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by Steko 5257 days ago
How ironic that Blizzard, by far the brightest star in releasing simultaneous Mac AAA titles, is being singled out here.

I'm going to pull a justification out of my ass: if you support things halfway and do things halfway the brand suffers. Before they'd make a linux client they'd do X-Box then PS3 then Wii for sheer ROI reasons. They aren't doing those either though even with larger consumer bases.
1 comments
replax 5257 days ago
Yes I agree with you in regard to Bilzzard.

To be more precise, my questions is: You have an OpenGL based game running smoothly on OSX, you decide not to port it to Linux. Why?

1. ROI

2. "Have to" offer support for Linux to maintain brand image - very hard

3. hurts game image "game for geeks"

Obviously, it is hugely dependent on the piece of software you have.

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shabble 5257 days ago
ISTR that they have some fairly sophisticated anti-cheat stuff running (esp. for WoW & Starcraft) Warden, I think it's called.

Essentially, a sort of background process monitor/snooper that tries to detect cheating behaviour and block or report it. I have no idea if that could be ported to Linux, and whether in doing so they'd:

1) Get grief for requiring it to run as root

2) Fail to detect all sorts of 'easy' cheats, ruining the online services and leaderboards for everyone

3) Interact horribly with the general fludity/flexibility of a Linux system.

4) All or none of the above.

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wladimir 5257 days ago
I'm told that WoW works pretty well in Wine, so I wouldn't think those are valid reasons. Warden only has to inspect the running game process, which does not require root. It also looks at the list of running processes, which doesn't require root.

AFAIK it doesn't require root/administrator on Windows and Mac either.

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nicwest 5257 days ago
2. "Have to" offer support for Linux to maintain brand image - very hard

good example of this is with HoN (Heroes of Newerth) where I believe the guy that looked after the Linux port left, leaving S2 having to outsource all their updates every week. The community is fairly good at hacking their way round day to day issues, but it's far hassle free and I'm sure is costing S2 more money than it's making them.

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