Poor indie studio Epic games couldn’t possible afford to support Linux, they only make about 5.6 billion a year and have a mere ~3000 employees, leave the little guy alone!
Won’t you PLEASE think of the shareholders?! They don’t want to ask the government for yet another government bailout.
Wait… Epic Games received a bailout?
And what does that have to do with making a Linux port if there’s no commercial incentive?
They’re spending every dime suing Google and Apple. Epic is now a law firm.
Absolute BS, all they have to do is enable proton support and people will go out of their way to play it. Tim Sweeney is simply being a slimy jackass.
When isnt he?
Tim Sweeney is awesome. He’s one of the biggest conservation donors in my state and is personally responsible for permanently saving over 50,000 acres of land from development, protecting crucial habitat in a rapidly developing state, allowing public trail and nature preserves to get created. He lives in a normal house and drives a normal car and hikes the land he preserves when he’s not working. He’s a billionaire that lives a modest life, doesn’t mess with politics, and a true philanthropist. He doesn’t give to get press. The few articles out there about his philanthropy are because reporters stumble across it when reporting on whatever new nature preserve is opening in their area.
He might have some business practices that are problematic but are endemic to the industry.
Doing good with one hand doesn’t excuse using the other to smother FOSS progress. No matter how humble you are materially, or reasonable in local policy, that doesn’t mean he is right in the many bullshit stances he’s dug himself into where the games industry is concerned. He does have a point in some places, but holy shit is it hard to take him seriously when half the shit he gripes about other companies doing, Epic does too. And that’s before we talk about the scummy BS only Epic does.
Epic has donated a sizable amount to fund Godot Engine, and other FOSS projects. UE4 and UE5 can both be built from source to run on Linux natively. They are not smothering FOSS or Linux.
philanthropy is the industry of laundering money and reputations
You sound like someone who doesn’t know much about philanthropy and falls prey to confirmation bias as much as anyone. The fact that you put money laundering ahead of tax-write offs is telling. He’s not a mexican drug cartel buying US real estate.
Like I said, he’s a stealth philanthropist to the degree that it does next to nothing to burnish his reputation. The only reason I know about it is because I’m in land conservation. He doesn’t seek out any press attention at all, and the limited number of news articles about his donations are a testament to that. I am not saying that Epic business practices don’t have issues that are common between his competitors, but I am saying that he himself is not a slimeball. His personality is about as far as you can get from a psychopathic self-enriching tech bro. Basically he hit the jackpot with Unreal, then fortnite.
Thanks for the insight. It’s quite tiring to watch human beings distilled into binary good or evil based on something as innocuous as adding proton support to a game…
hey look, a billionaire bootlicker, what are the odds
Hey look everyone, this guy only sees black or white!
not true, I can see plenty shades of gray too
No, just defending someone that I know for a fact is a genuinely decent human being. He doesn’t give a shit about burnishing his reputation through the philanthropy he does. He does it because he hates seeing billionaire mansions on mountaintops as much as anyone who isn’t a fuck, because he wants everyone to have natural places to enjoy in the future. If you can’t see the difference between someone like Sweeney and someone like Musk, DeVoss, etc., that’s on you. He’s not trying to make the world worse for everyone.
Do I have issues with the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the US? Yes. If you gave me a list of billionaires, where I had to rank them in terms of their benefit to the world vs. negative impact to the world, would I put him high in benefit and low in negative impact? Yes. He’s not spouting antisemitic nonsense, or trying to influence politics, or ruin education, or poison the minds of the American public. He’s just running his business, treating his employees well, and preserving land. So if you want to call me a bootlicker for points, fine. Given the world we live in, I’d rather have our billionaires be like Sweeney instead of Musk or DeVoss.
billionaire
genuinely decent human being
pick one
You can criticize bad actions even when they’re done by generally “good” people, believe it or not.
I specifically took issue with him being called a slimeball. He’s not a slimeball. Musk? Slimeball. DeVoss? Slimeball. Sweeney? Not a slimeball.
You can call someone a slimeball about something specific if they are a slimeball specifically about that thing, and Sweeny has proven repeatedly to be slimy in regards to Linux support.
I’m sure he’s a great guy in other ways, but when the topic is specifically about scumbag corpo practices, calling him a slimebag isn’t inaccurate.
Would love some sources!
Shhh. Tim said something the Internet disagrees with so we all have dog pile on him.
Them not bother with Linux says all there is to say about their anti trust cases. Only thing that bothers them about monopolies is that they arent one, and even when there is an opportunity to enter into a market where there is no competitors they don’t want to bother investing in it. They don’t care about open platforms or investing in it first.
It’s why they were late to getting a hold of PC distribution. And in the unlikely event Linux OS takes off be complaining about Steam’s presence there.
