Why don't game developers support Linux gaming?

I guess when it's a 50/50 chance the next update will delete all your important documents You really learn to appreciate when windows works lmao

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DirectX has better performance than OpenGL

Wrong

because it's 1000000000x the support burden for 1/1000000000 the userbase

Nice meme.
So why do games run worse in wine?

Because they want to make money

they don't bother optimizing for gnu/linux since the sales are like 0.1% of the total

Because they make games for the platforms 99% of people use. They would like to sell said games. That's really it. You want games on Linux? Convert 99% of folks to Linux and you'll get em.

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because people are stupid
>no body uses GNUL because no gaems
>no gaems so nobody uses GNUL
granted that's changing with proton, but it's not quite there yet.

There are actually a surprising amount of games released for Linux now. Like 90% of the games I played recently have a native port. No idea why though because is correct. I suppose it must be really easy to "port" now since engines like Unity are cross-platform?

Tbh. More games is the last thing I want on GNU/Linux. I want software with utility, and I wish for someone with talent and consistency to push a well developed desktop environment. A good stable base OS that can serve as the target for third party software. But this will never happened. I had hopes 15 years ago, the future looked bright, but now I regret ever spending time in front of the computer. This is everything I know now, but I wish I chose something else.

whether you like it or not, games are the biggest driving for a consumer base. With more users, comes more interest comes more software.
If you want more software you want games to bring in more people.

the real reason? mostly the state of linux graphics card drivers

No, it is true. Just try any game ever - they run better on DirectX

lol windows cucks everyone

theverge.com/2018/10/6/17944966/microsoft-windows-10-october-2018-update-documents-deleted-issues-windows-update-paused

Depends on the implementation.
DX9 is literally broken on Smite, with missing shaders and worse performance
>b-but that's just HR being shit!
Thought it was "any" game ever?

As someone who only uses Windows for games now, I'd say we'll see that shift soon, now that only tech illiterates use Windows 10.

I worked in retail. Only the minority bought their computer for games. It is easy to think yourself is the majority, but I don't think "gamers" are what the majority of the PC market is about. Most just want a machine for facebook and paying bills, maybe to type up some documents once in a while. The majority of gamers that showed up in the store I worked at (a big electronics chain) just wanted a PS4 or Xbone.

We did sell parts too, but few worthwhile customers wanted those. A lot of them either didn't know what they were doing or was some kind of greasy bastard that wanted to waste our time by talking about his epic water cooling loop.

Because you end up needing to use Windows and that's not very efficient.
Linux looks very interesting, even if some of the screen colours and menu options appear to be a little out of the ordinary.

But you are missing a vital point, a point which takes some experience and depth of knowledge in the field of computers. You see, when a computer boots up, it needs to load various drivers and then load various services. This happens long before the operating system and other applications are available.

Linux is a marvellous operating system in its own right, and even comes in several different flavours. However, as good as these flavours are, they first need Microsoft Windows to load the services prior to use.

In Linux, the open office might be the default for editing your wordfiles, and you might prefer ubuntu brown over the grassy knoll of the windows desktop, but mark my words young man - without the windows drivers sitting below the visible surface, allowing the linus to talk to the hardware, it is without worth.

And so, by choosing your linux as an alternative to windows on the desktop, you still need a windows licence to run this operating system through the windows drivers to talk to the hardware. Linux is only a code, it cannot perform the low level function.

My point being, young man, that unless you intend to pirate and steal the Windows drivers and services, how is using the linux going to save money ? Well ? It seems that no linux fan can ever provide a straight answer to that question !

The people who want a facebook machine buy macbooks. The others buy a shitty gaymen laptop.
The "average user" for windows now plays games at some capacity. The non-gaming windows user is a minority in the reality. Whether you want to skew your argument with bushiness statistics that are irrelevant to the "why aren't game developers supporting GNUL" conversation, is up to you.

Why would they even want a full PC for that? Mobileshit with a keyboard would probably work better for that and they'd be less likely to mess it up.
I guess this explains where the drive for UWP comes from at Microsoft. It certainly seems like the niche for "real pc users" is shrinking over time, and no one really wants them as customers. Too much support required and not numerous enough.

Hasn't been the case for a few years now.
Nvidia's driver is on par with their Windows one.
There are better drivers for AMD hardware on Linux than any other platform.

is this pasta?

>In Linux, the open office might be the default for editing your wordfiles, and you might prefer ubuntu brown over the grassy knoll of the windows desktop, but mark my words young man - without the windows drivers sitting below the visible surface, allowing the linus to talk to the hardware, it is without worth.
tip top kek

Better question: why are ryzen cpu's so badly supported with most online games?

Bought a 260, and it performs worse than my pc did when i had a fucking athlon 6000+ for crying out loud...

