Important to note that Fortnite does launch on the steam deck, but the anticheat kicks you out a couple seconds into the match.
The game does run. It’s Epic.
lol so he’s completely lying then
Yes
No, he didn’t say it needs more users to port it, just to support it. Support means more than getting it working, it means testing and customer support if there are issues, which means training testers and support people.
The extra load here would be much lower if it was a single player game, but because it’s MP, they need to know how exploitable it is by cheaters, and perhaps patch some vulnerabilities out.
It’s a lot more than flipping a switch, but it’s also something Epic could totally handle. He’s not lying, he’s just content to milk his cash cow as long as he expects to not lose too many customers by not supporting Linux.
No
No
It’s Epic
That doesn’t sound very Epic to me.
what’s fortnite’s anticheat like? my understanding is that a lot of games that would normally have no problem running on some flavor of linux or another but their anticheat software requires some ridiculous level of privilege that linux won’t (and shouldn’t) give it
Fortnite uses Easy Anti Cheat, which is made by Epic (that is, Fortnite’s own developer). EAC works fine on Linux; it just needs the developer to enable it.
Note
Epic bought Easy and made the Linux version for it. It’s there because of them
The issues are likely development related not anti-cheat
It could be that, or they just really know their community. If the cost of getting it working on steam deck and maintaining it is not substantially less than the income brought from the platform It doesn’t make any sense to utilize the platform.
It’s the same thing basically, you could have unlimited devs if cost wasn’t an issue
But they have 9 platforms already that all have to work together and every feature has to work on before release so it’s a lot of work.
Like the last line says, they want the user base to be big enough for them to support it
Exactly, Sweeney isn’t a complicated man, he’s just a greedy one. If choice a is less profitable than choice b, he’ll pick choice b. In this case, it’s Linux support vs other dev efforts, and the other dev efforts are apparently more profitable than Linux support.
And that’s my favorite quality about him, and it makes it really easy to avoid his products. It’s why I mostly play indies and use lemmy, I’m fine with lower production value if the quality of the overall experience is better.
I wouldn’t call Epic greedy
They have one of the more indie friendly Engines
That’s a side effect, not the goal. The goal is to make a ton of money on microtransactions, that’s why they have a revenue sharing licensing model, not a per seat model. They don’t lose much by being friendly to smaller devs, because they’re banking on raking in profits from the few that go viral.
I argue that until the recent change, Unity was the best engine for indie devs. You pay per seat and that’s it, you keep the rest. And you don’t pay until you make more than $100k, just like Unreal (Unreal is 5% after your first $1M). So if you earn $2M, you’ll pay $50k to Epic or $2k/seat for Unity (assuming pro plan). If you expect to make >$1M, Unity will probably be cheaper for smaller studios. If you want support, Unreal charges $1500/seat/year for the Enterprise option, and you still need to pay for royalties.
So here’s how I’d decide which to use:
- Godot - most indie games
- Unity - indie games with high revenue expectation (if it takes off), and studios with infrequent releases (you only pay if you’re making >$100k)
- Unreal - big 3D games with latest tech, or indie studios with lots of smaller games with lower average revenue targets
Most studios don’t need the features of Unreal, so it’s an odd choice for your random indie studio.
Excuse me? EAC is Exact Audio Copy. There can be no other.
Out of all the hills that are out there, this is the one you’re going for?
Interesting choice
Wooooosh
Wiiiiiiiiish
Whoa.
…What?
i fucking love exact audio copy btw
I thought it had a combination, eac and something else.
My understanding is that it uses EAC and Battleye, but in an “either/or” arrangement. That is, both are installed but which one is activated when you boot the game is essentially random (or driven by some logic that is not readily apparent).
Battleye also claims to have native Linux support.
But even if it didn’t, it would be trivial to have a Linux version which only used (the Linux version of) EAC. Presumably Epic have enough faith in their own anticheat product to rely on it for their flagship game for a small minority of users.
