[belthesar]

I used to weigh into arguments with positions like this, or that "Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work. Microsoft puts in zounds of dev time to make the wild west of hardware that is the PC landscape work, and in many ways, has to hold hardware manufacturer's feet to the fire in order to make that possible. Sony, Microsoft for XBOX, and Nintendo, all have much more significantly simplified architectures to support, and put in zounds of hours of work to make that work smoothly for their respective platforms.

The amount of effort to make a comparable API that game devs could target as a platform just... doesn't exist in the F/OSS world. I'm not trying to minimize the work that folks like the SDL team do in order to make this as possible as they can, as they do spend significant efforts to try and do this. It's also not like there aren't reasonably good F/OSS engines like O3DE, based on the Lumberyard source, which was in turn forked from a version of Crytek, which would keep this kind of support close at heart. For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.

It feels pretty rock-meet-hard-place to expect an ecosystem like Linux, one that embraces diversity as hard as it does to provide the level of stability and commonality that a large scale game project needs. Altruistically, yes, I wish there was a fantastic community supported platform target that game developers could use that provide the same level of stability and commonality that DirectX does. The adages about the chicken-and-egg problem of "nobody plays games on Linux, so no one is really interested in making a solid development target for games on Linux" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.

[johnnyanmac]

>Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work.

No worries, I'm no seasoned veteran with 30+ years experience and a grey beard. But I've put my time into industry and have worked for two major engine platforms at some point. I know the "should make" is fleeting platitudes and that part of it is due to how horrible the historical guts of each engine is. I just hated being powerless to fix it despite seeing the code right there. But I guess I would have lacked the talent even if I got the go ahead.

Frankly, I've accepted that cruft and hope instead of moping about the state of modern middleware that I can focus that energy in making sure something like Godot or any other up and coming engine can avoid those same pitfalls (especially with Unity announcing those "per download" pricing and online check-in today... sigh. Maybe it was a good thing I got laid off). No matter the platform, my history tells me it's less about being some technical wizard and more about simply making sure care is taken in the foundations, and rules (and as a result, debt) aren't broken for so long that you lose that care.

>For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.

And as you mention, those titles trying to deliver striking experiences simply lack the time for that care. If only because business pressure don't allow for it. I'm not trying to make sure Diablo 5 runs on Linux and is open source. But if I can make it easier for future indies to target Linux and not rely on a Windows wrapper, or get crap out of the way for the like-minded devs that already put in the work to target Linux, that's good enough for this single person's mission.

>At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.

Sure, I know I came off negative but I don't see WINE as a bad thing (I have feelings about Valve, but that's another story). I'm simply thinking a bit farther ahead on the next steps, pitfalls, and tribulations. I'm not sure if Valve is and is instead fine relying on selling Linux hardware until they can't.

If Windows pulled off its own M1 chip tomorrow and it just broke 30 years of compatibility, would Valve double down on a Steam Deck 2 w/ Linux and throw all its talent onto fixing the myriad of issues with Proton? Or would it simply relent and throw Windows on it, maybe hoping in 5+ years WINE can get something working? I feel like it's the latter and then all that market share gained will drop like a rock. I want to mitigate that if I can help it.