They are too retarded.
Most people use an engine.
Most engines have Linux porting built-in.
It's just ignorance.

because of adobe premiere

> they run better on DirectX
Direct3D older than 12 has a really non-standard and in some cases pretty archaic workflow.
Porting D3D10/11 to any other API is going to incur some performance penalty, even if that API is modern D3D12.
Developers need to start making their software Vulkan-first since its the best supported modern API.

>Linux graphic drivers
shit
>Linux sound
shit
>Linux networking
shit shit

>wanting to dev on a platform where everyone has a different configuration down to different kernel versions and hearing all the inane useless bug reports from a broken configuration
yikes

What kind of dumb question is this, OP? Game devs work too long to not go for the huge marketshare and support Windows has.

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Because no one uses Linux for gaming

Linus is just a line, whereas Microsoft has a Window into the hardware itself. For each horizontal line, you need some vertical lines to have a complete window. For example: 1920x1080. Linus does not have enough lines, so it cannot do windows as well as microsoft or even the Make and Touch.

So many outdated memes in this thread, what's going on in here even /v/ has better Linux gaming threads these days.

you will see it the day we have a game completely made in Emacs

>target for third party software.
>But this will never happened.
Actually it did happen, at least four times.

Valve provides stable sets of system platform libraries that software distributed through it can use.
Flatpack and Snap both allow easy app store style distribution of software on stable base platforms.
AppImages allow developers to bundle their software and dependencies together into an easy to use executable sort of like how you do things on MacOS or Windows.

Tablets can be annoying to deal with, and even worse when something breaks (Factory reset! You just lost your pictures!).

Those tablets are good enough for facebook, but not for family pictures and banking. Not all banks have applications for all tablets, or have decent applications that can access all features. Navigating a full desktop-tier website is annoying with a touch screen too. When customers want a tablet, they get one, but in my experience, most have an easier time with a decent laptop.

We sold a few macbooks, but not that much. We sold the most of shitty Asus and HP laptops as thats what people wanted to buy. The people that wanted macbooks already knew exactly what they wanted, and didn't need to be convinced to spend 1000 dollars on a laptop.

I wouldn't say "business statistics" is skewing. They show what kind of devices people actually buy, and which price range they are in. The majority of Windows users aren't playing games on the Steam+Windows video game console.

One could take your "It is easy to think yourself is the majority," and say that most brick and mortar stores are on sharp declines. Therefor your anecdotal claims mean fuck all.

show even one

fix these two things BEFORE anything else:
1/ set in stone library names, forever
having different distros or worse differents versions using differents names in ridiculous and force game to embed their own version.
2/ allow cutting-edge compilers to build old code for older version of libraries without breaks
games are build the same way as any rest app or anything else.
Dependencies are chosen and versions fixed, we need to be able to launch a game with libraries built with gcc5 and 9 beta for example, which is usually not possible.
this is a problem with windows to as you install shitload of c++ runtimes for example but it's a pain on linux.

My idea was to take an LTS distribution, shrink it down to the more basic components, with a very well thought out desktop environment. Then something like Flatpack or appimages on top. There might be distributions like that around already. Maybe elementary, but I've been hearing about those guys for several years already, and that's about it.

Except the chain I worked for had a massive growth, and so did its main competitor. Sure there is a lot of people that buy from web stores now, but people also buy from the brick and mortar chains. Those statistics are not worthless.

>Linux drivers are terrible
Nvidia drivers are the same code base as Windows and perform the same.
AMD drivers have a better code base than Windows and perform the same or faster.

>There are no games on Linux
There are over 5000 native titles on Steam for Linux, more than the number of native games on modern Windows.
There are thousands more games running well through compatibility layers on Linux, some of which run better than they do with the Microsoft-provided solutions on Windows, some games are even already distributed using the compatibility layers originally made for Linux on Windows.

>no one uses Linux for gaming
Approximately 2% of english speaking users on Steam run GNU/Linux

I'm a game developer, I develop using technologies that can easily compile to Linux, but I don't bother because the market share is so small it's not even worth the time to build/test/support it

Why not just bundle all the libraries? Seems like a non-issue, the only cost is slight extra disk space, i.e. nothing compared to game assets which are often absurdly large these days. As you said, Windows games tend to bundle everything as well, since it's the safest way to avoid support issues.

Probably the ideal approach would be nix-style hashing to share exact dependencies, but it doesn't seem like a big deal either way desu. Every game would end up using slightly different versions so there would probably not be much sharing in practice.

But if you port your game to Linux and it becomes popular Microsoft will buy you out for 2.5 billion dollars to be able to shut the Linux version down.

yeah I wish

Because games are not just graphics
The windowing/input/sound stuff is all platform-specific
And implementing these things on Linux is way more work because there are multiple competing standard and little to no example code

* also networking and everything display related is platform-specific too

>what is wayland

Because there is not enough market share and developing for linux adds a lot of additional work

Wayland is a tool to prevent you from file sharing by preventing screenshots and screencasts. The user ends up with less freedom with wayland instead of X.
qed.