Apparently they have enough developers to add in crappy emotes and crossovers but not enough to support one of the most popular operating systems… makes sense
Saying “one of the most popular operating systems” when there’s only 3-4 serious, mainstream contenders doesn’t mean much.
And Linux desktop is less than 2%
For gaming I’m fairly sure that overtakes macOS
Yeah exactly, it’s the lowest of the major ones… not saying it’s bad or anything, just not exactly attractive to game devs
Yeah, I think 10% is where it’s definitely attractive, though macOS got away with far less, probably because of how much their customers tend to spend on hardware and software.
Those are artists not developers
Lmao at one of the most popular.
I don’t agree that Epic doesn’t have enough resources, but realistically Linux makes up such a tiny proportion of systems I don’t blame any other developer for not supporting it. Would be a waste of resources.
Well Linux is certainly one of the top 3 most popular pc operating systems.
Yup, with ~2% market share. That’s like a fart in the wind, you’ll probably smell it, but it’s not worth actively doing anything about.
I love Linux and use it 100% outside of work (macOS at work), but I also 100% appreciate how little large companies care about it since it doesn’t even make a dent either way to their profits. We’re a rounding error to them, and until we get more marketshare, it’ll continue to be that way.
I wish they would support Linux, but I honestly only see risks and not many benefits to Epic to do so. Steam dominates Linux, so EGS probably wouldn’t make a dent there, and the costs to fix potential bugs that enable cheaters on Linux is probably higher than the revenue they expect to make (at least compared to other ways they could spend their resources).
Compare and contrast
You weren’t supposed to see this!
I mean we all know that, he didn’t need to say anything. They want to make billions and they think Linux doesn’t have enough users to get those billions going. Not worth it to them. But hey, fuck him, fortnite is a shit game anyway.
I think, people here look at it from the wrong side.
The code changes required for Linux support aren’t the issue.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
I’m not saying that it’s good, but top capitalists tend to be capitalists.
And in the end, I’m pretty sure someone who has all the business figures and frequently has to defend those in front of the shareholders probably knows much better what makes business sense than any of us. Someone like him goes where the money flows.
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros
It absolutely does not mean that.
Pick a steam deck, support a steam deck, 3 major releases. If the SD runs on enterprise Linux that’s a 10 year support window.
That’s a perfectly viable plan - much like “releasing on x box” - and with an understandable market clearly delineated. Everything else can be “hey try, but don’t call us” and we’d all still try.
This is a really good idea–they officially support the steam deck, and that means it’s unofficially supported on other Linux distros. The community gets what it wants without a huge extra load on Epic.
Honestly, I’d just test on Steam Deck (performance, recent libs) and Debian (desktop experience, older libs) and that’s it.
They also need to fix any exploits they find, which means they probably need Linux devs.
Most games that work on Steam Deck aren’t technically Linux-compatible and therefore have no “Linux support” needed. Proton has come very very far, and most games are running the Windows exe through Steam using Proton.
In fact, I’ve played several games that do have native Linux support, and they still play better using the Windows version through Proton. On my Steam Deck, and on my shitty non-gaming laptop.
So no, they don’t have to support anything new.
Exactly. Making the game WINE-compatible is not the same thing as committing to support. In reality, the only thing stopping WINE from working is Epic Anti-Cheat and the absurd thing about this is that Epic already gave EAC a WINE-compatibility mode – they’re just actively choosing not to turn it on.
What Tim’s really saying is this:
I don’t want our flagship game to be used as a way to highlight Steam’s better Linux support, so the game won’t come to Linux until EGS on Linux is at parity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense for us to bother doing that right now because the Linux usershare is too small to matter.
I’m going to do a hard disagree here - they don’t have to support Linux, just add compatibility in terms of anti-cheat for Linux. Proton is likely good enough to run the game itself but the anti-cheat sees Linux and just craps itself.
