• joneskind@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Imagine being the editor of a cross-platform game engine and pretending you don’t have enough developers to port the games you developed for other platforms…

    What’s your message here Timmy huh?

    “Our game engine is so shitty that even us can’t afford to develop our games on Linux with it”

    What a fraud…

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Meanwhile back in 2004, Epic released Unreal Tournament 2004, with a dedicated Linux installer on the first disc.

    • countsickness@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Correct me if I’m wrong but it was hidden on the last disk! (And the box did not mention it in any way)

      Good times.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        I conveniently had my UT04 retail box sitting on the shelf next to me. I can confirm there’s a little penguin on the back of package, and under OS requirements they list Linux with an asterisk explaining it’s not supported by Atari (publisher).

        There is nothing else in the manual indicating how to use the Linux version, which disk to use, or any additional information that I can find.

        Edit: geez I miss game manuals sometimes. All the game mechanics are so nicely explained, and it has instructions to setup modding tools!

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        You may absolutely be correct, I only learned of it a decade after I bought the game.

        Still awesome to include a native Linux version of the game back in 2004!

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Epic shut down the UT2004 master server back in this spring, before it died the community had created a new public master server, I had to edit the master server address in ut2004.ini but it works.

        Epic does deserve credit for running the master server for a game for 19 years, regardless of their current actions, that deserves mad respect.

        They even ran their stats tracking service untill then IIRC…

          • stoy@lemmy.zip
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            11 months ago

            About ten years ago, I switched to Linux, but two years later I switched back to Windows for gaming, I didn’t want to have to deal with gaming on Linux and fiddle with settings to get it all working.

            I know that things have changed and that gaming on Linux is far better now, but as I now work mostly in Windows, I am just too comfortable with it to switch again right now.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
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    11 months ago

    (Copied from a comment I made in another community about this)

    There’s an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.

    They’ve presented it as “it doesn’t make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count.” But they don’t need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say “yeah, we don’t support this, do it at your own risk.”

    From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don’t even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.

    To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.

    But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.

    They are worried that there’ll be graphical bugs or something and that’ll make Fornight look bad, so it’s better for their brand image to just block everything they don’t have control over.

    It’s a worrying pattern I’ve seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.

    … Or maybe it’s just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their “enemies”.

    I have been wondering why they don’t just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an “official” launcher. It’s probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.

    Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than “lol 2% market share” as they present it.

    • Cat without eyebrows @lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Sweeney doesn’t want his games to be available anywhere but Epic’s proprietary shit. Which is hilarious given his crusades against Apple and Google

    • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Linux support is almost free.

      It also gives you a lot of value, since Linux users are better at reporting bugs(i saw a post from a developer who called this out) and therefore it’s easier to find and fix them. A bug free game is something everyone benefits from. If Linux users see bugs more often and therefore report them more often you save a lot of money since you don’t have to pay people who test your game.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.

      And not even a little.

      The current HW survery says that about 1.9% of Steam users are on Linux. According to 3rd party sources, there’s on the order of 120M to 130M people who used Steam this year. Extrapolating the HW survey, that’s about 2.5M Linux on Linux users.

      Fortnite is leaving money from ~2.5M possible customers on the table because of stupid ideology.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Isn’t official support legally binding, or seen as that by a regular consumer, or their board? Like, they just don’t provide anything to other OS unless they can troubleshoot here. And they are donation-based too, meaning they are very alarmed about any liability, or any unpredictable sutuation at all, since both cash and questionable consent are involved.

      I don’t thing Deck can take a dent here, but there are a lot of cheap chromebooks and the likes in edu, where their primary targets are. I think they can bank on it. But it’s good they weren’t as smart to do so.

  • LupertEverett@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    (All copy-pasted from what I’ve written in the linux_gaming subreddit)

    This is the same guy who compared Linux to moving to Canada once, had moved away from PC gaming because of “rampant piracy” only to return back to it because he wanted that sweet, sweet pie of the market Valve had ripened, built the shittiest store imaginable, that was initially literally spyware and took 3 years to get a fucking shopping cart feature, did all these shitty exclusives to keep the said store afloat, instead of you know, trying to improve it? The same guy who allowed shitty creepto games into his store only when Steam had banned them (btw does anyone remember that Epic Shit Store was supposed to be a “highly curated store”)?