I don’t think they’ve ever cared about open platforms, they just care about profit. The Google and Apple cases were intended to allow them to bypass the app store fee for microtransactions. That’s it.
So them not supporting Linux has nothing to do with Linux itself, but the possibility for profit. If you read between the lines, Sweeney is basically saying, “our people are making more money on other projects than they would working on Linux support.” If Linux had lots of users that wouldn’t play on their other platforms, they could possibly make more by supporting Linux than other efforts (e.g. more cosmetics).
Sweeney is a simple guy, if it makes him more money than what he’s currently doing, he loves it. If it doesn’t, he’ll avoid it. There’s no deep seeded hatred of Linux here (EAC and Unreal Engine both support Linux, and the old Unreal Tournament games were Linux native), he just likes money more than anything else.
Sweeney is uncomplicated, and I like that. There’s no veiled promises or expectations, so it’s really easy to understand exactly why he does the things he does. I don’t buy his games or use his platform because I expect him to do the bare minimum to make money, so I instead spend my time and money elsewhere. Valve earns my business, Epic does not. I don’t hate Sweeney or Epic, I just find them uninteresting.
It’s a Linux problem because you can’t ensure a kernel module in Linux is untouched by the user. This is a design on Linux. This means Linux and secured anti cheat solutions are fundamentally at odds.
Client running code should always be considered compromisable, that’s security 101. Relying on kernel module checks is a terrible practice, and not a fundamental guarantee of safety either.
Good, secure anti-cheat happens serverside. But that’s harder and less broadly applicable, so Epic doesn’t want to bother with it.
Client code isn’t trusted but no matter what the is one set of data you most trust that comes from the client. Input data. So with input data it can be manipulated that another application calculate out a headshot and sends that input. So even only trusting the client where you have to, you’ve failed to secure the game fully because you need to trust input data.
The first rule of network programming: Never trust the client. How does anti-cheat software work? It trusts the client.
All clientside anti-cheat is fundamentally flawed and broken by design. It doesn’t actually prevent cheating it just creates an illusion that it’s preventing cheating. The fewer people that believe in that illusion the better off we’ll all be.
Besides, you can train AI to play any game via MITM in USB (plug the mouse and keyboard into the Raspberry Pi or similar which then pretends to be a mouse and keyboard to the computer playing the game). The simplest method is to just point a camera at the monitor but there’s much lower latency ways where you use some cheap Chinese HDMI decoder/encoders to feed the raw video signal right into the AI.
With methods like that becoming cheaper and easier every day the whole client-side anti-cheat bullshit kinda seems pointless, yeah?
We’ve already established you have to trust the client to some extent in a typical game.
Also do you lock your front door despite people being able to lockpick it? Most people do because it raises the barrier to entry.
Do I lock my door? Absolutely.
Do I let strangers into my home? As little as possible.
Most people put security cameras in their homes despite them being able to be remotely hacked. Lots of people have an Alexa which could also be seen as letting a stranger in. A lot of people use tools that could be used to compromise their direct use but trust they don’t as for things like anti-cheat being malware. That’s all FUD. There has not been a single large anti-cheat company known to be sending unneeded or personalized user data.
Cheats nowadays don’t even need to run on your machine. You can get a second computer that is connected to your computer via a capture card, analyze your video feed with an AI and send mouse commands wirelessly from it (mimicking the signal for your USB receiver).
These anti-cheats are nothing more than privacy invasion, and any game maker that believes they have the upper hand on people that want to cheat are very wrong.
Opening up anti-cheat support for Linux would at least make them more creative at finding these people from their behaviour, and not from analysing everything that’s running in the background.
Anti cheat should always be primarily server-side, but devs are lazy
None of these solutions are lazy, and I promise you they have large server side components too. From what I can tell, shooters are just especially cursed when it comes to cheating, and there’s no real way to stop it.
It is fundamentally impossible to secure a Turing complete system.
Yes but also the barrier to entry on those sorts of hacks is very high. Every houses front door lock can be picked in the matter of minutes. The issue is that lots of people don’t have that skill.
Lastly there are heuristic anti cheat but that’s really only a catch all for inhuman inputs. Not a full solution.
Sounds like the same excuse that would be made back in 2008 when epic felt consoles were more worth investing in than PC and only seeings cons to the hardware, and took until 2018 to even bother to try to start their own digital distribution.
And here’s Linux in its infancy just beginning to start becoming a little more accessible to regular people, and potential to enter the market early and also get more control compared to all the platforms run by other companies they complain about. And yet, like before they don’t want to bother investing in anything themselves and taking risks to get established first before competitors gain a foothold.
Simple fact is for all the technical excuses they don’t care unless another company shows it is profitable to do first.