They don’t even have to provide support - League of Legends runs on Linux if you install the game using community scripts and custom proton, and while the client runs poorly nobody spams the Riot Games support about how the “Linux version” client doesn’t work the well because people understand that it’s a community effort. Riot themselves have only made a statement saying how they’ll try not to break the game for Linux users, and that’s pretty much it.
League of Legends is a massively popular game as well, yet Riot barely has to do anything to maintain it on Linux, let community fix issues that come up, let community provide support as it’s their tools.
And while I do understand that porting an anti-cheat to be more friendly to another operating system isn’t an easy task (such as for Rust, where they tried to make the anti-cheat compatible with Linux but it introduced other issues so it got shelved), I think you’re vastly overstating the amount of areas a company has to cover for a game to be playable on Linux.
There’s a difference though.
If the game doesn’t work for (some or all) Linux users, that’s not a big problem from Epic’s POV. They’ll lose a couple users that wouldn’t have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.
But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That’s now a problem for the whole game’s user base and consequently for the publisher as well.
Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn’t work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.
(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it “just works as expected”)
Speaking as a former game cheater…
Cheaters are going to cheat. Booting into Linux isn’t going to change that.
Anti-cheats just keep the filthy casuals from cheating. A broken anti-cheat on Linux would be fixed pretty quickly.
Sure, but that’s dev resources they need to spend on a small market, and they’d suggest need to hire Linux devs or pull from other projects. It’s quite likely the math just doesn’t add up given the likelihood for profit for other uses of those resources.
I doubt Epic would lose money in it, but they probably wouldn’t make as much as other options.
EAC has a check box for Proton compatibility. Battleeye is linux native. All they have to do is check a box, and test to see if they can break it. If they let it out in the works and there’s some influx of cheaters, they can check the box again. Halo Infinite, Apex Legends, Smite, Battlebit etc etc were all capable of checking the box and testing.
I suspect Sweenys hesitation over support is caused by a lack of control.
Upgrading EAC in an unreal engine game is trivial, it’s basically baked into the engine. They update EAC all the time.
The only thing stopping Fortnite from running on Linux is the anticheat. The anticheat it uses it made by Epic, and has a specific option for WINE compatibility.
If I remember correctly it actually uses two separate anti-cheat, and the second one not made by Epic doesn’t have Linux or Wine support.
But it’s still a weak excuse that they could just make a Linux version without that redundant second anti-cheat.
Unless they changed it, the other one is Battle eye which also has Linux support
Dude, steam ships with a bunch of libraries enabling cross distro support. It ain’t that complicated https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md
To be honest… Yes it’s that complicated. I’ve read that, Apparently valve had to spent massive ressource to figure out the load order of librairies and what to include for the steam runtime.
Granted, all they made is open source iirc. But it was a massive pita
Yes, their first attempt used load order overrides and search patch patching. Now, it uses linux containers to ship an isolated environment. Think of it as more similar to docker (or LXC/LXD). That said, I haven’t used it myself to so cannot comment on how difficult it is to use. Most people here are advocating for them permitting proton use without necessarily supporting it officially though. Which can easily be done by changing an option in EAC.
deleted by creator
Did you read the second line of my post?
The code changes aren’t the issue.
Did you read my comment? They ship with libraries to unify distribution across distros
I said: Code changes are easy, all the other things in regards to supporting playing on Linux (anticheat, support requests, testing, …) is hard.
You said: But code changes are easy because steam has libraries to unify distribution.
Do you see the problem here?
What are you going to tell me next? That code changes are easy?
If it can be made to run via Steam, then they only need to support it as far as getting it installed in Steam. Either Proton or native, it can be made an invisible issue from the user perspective. They have made a choice not to do so.
Right, no need to support 20 distros. One distro, known hardware. Anything else, you’re on your own.
If Steam can install on it, then it’s done. The distro doesn’t matter in this case. If Steam’ll install, then you’re done.
EA/Respawn somehow haven’t had a problem with doing that with Apex legends.
Apparently, their cost calculation is different. Also, Fortnite has about 50x active users compared to Apex Legends. That also changes a lot.