    And this is the same company who specifically makes sure Fortnite won’t run on Linux because they literally use several anti cheat software, apart from the one they’re literally developing themselves, deliberately to NOT make Linux run it (such confidence on their software amirite :V)? The same company who has (hopefully had) a dumbass developer complaining about Steam Deck “not having Fortnite???” and that’s “fragmenting his library???”.

    And there is also the matter of Rocket League, Artstation, Bandcamp, and so many other things.

    Epic and Tim Sweeney are the most two-faced scumbags I’ve ever witnessed in my life, and it still fucking hurts me because I’ve loved the Unreal series so goddamn much, man.

    In fact, I’m more angry at Heroic and Lutris and co. for allowing games to be installed from that store. Epic shouldn’t get this amount of work done for them for free.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Don’t take any words as truth, from this jerkoff. Tim will do literally anything to avoid giving people what they’re asking for

  • cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    you’re paying other developers off to convince them not to launch their own stores

    lmao says the ceo of the company that pays developers off to launch exclusively on egs

  • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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    11 months ago

    Kinda weird when both Unreal Engine and EAC, both owned by Epic, actually already have Linux/Proton support, yet games that exclusive to Epic Store won’t support Linux, or drop Linux support once they become Epic Store exclusives.

    • Rose@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Rocket League dropped its native Linux support to upgrade to DirectX 11. If the move to Epic were the reason and the justification is fake, why did the game also drop Mac support despite it being supported by the Epic launcher?

      Previously, games like Rust and Valve’s own CS 2 stopped supporting Linux and Mac without any store changes.

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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        11 months ago

        You raised a good point about rocket league, which seems to be using the ancient unreal engine 3. Epic basically updated ue3 to support directx11 but neglect updating vulkan/metal support on the old engine. But Fortnite is using unreal engine 5 though, which has excellent Linux support. Epic had a presentation bragging about how they got Fortnite running on Vulkan as “same game, not port”, so the decision to not support Linux is certainly not a technical one.

  • filister@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Just out of curiosity but how many users have the deck? Aren’t they already ~10M?

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      No, definitely not but getting there! Last year despite slow production ramp up, about one million were sold. Source: a SteamOS developer on a KDE conference in autumn.

      This year a financial analyst company predicted an additional two million until the end of this year but that was before the OLED announcement. Valve then recently said “millions”. So I guess 3 million may be a somewhat conservative estimate now that the OLED model is out. 4 million if we’re generous. It’ll take a while until 10 million are reached, if they’ll be reached at all. My memory is a bit foggy but I think Valve people said that the Steam Deck was intended to launch earlier but the Covid semiconductor crisis delayed the announcement. My guess is that at least a Steam Deck Lite will be announced first but the overall performance will stay about the same, so that could drive sales a bit before the eventual successor comes out.

    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s not about Deck alone. Supporting Deck, means supporting all Linux machines and everyone else with controller.

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    What a tool. Fortnite generated $6 billion in 2022. He could throw hundreds of programmers just at Linux compatibility and it would still be obscenely profitable.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      Despite how much people hate this dude, which is understandable because he’s only doing this for money, it’s good that Google’s shady practices were brought to light. I do wonder if it’ll actually have an impact. The judge hasn’t spoken yet, correct?

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Enemy of your enemy can still be your enemy. It’s unlikely the Google vs Epic case will amount to anything for us personally.

  • KrapKake@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Instead of asking for Linux support maybe we should be asking companies for wine/proton support, since that works for Mac and Linux. Not ideal but probably more realistic and that would solve issues for all the non-windows desktops. I would also imagine it’s less work for the company to just ensure it works on wine, than it is to compile a seperate client for Linux. I don’t know about anti cheat stuff but personally I wouldn’t run a game that wanted that level of access to my system.

  • JackLSauce@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Let’s just take a moment to recognize his struggle to find a few more programmers

    Maybe if we pool together and buy just one more pack of gems (or whatever they call them) they can pull off what must surely be a truly Herculean technical feat

  • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Tim Sweeney is a fuckin retard.
    All it takes is one click in the EAC SDK to support Valve’s Proton. (⁠┛⁠◉⁠Д⁠◉⁠)⁠┛⁠彡⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      Fortnite uses both EAC and BattleEye, so it really isn’t that easy to integrate with their custom solution. Also, they have to test it to make sure no bugs are introduced. Afterall, it’s a multi-billion USD game.

      But as we know, they really don’t care, so even if it was only a day of development time, they wouldn’t do it.