Why should they. They are in the business if making innovative and interesting games. Not innovative hardware or dealing with 2% of the marketplace. They don’t even fully support Mac which has a larger market share. I can’t blame them for making their business one of reducing risks in underdeveloped areas.
So he want the game to get to 10 millions player on steam deck only then support it, but without supporting it the game won’t get to 10 millions player. It’s not a linux problem Tim, it’s you.
Yea it’s not even like Fortnite runs unofficially on Linux. Fucking “anticheat”
No.
He wants the Steamdeck user base to be 10 million, so it’s large enough to support a player base that can generate revenue if targeted.
And frankly it’s not a him problem. Nearly every dev refuses to release on Linux (and Mac) because of its small user base.
They don’t have to release on Linux at all!!
All they have to do is click a checkbox in the EAC SDK & contact Battleye to support Valve’s Proton & that’s it!!
It is a Tim Sweeney problem.Yeah, but to be fair, maybe that fact about the EAC SDK isn’t common knowledge. I mean, we know it in our community, but a Windows-only game dev like Epic might not quite notice.
If that’s the case, then maybe whoever owns EAC could get some good publicity if they could convince Tim Sweeney to do a public stunt like livestreaming the process of opening up the config for Fortnite, enabling it for Proton, and then testing it on the Steam Deck. EAC gets good publicity, and Fortnite gets all the extra revenue from the Steam Deck users.
Of course, Tim Sweeney wouldn’t reach out on his own, he’s probably got far too many bigger things to do. It’s up to whoever owns EAC to get that ball rolling and schedule a meeting with Sweeney to make this proposal and see if they can make it work.
Does anyone know who that second person is? Not Tim Sweeney (the guy who probably doesn’t realize how easy it is to enable this in EAC), but the other person (the person who owns EAC)? Because trying to get through to that first guy is a challenge, so maybe we can get that second person to try their hand at it.
/j
To be fair, you don’t look at the whole picture.
Yes, generating a Linux build wouldn’t require a lot of changes to the code.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
They don’t even have to support Linux. They just have to stop actively preventing the game from launching on Linux platforms.
Then they get bad press for cheaters using Linux or whatever due to some bug they easily could’ve caught during the QA they didn’t do. So they either need to scramble to fix it, or pull Linux support and block those older versions from connecting.
All of that is worse than never supporting Linux in the first place. So if they’re going to support it, they’re going to need to do proper QA and get their support staff trained to deal with Linux issues.
A smaller studio or something with SP only mode can get away with it, but it’s a lot more tricky for big MP games.
If Apex can do it, then so can Epic Games.
Can and should are very different things. Here are some big differences to understand why it doesn’t make sense for Fortnite, but it might make sense for Apex:
- Fortnite isn’t on Steam, so the only people who would play it on Linux are enthusiasts and cheaters (if it’s easier than on Windows)
- Fortnite has way more players than Apex - the possible pool for new users is likely much smaller for Fortnite, and the potential for making money is higher with getting current users to spend than attracting new ones, and they have more users to lose with bad press
- Fortnite has two anti-cheats, EAC and Battleye, Apex just has one (EAC); depending on how they’re integrated, that could mean twice the attack surface
I wish they’d support Linux, but I don’t think comparing to Apex makes a lot of sense here.
Just so I don’t have to repeat myself 1000 times.
https://lemmy.world/comment/6016698
https://lemmy.world/comment/6013450
https://lemmy.world/comment/6014060
https://lemmy.world/comment/6020626
That should cover most if not all of your arguments.but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users
total* across all platforms, not exclusively desktop.
Also, what XyliaSky@sh.itjust.works said.
Support for Steam Deck != support for Linux version. Steam Deck use Proton to run Windows game on linux seamlessly.
Their direct competitor, Apex Legend, is steam deck verified. Big games like Monster Hunter World/Rise, Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Elden Ring, etc etc, all steam deck verified. Check out this page for more info
It’s not a Linux problem, it’s a Tim Sweeny problem.
It’s one thing to not release for Linux (thanks to wine and proton it’s no Biggie) another thing is to actively sabotage it to run on Linux which some Developers who can’t check a fricking Checkbox in EAC do.
Not preventing Linux use is implicit support, and it opens up another platform for cheaters to exploit. So if it works and your entire game is based on the online, MP experience, you need to QA on all possible platforms to stay on top of cheaters.
10 million is just an arbitrary number he will not honor when it is reached.
Valve has sold ‘multiple millions’(source) already. The 10 million will probably be reached soon. Not even to mention all the Linux users.
And frankly it’s not a him problem. Nearly every dev refuses to release on Linux (and Mac) because of its small user base.
Yes it is. He does not have to release for Linux. He just needs to allow the anti cheat to run on Proton. This is a simple config change not more. Fortnite will probably run fine on Proton.
With that mind set explains why Epic was so late into trying to get into PC distribution.