Sweeny said it doesn’t make business sense for them and if it will make sense in the future, they will support Linux.
I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.
I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.
Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.
Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.
Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.
Well, if half a million people are guessing on a choice of two options, some are going to get it right. But that’s not due to the insight of the people, but due to numbers.
Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.
These examples really don’t apply here.
- Windows Phone, Blackberry and Nokia were caught up in a massive market change where they where too little and too late.
- Stadia was a purpously risky gamble to be first at a potential “next big thing” and was scrapped when the global economy crumbled and cloud gaming showed no signs of wide spread adoption. If anything, this is the opposite situation than Epic and Linux.
- Hangouts was renamed and merged with other Google chat apps, but in the end they now have messages, which is the messenger with the highest install count worldwide.
- EGS is still a comparably new thing, considering that Steam is in the market since ~20 years while the EGS is here only ~5 years. They are growing steadily, so this is not an example that we can look at in retrospect, because it’s still unfolding. Also, sure it would have been great if they would have had to run a game distribution platform in 2003, but their money shower didn’t start until Fortnite exploded in 2017. And they pretty much immediately got into the business when they had the money to.
Also, there are some other factors in play that you didn’t consider.
Smartphones exploded between 2007 and 2010. It went from nothing to almost everything in just a few years, and those who got lucky and where ready at the right time managed to take the new market. Windows Mobile proves that it’s not enough to be super early. You need the right timing in both directions.
There is no indication that Linux will have >50% market share among gamers within the next 3 years. Yes, it nudged Linux over the 3% mark but at that rate it’s going to take a long while. Also, contrary to smartphones vs feature phones, the steam deck is an additional gaming PC for on the go. It doesn’t replace desktop gaming.
Also, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Steam Deck is a distant fourth between Android, iOS and the Switch.
And even if you limit the scope to x86 mobile gaming, they are by far not the only competitor. There are lots of others, many of them using Windows, who do the same.
And the biggest edge the Steam Deck is it’s value, because Steam subsidizes the Deck with their Store sales. Most people don’t care whether it runs Linux or not.
Does it have to support every permutation or just a standard one like SteamOS?
It feels like none of the replies to you actually read your comment. I appreciate you taking the time to offer up possible explanations with examples. Thank you!
Except he’s completely wrong because containers work specifically to solve the problem of deploying across different configurations. Valve already figured this out a decade ago with the steam runtime. That’s why I can run a relatively obscure OS like Bazzite and nearly my entire library of AAA just works like it would on any other distro. You can run a container across hundreds of thousands of different configurations, it doesn’t matter.
Yeah, pretty much all answers are “You are wrong, the code change is easy”.
Kinda sad that people don’t make it even to the first line.
lol why are you simping for them? they made a choice not to do this. they could easily do it with their manpower if they didn’t, you know, keep laying people off in order to maximize profits. You’re also overinflating how difficult it is to make games cross-platform compatible with the tools available today.
It sucks a lot when people are so deep in their petty trench fights over brands that they think there is only “Me for this, You for that, You simp”.
I don’t care about Epic and neither do I care for Steam. I buy my games where I get them the cheapest: Key resellers. And I don’t care on which online store the cheapest price lands.
If I was still developing games, I’d deploy them on both or on the one who pays me the most for an exclusivity deal.
With that out of the way: I am only explaining simple backgrounds to people interested to listen.
But sadly so many people fight over an online shop as if it was politics.
Do you fight like that for your favourite online retailer? Or your favourite supermarket chain?
What Steam and Epic do is business. They are no charities. They do stuff that makes them money. So any sane user should see it as a business transaction and buy where the price is best for what you get.
LOL I have no skin in this game. Your comment is pure projection and I think that you have demonstrated precisely what I was arguing.
Them not bother with Linux says all there is to say about their anti trust cases. Only thing that bothers them about monopolies is that they arent one, and even when there is an opportunity to enter into a market where there is no competitors they don’t want to bother investing in it. They don’t care about open platforms or investing in it first.
