug compatibility.
None of my original Linux games still work, but their windows counter parts work without problems or patches on proton. And no, they don't work on windows 11 either.

Well, I could hardly believe the situation with native Linux games is that bad, so I tried it on my side. I redownloaded and started the first 10 games I got for Linux on Steam, from late 2012 to mid 2013.(*) Every single one of them is running without problems and without any tinkering on my 2023 system.

(*) My PAYDAY: I got some new collectible cards. :D

It's mainly older titles, 2000s and earlier. But for a Linux game from Steam that doesn't work: Monaco.
I booted it up sometime last year, and it instantly crashed.
As it turns out, it's a known issue since launch, that they never fixed. The entire issue is solved by modifying a shader file.

Weird, pretty sure Monaco worked for me when it came out. One problem with gaming on Linux is we have two major vendors for gaming... and two completely different implementations of OpenGL / Vulkan. Windows has targets for DirectX. There is just enough of a difference on Linux that we have had porting houses specifically say they don't support one or the other, and it causes an already small market share to split.

If nvidia would just adopt Mesa... though I feel there could be issues with that. Playing with my AmigaOS4 box, it amusingly only wirks with Radeon cards, since they can access source code to get it to work.

Well, I could hardly believe the situation with native Linux games is that bad, so I tried it on my side. I redownloaded and started the first 10 games I got for Linux on Steam, from late 2012 to mid 2013.(*) Every single one of them is running without problems and without any tinkering on my 2023 system.

I recently tried EndeavourOS and couldn't get native games to run, in particular Payday 2 and Metro Exodus. Playing these games with Proton worked fine however. I checked drivers, vulkan and a few other things, but no luck. Never found out what was missing. Back on Manjaro, native games where running out of the box...

As much as I prefer to play native, I do love the fact that I can always use Proton as a fallback when the native version doesn't work anymore or gets dropped.

Weird, pretty sure Monaco worked for me when it came out.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/113020/discussions/4/630802343848424492/#c666824800759604947

Huh, well I have 58min of play time, but suure enough it crashes, even after making the change to the shaderfile.

Well, I could hardly believe the situation with native Linux games is that bad, so I tried it on my side. I redownloaded and started the first 10 games I got for Linux on Steam, from late 2012 to mid 2013.(*) Every single one of them is running without problems and without any tinkering on my 2023 system.

I recently tried EndeavourOS and couldn't get native games to run, in particular Payday 2 and Metro Exodus. Playing these games with Proton worked fine however. I checked drivers, vulkan and a few other things, but no luck. Never found out what was missing. Back on Manjaro, native games where running out of the box...

As much as I prefer to play native, I do love the fact that I can always use Proton as a fallback when the native version doesn't work anymore or gets dropped.

Maybe some 32bit libraries? (just a shot in the dark, I would think at least those two are 64bit native).

At least it still works well with Proton, so nothing significant lost!

On the flip side we could look at it and say something is gained. Now that the steam deck is here and pretty much people are exclusively using proton to game on modern titles, the motivation to make their next game work on proton may be higher as it is not seen as a 'moving target' like Linux is often portrayed as by developers and it must be easier to test if their build works on proton.
Of course there is the issue with anti-cheat, but again given the success and popularity of the steam deck, hopefully they are now aware of this and make the adjustments necessary.

but the ultimate reason is pretty much the same as always — Linux and Steam Deck together hold a less than 2% user share on Steam

Sorry, but no, that's wrong. The reason is this:

due to the Linux version being on an older version of the PAYDAY 2 engine

I.e. a terrible development environment, the developers being bad at their job.

That quote right there, that tells me that they kept the Linux codebase in a separate fork. That's bad praxis, that's objectively incompetent.

Forking the codebase to put in support for another platform is fundamentally wrong, and we see, time and time again, that this leads to the codebases growing apart with the developers not being able to keep up keeping them in sync, and then abandoning the other platform. 90% of the time were we had Linux support being wiped away was because of this very reason. Why aren't people learning? You don't do that.

