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Why do game devs keep making horrible Linux Ports? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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I'm asking because I just bought Cronos: The New Dawn on Steam because it has a native Linux port. To be fair, I would have bought it at some point anyway but I got excited when I saw it had a Linux port. The game is missing features that the Windows version has, It runs horribly at any setting other than very low. I think they only bothered testing for the SteamDeck. But if that's the case, why does it support FSR 4.0? To be fair, the Windows version doesn't run amazing either if you enable ray tracing but it still performs way better than the Linux port. Why do devs keep doing this? I've bought many Linux games that have problems that the Windows versions don't have. Why even make a port if you're not going to bother testing or optimizing it?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I know this is gonna dig deep, but consider this…

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros, but let’s say you can get a passable port, may not be the best but for minimal effort you can sell to a handful of that 3%, the business thinks “why not?”

In the grand scheme of things, native Linix ports is still low on the priority list for a company focused on making money

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

    If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

    Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

    That's completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It's 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That's its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    A lot of the "native ports" are done by a third party studio, and they don't maintain it. Because of this, many games perform better through proton than natively.

    Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you've already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.

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