Quoting: Maelrane

Quoting: edqeI'm a bit confused. What do you suggest they should have done?

Choose a middleware that supports the platforms they are (kind of) obliged to support because of their Kickstarter campaign?

Seriously, game developers expect us to read and accept the average of 1,000 letter pages of legal gibberish they use for their EULAs - and they don't read the two lines of system requirements where it states "Supports Windows, Mac and nothing else" on the middleware they're using? :p

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I'd guess in the addition of the usual "middleware" thing (seriously, you should think they'd check into whether or not their 3rd party modules support all platforms they want to deploy on before using them), it's probably a case of having only one person assigned to work on the Linux port in their spare time, because everyone else is busy with their next Windows game. :p

But hey, at least it will happen. Eventually. And as others have pointed out, Pillars of Eternity is around the corner.

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Blizzard has yet to make one game I'd be remotely interested in, so I couldn't care less about Blizzard not caring about the "2%" (btw. 2% of a whole lot of sales are a whole lot of money). Chances are that I wouldn't buy any of their games even if they'd run natively in Linux.

I wish the person starting the petition would have reacted more classy, though.

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Great article and I absolutely agree with the main point there: Many publishers will see no point in supporting Linux as long as we're willing to switch to another OS to use their products. This attitude is not exactly customer-friendly, but the gaming industry always had a "People want to play games, so they have to adapt to our wishes and not the other way around" attitude, after all. At least in the real life product world, companies usually don't get away with treating their customers like that. But gamers swallow intrusive DRM systems, unfinished and badly tested software and region locks without complaining, so why wouldn't the publishers dictate what OS gamers have to use and save some money in the process?

The flip side of the medal is of course that -not- dual booting will, at least at first, only hurt ourselves, since we will be unable to play the games we want. Only two years ago, not willing to dual boot (or use Wine, which for the purposes of this consideration is the same thing, as dual booting as it takes away pressure on devs to support Linux natively) basically meant not playing any professional-quality games at all. Nowadays, this has of course changed considerably (mainly thanks to Steam) and some of us might be able to get away without ever booting Windows again. But 1000 available games or not, but there are still glaring gaps in Linux gaming. There is a plethora of great strategy games available for Linux I pretty much all bought (yay for Paradox!). But I also love MMORPGs and there is not a single decent one available for Linux. On the other hand, the dozens of platformers and zombie games available for Linux don't do anything for me, because I don't like either platformers or survival horror. Whether or not you still feel any pressure to dual-boot really depends on your taste in gaming, even in 2015.

What I personally do is that I still dual-boot when I have to, but around one year ago I made the decision not to buy any game anymore that doesn't support Linux natively. So right now I get the best of both worlds for myself. I still play the (older) games on Windows that aren't available for Linux, including the MMORPGs. But my money goes to publishers that support the OS I want to use. And that's what counts for me.

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