Instead, you need to make portability a feature of your code outright, you need to make the same single codebase run on all the individual platforms. No forks, just one portable repository that can run everywhere. That's not new knowledge either, we've known that for decades!

While that is a terrible way to perform development it unfortunately is quite the norm. The studios do this with basically every single port, be it for the switch or ps5, which ultimately leads to them having several different versions of the same game instead of a single codebase where fixes for one platform means fixes for all. The reason of course is that it is initially much easier to do it this way, aka write your game for PS2 first then when it becomes popular send off the entire codebase to another company to port it to the Gamecube and once Gamecube is no longer a viable platform management can happily terminate that contract and the code is thrown in the can.

This is the same Overkill Software/Starbreeze Studios that struggled to maintain the Console version of PAYDAY 2 (thus: it gets abandoned) and failed to maintain parity with the PC Version...twice.

The fact that they managed to maintain the Linux port of PAYDAY 2 for the longest time, despite Overkill's weakness of multiplatform developer, is a miracle.

I think the idea is

there is no idea, the average joe knows jack shit about computers, he probably dont know what an source code is, or open source and call game modifications "mods" even if the mod was done with full source code access.
we dont call that mods, its "forks".

i own a few physical media games, and let me tell you, i dont know how to rip their content to save my life.

So any of tge open source wngines that need data are useless to you? I still have my Quake 1 CD somewhere... totally easy to download one of the updated engines and copy tge files off the disk. Hell, I install Doom on my Amigas and Atari Falcon this way.

I don't talk to enough normal people these days, but pretty sure most don't mod their games that much, except maybe Skyrim, which is a meh experience without them.

no, the ones i own are for n64 and ds , i dont know how to rip then to backup and the n64 ones arent working anymore, so having then in physical media is useless from a preservation point of view.

to be fair i have some pc games as well.

Instead, you need to make portability a feature of your code outright, you need to make the same single codebase run on all the individual platforms. No forks, just one portable repository that can run everywhere. That's not new knowledge either, we've known that for decades!

Proton totally nuked this concept.
There is only one platform for personal computer gaming and it's DirectX.
Even Apple gave up dedicated ports, they went fully Wine.

I don't sympathize at all, moreover, these "corporations" are adversaries to me. They hate their customers and don't deserve to have any.

You put something out, that people bought in good faith and are still using, you bloody well fix it. You don't just say "too bad, we're adding new shitware to our game and have decided to exclude you"

Pretty much. It is far worse in my mind to say you are going to support a port, and then drop support while still updating the other platforms, than it is to never support Linux in the first place.

I'll just make sure to not buy anything from them later. Granted I never got around to playing Payback 2...

Honestly, this is likely a coincidence but it is funny, literally yesterday Epic Games gives away PAYDAY 2 for free and on that same day, Linux support is dropped

Weird, pretty sure Monaco worked for me when it came out.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/113020/discussions/4/630802343848424492/#c666824800759604947

Huh, well I have 58min of play time, but suure enough it crashes, even after making the change to the shaderfile.

Worked for me as well, at the time when it was free to keep at Steam.
What would I need to test to say "It still works!"?

Nice! Hopefully this doesn't mean that gaming on Linux is going to drain down to sewers. Proton is a good thing ofc but atm I still I prefer a native Linux game over Windows one. But on the other hand the gap in game performance when you compare windows and Linux is shrinking so maybe soon it doesn't matter if you play on windows or on Linux using proton.And for me that means a lot!

Ok. I have just dropped it from my wishlist. Drop for a drop.

It's moves like this that are making me support FOSS games more. They usually actually care about Linux support regardless of financials.

Seems a lot of developers are counting on Proton to give them zero effort access to the Linux market. The good news is that Proton works extremely well. The bad news is... hmmm... Is there bad news? I'm not sure.

Seems a lot of developers are counting on Proton to give them zero effort access to the Linux market. The good news is that Proton works extremely well. The bad news is... hmmm... Is there bad news? I'm not sure.

Developers get to claim the benefits of supporting Linux without needing to worry if an update breaks support every few weeks because they don't officially support it, and so they don't test new updates. Players aren't entitled to complain about it because the game only supports Windows.