One of many competing standards

wayland is objectively better.

same. Also the reality is I don't use linux as a daily driver. It wouldn't be difficult to have oversights because I am not a regular user. You ever play a port and just say to yourself did the developers even try it out ? That would be me when it comes to linux. Reputation risk and time spent supporting the platform make it a very easy business decision to not sell for the platform.

>six types of gpu drivers to support
>a fucking fragmented ecosystem
>thousand types of filesystem, DE, WM, libs, protocols etc
>waste of time and money

So is basically this.

Not in every way
Also it doesn't matter
If you want to support Linux you have to support multiple standards atm
Windows doesn't have this problem

The best answer

>he fell for the write your own engine meme

I've switched my laptop to Ubuntu only. I really like it, and I'd use it on my desktop but the performance hit from Proton is too big.
That said, I buy all my games through the laptop because it counts for a Linux sale and I want more people to notice it.

>If you want to support Linux you have to support multiple standards atm
not necessarily.
good products can convince people to adopt.

Because all devs know and secretly agree with each other to never move the garbage that is gayming industry to Linux.
And I agree, too. Keep the cancer in Winbloats. Thank you very much.

>what is glfw

Dev here.
It's often harder to port something FROM windows to mac/linux than it is to either:
>Port it from linux to windows, or
>Write it in such a way where the platform-specific code is easily swapped out in the first place

>gee I wonder why gamedevs don't waste money on client support and debugging their games on a system with shittons of trash distros with absolute crappy if not plain broken drivers

>developing for linux adds a lot of additional work
The libraries you use on Linux are all available on other platforms. You're only having to do a lot of extra work because you didn't do your job properly in the first place and wrote code that wasn't portable.

>he fell for the brutally stuff whatever new and unique functionality you want into a black box engine made for javascript devs 10 years ago meme

building and testing on linux even with cross-platform libraries isn't worth the return

I'd prefer to develop on linux in the first place. My workflow would be way faster if I did.

>using sepples

ive met hundreds of game developers and ive never met one who works on linux

Because they're lazy faggots

For GNU/Linux itself? Sure I can maybe believe that.
But you get easier portability to ARM Linux distributions like Android, UNIX based consoles like the PS4 and the Switch, and better support for still widely used legacy OSes like Windows 7 or OS X.
Though with only around 450 days of support left, admittedly Windows is looking like a poor target for a new project starting today, and obviously for OS X support you would have to utilize MoltenVK.

well I assume the question was about desktop linux seeing people obviously develop games for mobile and console

>same code
That's bullshit.

>Write it in such a way where the platform-specific code is easily swapped out in the first place
This is the real answer. Even without Linux, there is Windows, 3 consoles and 2 mobile platforms. Developing straight to MS apis gets you only Windows and the least popular console. That's the real reason everything is based on cross-platform engines these days.

Most engines let you export to Linux pretty easily these days which I guess is why it happens. That and I bet Gaben is giving some kind of incentives because he's (rightfully) afraid of the Windows store. MS may be incompetent but if the platform owner doesn't like you you're living on borrowed time

the real answer is lack of market share
alot of tech nerds in this thead with no idea what they're talking about performing mental gymnastics

Fake news. My 4 windows 10 machines auto update and it didn't happen to me.

Wouldn't say so - there are few free products that were comercial hits. Just look, for example, at tales of maj'eyal - over 500 thousands sold copies of game that is free as in freedoom. Not to mention all fundations and their donations.

I'm a game developer, I exclusively develop for GNU, Linux and BSD because no one else bothers to. Untapped market bro.

Nvidia have an internal low-level API which abstracts the platform and hardware specific details and which the OpenGL, Vulkan, and Direct3D stacks are written on.
Why would they maintain an entire separate code base on GNU/Linux?

Though you're not entirely wrong. Obviously the Direct3D and Metal code is platform specific since that doesn't need to be portable. There's also obviously some Vulkan features that are GNU/Linux exclusive.

that's not how untapped markets work
game genres are markets, linux isn't a market, linux is just your regular sales * 0.01

linux is a market. its filled with autistic screeching about every little detail about a program. such a lovely customer base.

Hey, at least most of them will pay when it comes down to it.

linux users will have taste in games like every other user, they aren't going to buy a game just because it's on their platform
well maybe they would because they're all zealots

Linux is more like your regular sales * 0.05 ...if your game is very good
Still not really worth the huge effort

Itt. Unity asset-flipping "developers" (6 months in a coding bootcamp) don't know how to make anything that's even remotely portable

Even if it's just +1% sales that's still a very good payout for clicking the export menu item in Unity

>not using your own engine

shipping on linux means testing and support even if it's just another make button on unity. there's always going to be os-specific problems. it's just not worth the effort to deal with even if you do make a few thousand off it

because communism

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Those problems will solve themselves, neckbeards love when things break.

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Because Linux users are either edgy kids with no money, or older autistic neckbeards. There is absolutely no reason to waste time and resources on them.