GOG is not a tiny store. And games like above (Life is Strange and etc.) are already there, so publishers have interest. Feral in particular has some problem.

For games like Life Is Strange, without Feral there wouldn't be a Linux version available at all, not just no Linux version on GOG. Game devs don't want to take on Linux support even if they've already made a Linux version. It's expensive and they're scared of it.

That's because they had no experts for it. Of course it's expensive to hire people. Increasingly they have them now, so the support is not a problem for them.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 June 2020 at 6:41 am UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: PublicNuisanceMore and more indie studios maybe but not more and more AAA studios.

Stadia happened, so that includes what you call "AAA" studios (I dislike that term though, it's pretty useless).

Stadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Quoting: ShmerlThat's because they had no experts for it. Increasingly they have them now.

They'll (hopefully - I've said myself that more general competence will be a good outcome from Stadia) have people that can make a game run on one Linux configuration, with help from Google. That might translate into game devs being able to use the Steam runtime with help from Valve. Game devs throwing themselves straight into the wild-and-wooly Linux ecosystem through GOG, when GOG don't care about Linux and won't give them any help, is a stretch too far.

Feral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing. What we want is for game devs to realistically look at the costs and benefits of supporting us and say to themselves, "yes, that is profitable. We'll do that." Even if they do that, most of them won't be on GOG.

Quoting: ShmerlIncreasingly they have them now, so the support is not a problem for them.

The support is all the problem.

Quoting: PublicNuisanceStadia games are not native Linux games. They are not Linux games any more than a PS4 gamer can say they are playing BSD games on their console simply because it's OS was based on BSD. If a game has released on Stadia but not available on Linux outside of it then it is not a Linux game.

Stadia developers are Linux developers. So these big studios have them now. Before they didn't have them. Whether they want to release for Linux or not is another question, but in the past when they wanted, they had to work with someone like Feral to do it. Today - not anymore.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 June 2020 at 6:57 am UTC

Quoting: CatKillerFeral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing

It's not a bad thing. It just means the previous business model became obsolete these days. They can do something else. Like I said, for example make their own games.

Quoting: CatKillerThe support is all the problem.

Skilled support is a problem. Now they have someone to address it or they are training these people in-house. I see it as a much better situation, than studios looking for external experts.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 June 2020 at 7:02 am UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: CatKillerFeral not being able to make supporting Linux gamers financially sustainable is a bad thing

It's not a bad thing. It just means the previous business model became obsolete these days. They can do something else. Like I said, for example make their own games.

Quoting: CatKillerThe support is [i]all the problem.

Skilled support is a problem. Now they have someone to address it.

Of course it's a bad thing. Your wish to buy your games on GOG has blinded you to the realities of the situation.

Making games for Linux is no harder than making games for Windows. Lots of people manage it. You'll likely need to learn different tools, but it's fundamentally the same stuff.

Making your games work on Linux from the start makes making games easier: you have another path to finding bugs, which makes your game better faster. You avoid platform-specific assumptions. The people who can do this already do.

For all the rest, they have one platform that they're familiar with and they can bludgeon their code to work on other fixed platforms if the market share has made the tools that will do that for them widely available and easy to use. Sturgeon's Law applies to game devs just as much as everything else.

They are absolutely terrified of ballooning support costs from supporting "all the fragmented Linux environments." They don't understand it, they don't use it, and their normal habits make things way harder for them and increase their costs from the start. Soothing those fears is the service that Feral provides: "your costs will never be higher than our fee and our royalty from all the extra sales we generate." If Feral, with their years of experience, can't keep that profitable, then what chance do green devs, who are likely to cock up at least one thing, have of making the case that it's viable for their company?

Support costs are what scare them, and losing Feral will scare them more.

The relevant metric is whether the Linux marketshare is big enough so that every corner-cutting dev can still make a profit from their inadequately-tested game release that uses middleware they chose with no regard to which platforms it worked on. The ones who try that when the market isn't big enough go and whine on Twitter about it and scare away others, and rile up Linux gamers which scares away more.

People that can develop properly will continue to develop properly, and some fraction of those will release games for Linux.

If Stadia is moderately successful, which is still an open question, then the corner-cutting devs will be throwing together a Vulkan game rather than a DirectX game, which is a win. They'll have tested their game on at least one version of Linux, which is a win. More of the middleware that they grab off the shelf without thinking is likely to work on Stadia, and so Linux, which is a win.

Maybe that will be enough to lower costs. Maybe the marketshare will grow enough organically so that the revenue is there. But it still needs to be profitable, and it needs to be seen to be profitable. The failure of the only porting house that gives a damn will be a blow to that, no matter how much you'd really like a high-profile Linux game on GOG.