I don't know if "works extremely well" reflects my experience with Proton. Games take a minute or longer to startup while they compile shaders, because otherwise the game would be jittery the entire time, and sometimes it is anyway. It mostly works, I'll certainly give it that, and I'd rather it worked than didn't, but there's a long way to go until it works extremely well on most of the games I play (multiplayer games and DRM-encumbered visual novels sold outside of Steam).

Syncing up engine versions between platforms is a nightmare apparently for developers. I see this problem cropping up continuously with games that release for Linux and Windows or MacOS and Windows etc...

I think the idea is

there is no idea, the average joe knows jack shit about computers, he probably dont know what an source code is, or open source and call game modifications "mods" even if the mod was done with full source code access.
we dont call that mods, its "forks".

i own a few physical media games, and let me tell you, i dont know how to rip their content to save my life.

So any of tge open source wngines that need data are useless to you? I still have my Quake 1 CD somewhere... totally easy to download one of the updated engines and copy tge files off the disk. Hell, I install Doom on my Amigas and Atari Falcon this way.

I don't talk to enough normal people these days, but pretty sure most don't mod their games that much, except maybe Skyrim, which is a meh experience without them.

no, the ones i own are for n64 and ds , i dont know how to rip then to backup and the n64 ones arent working anymore, so having then in physical media is useless from a preservation point of view.

to be fair i have some pc games as well.

Generally DeOxit will help with getting old carts working again. There are ways to rip such things, though I think at this point most of those will have been ripped / archived by now.

Instead, you need to make portability a feature of your code outright, you need to make the same single codebase run on all the individual platforms. No forks, just one portable repository that can run everywhere. That's not new knowledge either, we've known that for decades!

Proton totally nuked this concept.
There is only one platform for personal computer gaming and it's DirectX.
Even Apple gave up dedicated ports, they went fully Wine.

I don't sympathize at all, moreover, these "corporations" are adversaries to me. They hate their customers and don't deserve to have any.

You put something out, that people bought in good faith and are still using, you bloody well fix it. You don't just say "too bad, we're adding new shitware to our game and have decided to exclude you"

Pretty much. It is far worse in my mind to say you are going to support a port, and then drop support while still updating the other platforms, than it is to never support Linux in the first place.

I'll just make sure to not buy anything from them later. Granted I never got around to playing Payback 2...

Honestly, this is likely a coincidence but it is funny, literally yesterday Epic Games gives away PAYDAY 2 for free and on that same day, Linux support is dropped

I honestly don't know what happened, Epic Games used to be one of the more pro Linux development studios. Up until Unreal Tournament 2004, they'd have Linux clients. Then the debacle of Unreal Tournament III... Granted their naming for those are as horrible as Windows versions...

Very disappointed with this to be honest. Payday 2 was one of the first games I was amazed to have linux support, I played it so much at that point.

I understand their reasoning, though in my opinion it doesn't bode well for Payday 3.

Let's be honest Linux native games outside of indie games are dead it's going to be proton or you don't get to play from now on. Thankfully the steam deck success could change that but as long as valve are fitting the bill for dxvk vulkan and proton. Native triple a games are a thing of the past. Now that feral are dead on Linux

Seems a lot of developers are counting on Proton to give them zero effort access to the Linux market. The good news is that Proton works extremely well. The bad news is... hmmm... Is there bad news? I'm not sure.

It does rely on steam continued support for proton dxvk and vulkan as well as continued funding for Mesa. Now at the minute the steam deck has been a success thank god but much like Google valve has form for getting bored and dropping projects see steam controller steam link and steam boxes

Native triple a games are a thing of the past.

Were native triple A games ever really a thing of the present?


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 10 June 2023 at 4:30 pm UTC

Native triple a games are a thing of the past.

Were native triple A games every really a thing of the present?

Not regularly, but a few did happen. I don't know if Total War counts as triple A, but Half-Life (Alyx) sure does.


Last edited by Eike on 10 June 2023 at 9:41 am UTC