Comment by MathMonkeyMan
10 hours ago
> It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32
Studios don't target Linux, they target Windows and sometimes Mac.
Imagine if Flappy Bird targeted only iPhone, because there were only 50,000,000 Android users in the world (hardly worth supporting). Then Android creates an iPhone runtime on Android so people can play Flappy Bird on it, and you conclude "iPhone actually worked, this is evidence that Android is a hilarious and catastrophic failure."
I don't need to imagine a made-up scenario that doesn't make sense. We can look at what has happened at face value.
The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
It is not uncommon for indie games on custom engines to support Windows, Playstation, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox. And, depending on the game, iOS or Android. Sometimes macOS although that's increasingly rare.
Native Linux builds are pretty rare. Especially before Proton got pretty good with Steamdeck release.
Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively. So painful that emulating Win32 is a clear win. Valve's runtime helps a lot. And supporting another path is just a waste of time.
Very sad!
> The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
Companies end up not doing profitable things all the time, for many reasons. One rational reason is that while action 1 might be profitable, action 2 is even more profitable. So the fact that Linux is not supported does not show that it would not be profitable, but rather that there are other things the companies can use labour for which they think is even more profitable. If they could freely clone their employees (and "unclone" them afterwards) all profitable things would get done.
(This is just nitpicking about your economic argument, I have no reason to think your conclusion is wrong).
> Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively.
Funny, I have the same feelings after 5 seconds of using MSVC or looking at Win32 documentation. Or is it WinRT now, or is it .NET Core, or .NET Framework, or UWP or OLE or COM, or whatever the API du jour is which will be slightly incompatible and incomplete with the rest of the ecosystem in poorly documented and inscrutable ways?
Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. What's your equivalent to strace again, the one that's built into the system natively? There isn't one?
All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.
I guess there's a reason 80% of the servers in the world run Windows. Because it's so hard to develop for. Er, uh...no wait!
Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly.
> Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development.
Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll be great. Today is not that day.
Superluminal is spectacular. They're working very hard on a Linux version. It's taking them a long time because Linux is bad.
> All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.
Unity and Unreal do have buttons to export to Linux. Most proprietary game engines don't have Linux clients. Linux for headless servers you control is fine.
> 80% of the servers
Yawn.
The Linux pain is trying to deploy proprietary binaries that run on customer machines which are infinite in variation. Running headless on a single Linux image you control is very different.
Anyhow. Let me know when you ship a game with 3D graphics to customers and have to deal with all their support issues!
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the other way around is kind of how libgdx games run on iOS :)