It’s why they were late to getting a hold of PC distribution. And in the unlikely event Linux OS takes off be complaining about Steam’s presence there.
I don’t think they’ve ever cared about open platforms, they just care about profit. The Google and Apple cases were intended to allow them to bypass the app store fee for microtransactions. That’s it.
So them not supporting Linux has nothing to do with Linux itself, but the possibility for profit. If you read between the lines, Sweeney is basically saying, “our people are making more money on other projects than they would working on Linux support.” If Linux had lots of users that wouldn’t play on their other platforms, they could possibly make more by supporting Linux than other efforts (e.g. more cosmetics).
Sweeney is a simple guy, if it makes him more money than what he’s currently doing, he loves it. If it doesn’t, he’ll avoid it. There’s no deep seeded hatred of Linux here (EAC and Unreal Engine both support Linux, and the old Unreal Tournament games were Linux native), he just likes money more than anything else.
Sweeney is uncomplicated, and I like that. There’s no veiled promises or expectations, so it’s really easy to understand exactly why he does the things he does. I don’t buy his games or use his platform because I expect him to do the bare minimum to make money, so I instead spend my time and money elsewhere. Valve earns my business, Epic does not. I don’t hate Sweeney or Epic, I just find them uninteresting.
It’s a Linux problem because you can’t ensure a kernel module in Linux is untouched by the user. This is a design on Linux. This means Linux and secured anti cheat solutions are fundamentally at odds.
Client running code should always be considered compromisable, that’s security 101. Relying on kernel module checks is a terrible practice, and not a fundamental guarantee of safety either.
Good, secure anti-cheat happens serverside. But that’s harder and less broadly applicable, so Epic doesn’t want to bother with it.
Client code isn’t trusted but no matter what the is one set of data you most trust that comes from the client. Input data. So with input data it can be manipulated that another application calculate out a headshot and sends that input. So even only trusting the client where you have to, you’ve failed to secure the game fully because you need to trust input data.
The first rule of network programming: Never trust the client. How does anti-cheat software work? It trusts the client.
All clientside anti-cheat is fundamentally flawed and broken by design. It doesn’t actually prevent cheating it just creates an illusion that it’s preventing cheating. The fewer people that believe in that illusion the better off we’ll all be.
Besides, you can train AI to play any game via MITM in USB (plug the mouse and keyboard into the Raspberry Pi or similar which then pretends to be a mouse and keyboard to the computer playing the game). The simplest method is to just point a camera at the monitor but there’s much lower latency ways where you use some cheap Chinese HDMI decoder/encoders to feed the raw video signal right into the AI.
With methods like that becoming cheaper and easier every day the whole client-side anti-cheat bullshit kinda seems pointless, yeah?
We’ve already established you have to trust the client to some extent in a typical game.
Also do you lock your front door despite people being able to lockpick it? Most people do because it raises the barrier to entry.
Do I lock my door? Absolutely.
Do I let strangers into my home? As little as possible.
Most people put security cameras in their homes despite them being able to be remotely hacked. Lots of people have an Alexa which could also be seen as letting a stranger in. A lot of people use tools that could be used to compromise their direct use but trust they don’t as for things like anti-cheat being malware. That’s all FUD. There has not been a single large anti-cheat company known to be sending unneeded or personalized user data.
Cheats nowadays don’t even need to run on your machine. You can get a second computer that is connected to your computer via a capture card, analyze your video feed with an AI and send mouse commands wirelessly from it (mimicking the signal for your USB receiver).
These anti-cheats are nothing more than privacy invasion, and any game maker that believes they have the upper hand on people that want to cheat are very wrong.
Opening up anti-cheat support for Linux would at least make them more creative at finding these people from their behaviour, and not from analysing everything that’s running in the background.
Anti cheat should always be primarily server-side, but devs are lazy
None of these solutions are lazy, and I promise you they have large server side components too. From what I can tell, shooters are just especially cursed when it comes to cheating, and there’s no real way to stop it.
