<story><title>Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets</title><url>https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajvs</author><text>Have you not seen Steam Play these last few months? Because of Proton the majority of the top 250 highest rated games now run fine on Linux.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been playing Skyrim, Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3, Castle Crashers, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, etc all of which are Windows-only but now WINE is so good it runs like it&amp;#x27;s native.&lt;p&gt;Linux gaming doesn&amp;#x27;t suck anymore and it&amp;#x27;s coming to eat Windows lunch. Check out ProtonDB to see compatibility with your favourite games and the Linux gaming subreddit for more news.</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>Technically speaking I&amp;#x27;m sure you&amp;#x27;re right. In practice it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter though, if they did it that way it&amp;#x27;s either because it was easier or because that&amp;#x27;s the way they were used to doing it. The fact that &amp;quot;technically&amp;quot; it&amp;#x27;s not Linux&amp;#x27;s fault doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter, unless you&amp;#x27;re more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game.&lt;p&gt;Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? So that they&amp;#x27;d get kudo &amp;quot;clean code&amp;quot; points from people on HN? Most for-profit software cares very little about that, and for good reasons.&lt;p&gt;Gaming on Linux sucks because Linux is not popular for gaming. Linux is not popular for gaming because gaming on Linux sucks. That&amp;#x27;s the root of the issue.</text></item><item><author>rkido</author><text>Linux is the perpetual scapegoat.&lt;p&gt;They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn&amp;#x27;t work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn&amp;#x27;t make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don&amp;#x27;t make these mistakes, so this isn&amp;#x27;t really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making Linux&amp;#x2F;Mac support first class, by making a purely OpenGL engine for the game. But it seems they weren&amp;#x27;t aware of some other best practices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NicoJuicy</author><text>You know WINE exists 25 years though. During this time, Windows still has 95% market share ( &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;store.steampowered.com&amp;#x2F;hwsurvey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;store.steampowered.com&amp;#x2F;hwsurvey&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;p&gt;You could also think that, because of WINE, Windows is first class and then they check Linux with Wine.&lt;p&gt;Depends on the perspective.&lt;p&gt;PS. Yes, steam detects Wine</text></comment>
<story><title>Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets</title><url>https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajvs</author><text>Have you not seen Steam Play these last few months? Because of Proton the majority of the top 250 highest rated games now run fine on Linux.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been playing Skyrim, Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3, Castle Crashers, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, etc all of which are Windows-only but now WINE is so good it runs like it&amp;#x27;s native.&lt;p&gt;Linux gaming doesn&amp;#x27;t suck anymore and it&amp;#x27;s coming to eat Windows lunch. Check out ProtonDB to see compatibility with your favourite games and the Linux gaming subreddit for more news.</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>Technically speaking I&amp;#x27;m sure you&amp;#x27;re right. In practice it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter though, if they did it that way it&amp;#x27;s either because it was easier or because that&amp;#x27;s the way they were used to doing it. The fact that &amp;quot;technically&amp;quot; it&amp;#x27;s not Linux&amp;#x27;s fault doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter, unless you&amp;#x27;re more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game.&lt;p&gt;Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? So that they&amp;#x27;d get kudo &amp;quot;clean code&amp;quot; points from people on HN? Most for-profit software cares very little about that, and for good reasons.&lt;p&gt;Gaming on Linux sucks because Linux is not popular for gaming. Linux is not popular for gaming because gaming on Linux sucks. That&amp;#x27;s the root of the issue.</text></item><item><author>rkido</author><text>Linux is the perpetual scapegoat.&lt;p&gt;They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn&amp;#x27;t work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn&amp;#x27;t make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don&amp;#x27;t make these mistakes, so this isn&amp;#x27;t really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making Linux&amp;#x2F;Mac support first class, by making a purely OpenGL engine for the game. But it seems they weren&amp;#x27;t aware of some other best practices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selectodude</author><text>Why should I get excited about decent compatibility when I can stick with perfect compatibility? Linux gaming doesn&amp;#x27;t suck compared to linux gaming 5 years ago. It&amp;#x27;s still crap compared to Windows.</text></comment>