[kungtotte]

One thing that's important for Linux gaming is that games played under Proton on Steam are counted as Linux sales, so publishers and developers get accurate statistics on how many Linux gamers there are.

If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.

[FrojoS]

On the other hand, if the Windows version works fine with Vulcan, why go through the trouble of making a Linux version?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Precisely, and developing for Windows is much easier than Linux anyway because it doesn't suffer from the same "lets break userspace every 2 years" problem.

[mhh__]

I know that games are hectic and everything but I am still genuinely confused that porting a game is this complicated.

The main meat and potatoes of the game is either nearly platform agnostic (Vk, OpenGL, or emulation) or usually similar in principle (audio).

Maybe I've been spoilt by only working on open source projects where people try to write good code because it's public.

[jay_kyburz]

We didn't port our game Void Bastards to Linux because the sales are _so_ low we won't see a return on investment. Yes its easy these days, but there is still a few days messing around with builds and a few days testing. There is a good chance we won't see a week of salary as a return.

[FrojoS]

If you see how hard of a time publishers have to get their games running on the wide range of Windows PCs, especially at release, it's easy how they don't want to add a second operating system to the requirements as well.

[kungtotte]

Yeah, there's never any issues keeping games working on Windows...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

There are sometimes problems, sure, but compared to Linux, where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version, it's pretty damned good at compatibility.

[alternatetwo]

Age of empires 2 works out of the box on windows 10 ... The game was compiled with Visual Studio 6.0 ... Even that still runs on Win10. So yeah, it's pretty damn good.

[account42]

> where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version

Ship non-system libraries with your application instead of assuming they will be in /usr/lib* and that's a solved problem. Valve even does that for you with the Steam runtime.

This isn't any different on Windows - if you don't bundle your dependencies (including MSVCRT / .NET / whatever) then you will run into problems.

[rawfan]

True. I've heard some devs are spending at least some time to optimize their games to work better with Proton.

[fctorial]

Wine/proton team could provide tech support service to firms trying to make their application wine compatible.

[gpderetta]

As long as the game runs fine and it is supported, that's perfectly fine for me. Most ports use ad hoc emulation layers anyway that never see updates once released, while proton see continuous improvements (but of course it can also regress).

The better ports use the native APIs of course, but are few and far between.

[imtringued]

It's probably easier to develop proton support for a Windows than to port the entire game to Linux.

[kungtotte]

Sure, but my point was that this shows the value in making a game that's easily portable to begin with. This is more for future games rather than converting existing ones.

[Kaze404]

How so? At the time of sale it's not clear how the user will play the game, especially considering only a few titles are available officially for Proton.

[kungtotte]

Hm? All titles on Steam when played with Proton are registered as being played on Linux, not just the ones available officially, and if you do this with something you just purchased it will show up in Steam's statistics as a Linux sale.

This lets the publishers and developers know that there's a market of Linux gamers because they can see that X thousand players play their game on Linux. So when they make their next game, hopefully they'll pick technologies that lets them release with proper Linux support and not "hope it runs under Proton"-support.

[Kaze404]

Do you have a source for this? I don't doubt that's how it works but it doesn't sound likely.