It is fundamentally impossible to secure a Turing complete system.
Yes but also the barrier to entry on those sorts of hacks is very high. Every houses front door lock can be picked in the matter of minutes. The issue is that lots of people don’t have that skill.
Lastly there are heuristic anti cheat but that’s really only a catch all for inhuman inputs. Not a full solution.
Sounds like the same excuse that would be made back in 2008 when epic felt consoles were more worth investing in than PC and only seeings cons to the hardware, and took until 2018 to even bother to try to start their own digital distribution.
And here’s Linux in its infancy just beginning to start becoming a little more accessible to regular people, and potential to enter the market early and also get more control compared to all the platforms run by other companies they complain about. And yet, like before they don’t want to bother investing in anything themselves and taking risks to get established first before competitors gain a foothold.
Simple fact is for all the technical excuses they don’t care unless another company shows it is profitable to do first.
Why should they. They are in the business if making innovative and interesting games. Not innovative hardware or dealing with 2% of the marketplace. They don’t even fully support Mac which has a larger market share. I can’t blame them for making their business one of reducing risks in underdeveloped areas.
Because fuck you, that’s why
Sadly he didn’t clarify why it’s the Linux being problem here. If there are any technical obstacles, why can’t he say something’s too broken on the Linux side of things so that community or Valve could fix it?
He means Linux problem as in: not enough players to justify supporting it, while those low amount of players also account for like 70% of the bug reports
while those low amount of players also account for like 70% of the bug reports
And we have other developers saying that according to their metrics, most bugs linux players report are cross-platform and it’s only unbalanced because we’re the only people who actually bother to report bugs.
those low amount of players also account for like 70% of the bug reports
Those bug reports are often real bugs that affect other platforms too.
https://www.pcgamer.com/indie-dev-finds-that-linux-users-generate-more-better-bug-reports/
Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific, that is, would only happen on Linux.
Turns out, the people who are more technically proficient and use software built and maintained by a community that necessitates bug reports, report bugs more often than the “it just (sometimes) works” OS users. Who knew?
You mention bug reports as if they care to fix bugs in the first place.
Yup, they care about cheaters scaring away paying customers. Supporting another platform increases the attack surface of the game, at it needs enough new customers to be worth the risk.
That’s it. If Linux support doesn’t have a high chance of significantly increasing profit, and it has a risk of pushing cash cow, they’re not going to do it.
For that one game. There may be more games experiencing this but the 70% number I’ve seen is from one developer so far.
Bullshit, he means Linux problem as in: “My main competitor is heavily invested in turning gaming on Linux into a viable platform.”
If supporting Linux doubled his profits, he’d do it. Sweeney has a price, and Linux hasn’t met it.
He did in the next sentence. There’s not enough players on Linux to justify it.
“The Linux Problem” = “Not enough people using it for us to care”
That’s a public line. It’s BS. Sweeny has been actively trying to torpedo gaming on Linux for YEARS. I don’t know if it’s just “Steam is good for Valve so it’s bad for me”, or if it goes deeper than that, but it’s obvious in the last decade of behaviour.
IDK, Unreal Engine runs on Linux, can export to Linux, and the Unreal Tournament games are released on Linux.
I really don’t think he hates Linux, I believe him that he didn’t see a financial point in supporting it for their games. People seem willing to use Windows to play their games, so there’s not a strong financial incentive to support another platform.
If you want Sweeney to change his mind, get more people to use Linux exclusively. Personally, I prefer to ignore him.
IDK, Unreal Engine runs on Linux, can export to Linux, and the Unreal Tournament games are released on Linux.
You are cherry picking. What about EVERYTHING ELSE?
What are you talking about? I’m merely showing that he has supported Linux in the past, and at least some of his companies products support it today (Unreal and EAC).
The reason EGS and Fortnite don’t support Linux isn’t because he hates Linux, but because he doesn’t see profit in it. And I don’t blame him, Linux probably isn’t profitable in the short or medium term for EGS or Fortnite.
Steam didn’t start supporting Linux because they saw short or medium term profit, it was a long term investment to keep an option open in case Windows was able to force stores to share profit on their platform. Now that Windows has kind of backed off that, they’re doubling down because the Steam Deck provides another option to increasing sales and appealing to more people.
I don’t hate Tim Sweeney for not supporting Linux, but I am a bit disappointed though. But if Linux gains enough marketshare (not sure how much we’d need, but maybe 5%?), he’ll likely change his mind. He’s interested in profit, and Linux just isn’t an attractive enough platform for that right now for EGS. Maybe that’ll change in the future.
I have never and probably will never give EGS any of my money, but that didn’t mean I hate Sweeney or his products, it just means they provide no value to me, so I’m uninterested, much like he is with Linux.
Am I the only one that doesn’t actually give a fuck if fortnite is on steam deck or not.?
Hell I’m happier with it not.
So it would upset you if it was available on the platform?
I would… Actively scoff…
Then you’re an elitist asshole. Let other people enjoy things without needing to feel superior.
Need I put a /s? Really?
It’s more that having a game like that support linux would do a ton to quiet the “You can’t game on Linux” crowd.
Fortnite what? Isn’t that the crack the 12 year old video gamer nerds smoke?
I have no interest in it whatsoever, and I’ve banned my kids from playing it because I think it’s predatory.
That said, I wish it was supported in Linux because that would likely instead Linux marketshare, which makes it more attractive to support for other studios, which means more working games on my platform of choice.
I don’t care if Fortnite falls off a cliff and destroys itself, but I do care if it works on Linux.
So he want the game to get to 10 millions player on steam deck only then support it, but without supporting it the game won’t get to 10 millions player. It’s not a linux problem Tim, it’s you.
No.
He wants the Steamdeck user base to be 10 million, so it’s large enough to support a player base that can generate revenue if targeted.
And frankly it’s not a him problem. Nearly every dev refuses to release on Linux (and Mac) because of its small user base.
Support for Steam Deck != support for Linux version. Steam Deck use Proton to run Windows game on linux seamlessly.
Their direct competitor, Apex Legend, is steam deck verified. Big games like Monster Hunter World/Rise, Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Elden Ring, etc etc, all steam deck verified. Check out this page for more info
It’s not a Linux problem, it’s a Tim Sweeny problem.
10 million is just an arbitrary number he will not honor when it is reached.
Valve has sold ‘multiple millions’(source) already. The 10 million will probably be reached soon. Not even to mention all the Linux users.
And frankly it’s not a him problem. Nearly every dev refuses to release on Linux (and Mac) because of its small user base.
Yes it is. He does not have to release for Linux. He just needs to allow the anti cheat to run on Proton. This is a simple config change not more. Fortnite will probably run fine on Proton.
It’s one thing to not release for Linux (thanks to wine and proton it’s no Biggie) another thing is to actively sabotage it to run on Linux which some Developers who can’t check a fricking Checkbox in EAC do.
Not preventing Linux use is implicit support, and it opens up another platform for cheaters to exploit. So if it works and your entire game is based on the online, MP experience, you need to QA on all possible platforms to stay on top of cheaters.
With that mind set explains why Epic was so late into trying to get into PC distribution.
Wuh? They started on PC.
ZZT was fucking amazing to play and make games with as a kid.
And look how late they were when it came to launching their own digital platform. I’m not taking about games being on PC.
This is a company that saw consoles more worth putting resources towards and didn’t see it worth it too start their own Steam competitor even back in 2008.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Tim-Sweeney-Says-the-PC-Is-Dead-for-Games-80714.shtml
They had many chances to become the go to digital platform for PC.
Every gaming company basically thought the PC was dead for gaming, only to be relegated to nerd paying high prices for hardware to play niche nerdy shit.
Honestly I still don’t know what changed, even Japanese devs are releasing on PC again, it’s a weird time.
PC gaming has only had a slow, steady rise since Steam entered the scene. But perhaps one other catalyst might have been the Games For Windows initiative (not “Live”) that standardized controller support, added some extra marketing oomph, and gave more incentive to make the same game on PC and console rather than making two entirely different games (sometimes with the same title, like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter).
Well apparently Valve didn’t get the memo. By the time PS3 came out and the further into the Gen it got it became clearer that digital was the way forward. And you’d think a company with PC roots would have gotten their own digital distribution platform started once steam sales caught on.
The whole everyone thought pc was dead excuse is a poor one because Epic took until 2018 to bother with their own distribution platform. That’s a hell of a long time and too many years from the PC is dead excuse.
That’s what I mean by many many many missed chances. They had over a decade to enter as it became more and more obvious the money there was to be made from PC gamers.
Why should they have a distribution platform? Pretty much every game except Gears of War had a Windows release, and at least I never considered a digital distribution platform as a kid since boxed games worked just fine. I didn’t have a Steam account until Steam came to Linux, yet I played plenty of PC games in the meantime on both Windows and Linux. I bought a mixture of boxed games and online downloads, I didn’t need a launcher to do that for me.
Yes, they missed the boat, but it wasn’t obvious that the boat was going where they wanted to go. Valve took that risk and won big, but other large studios didn’t and were absolutely fine focusing on game dev, and it wasn’t until recently that they wanted in.
I think stardust meant Epic Games was very late in opening their own storefront, to become a distributor on PC.
Yes that’s correct. They seemed dismissive of it even back in 2008 seeing more cons than potential in the market. It’s like the Windows approach to smartphones entering in after Android and iOS established themselves. Except even later with years and years passing as it became clearer PC gaming was becoming more accessible and it’s own formidable market. They missed a lot of earlier chances to enter.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Tim-Sweeney-Says-the-PC-Is-Dead-for-Games-80714.shtml
They don’t have to release on Linux at all!!
All they have to do is click a checkbox in the EAC SDK & contact Battleye to support Valve’s Proton & that’s it!!
It is a Tim Sweeney problem.Also, Unreal Engine, which the Epic Games Launcher was built in for some reason also has a checkmark for Linux, and they refuse to tick it. It’s to the point that while it is possible to do development for Unreal on Linux, they had to build a completely different way to get it up and running since the launcher doesn’t support Linux.
They consciously make efforts not to support Linux, it would literally take less effort to do it.
To be entirely fair this is much less of a “tick the Linux box” solution, you actually have to program thing differently to work on Linux in that case. They obviously have the resources to do it but it’s less infuriating than the literal single click it would take to enable EAC on Linux on $game.
Pretty sure you’re wrong, got any source on that info?
To be fair, you don’t look at the whole picture.
Yes, generating a Linux build wouldn’t require a lot of changes to the code.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
They don’t even have to support Linux. They just have to stop actively preventing the game from launching on Linux platforms.
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Linux is preventing people from booting up Steam Deck?
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Exactly.
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Epic games has its own store: its competing. There is no way they want to support the steamdeck right now. Same goes for xbox/Activision in a lot of ways and anything they’re doing for the time being is just a way to sedate the law makers that objected to M$ activision acquisition.
Going to add that Epic Games blaming engineering headcount is a BS measure to distract from it too. They just got done suing Google. They absolutely want every part of the bottom line they can grab. Many companies have cut/are cutting programming staff to hedge bets they will be fully replaced if not mostly replaced in 5-10 years.
There are tens of Millions on steam, what a dish
also why the fuck does Lego Fortnite require anticheat? it’s a survival co-op, there’s no competitive element, and yet from what I’ve read it still kicks you out when you’re trying to play it on Linux.
Does it have a Funbucks store?
Its to prevent piracy thats why and also to prevent modders from adding mods
Piracy? The game is free?!
People will still steal it to avoid using the Epic store
Source: Me
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What is HGL?
Is that like Fitgirl? Empress/Codex?
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