Isn’t he the asshole who threw a tantrum about pirates and swore to never release on pc again? Dude is just a worthless little bitch that doesn’t actually care about industry in the slightest. Every success epic has ever had has been in spite of him.
Wuh? They started on PC.
ZZT was fucking amazing to play and make games with as a kid.
And look how late they were when it came to launching their own digital platform. I’m not taking about games being on PC.
This is a company that saw consoles more worth putting resources towards and didn’t see it worth it too start their own Steam competitor even back in 2008.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Tim-Sweeney-Says-the-PC-Is-Dead-for-Games-80714.shtml
They had many chances to become the go to digital platform for PC.
Every gaming company basically thought the PC was dead for gaming, only to be relegated to nerd paying high prices for hardware to play niche nerdy shit.
Honestly I still don’t know what changed, even Japanese devs are releasing on PC again, it’s a weird time.
Well apparently Valve didn’t get the memo. By the time PS3 came out and the further into the Gen it got it became clearer that digital was the way forward. And you’d think a company with PC roots would have gotten their own digital distribution platform started once steam sales caught on.
The whole everyone thought pc was dead excuse is a poor one because Epic took until 2018 to bother with their own distribution platform. That’s a hell of a long time and too many years from the PC is dead excuse.
That’s what I mean by many many many missed chances. They had over a decade to enter as it became more and more obvious the money there was to be made from PC gamers.
Why should they have a distribution platform? Pretty much every game except Gears of War had a Windows release, and at least I never considered a digital distribution platform as a kid since boxed games worked just fine. I didn’t have a Steam account until Steam came to Linux, yet I played plenty of PC games in the meantime on both Windows and Linux. I bought a mixture of boxed games and online downloads, I didn’t need a launcher to do that for me.
Yes, they missed the boat, but it wasn’t obvious that the boat was going where they wanted to go. Valve took that risk and won big, but other large studios didn’t and were absolutely fine focusing on game dev, and it wasn’t until recently that they wanted in.
PC gaming has only had a slow, steady rise since Steam entered the scene. But perhaps one other catalyst might have been the Games For Windows initiative (not “Live”) that standardized controller support, added some extra marketing oomph, and gave more incentive to make the same game on PC and console rather than making two entirely different games (sometimes with the same title, like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter).
I think stardust meant Epic Games was very late in opening their own storefront, to become a distributor on PC.
Yes that’s correct. They seemed dismissive of it even back in 2008 seeing more cons than potential in the market. It’s like the Windows approach to smartphones entering in after Android and iOS established themselves. Except even later with years and years passing as it became clearer PC gaming was becoming more accessible and it’s own formidable market. They missed a lot of earlier chances to enter.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Tim-Sweeney-Says-the-PC-Is-Dead-for-Games-80714.shtml
Ah yeah that makes sense.
Apparently they have enough developers to add in crappy emotes and crossovers but not enough to support one of the most popular operating systems… makes sense
Adding emotes is a different skill set than getting it to run on Linux, but there’s plenty of UE5 games on steam deck already so surely it can’t be that hard…
adifferent skill set
you’re right, given that all it’d take for it to work on Linux would be ticking a box in EAC console, the anticheat software that they develop themselves.
Saying “one of the most popular operating systems” when there’s only 3-4 serious, mainstream contenders doesn’t mean much.
And Linux desktop is less than 2%
For gaming I’m fairly sure that overtakes macOS
Yeah exactly, it’s the lowest of the major ones… not saying it’s bad or anything, just not exactly attractive to game devs
Yeah, I think 10% is where it’s definitely attractive, though macOS got away with far less, probably because of how much their customers tend to spend on hardware and software.
Those are artists not developers
Lmao at one of the most popular.
I don’t agree that Epic doesn’t have enough resources, but realistically Linux makes up such a tiny proportion of systems I don’t blame any other developer for not supporting it. Would be a waste of resources.
Valve has sold multiple millions of steam decks. Fortnite is a popular game. What better way to grow a platform than to develop a popular game for it? Am I not wrong in thinking you’d increase profits having invested in another area? Especially if it would only take “a few more programmers”? I know Tim Sweeney doesn’t want to provide profit to Valve and I know he’s also a fucking idiot, but more money is more money…
Tim Sweeney has a personal grudge against Linux.
I don’t think it’s Linux.
I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.
Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.
I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.
There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).
I’m sure Gabe has a lot of wonderful traits, but pro-consumer ain’t one of them.
Eh… Valve isn’t a publicly traded company. I’m not sure I’m aware of anything Gabe has said or done to imply he’s anti-consumer.
And he is the one who said that piracy is a service issue, and if you give people convenient access and fair prices, they’ll pay. And he was right.
And Steam is proof of that. Their refund policy is also far more generous than, at the very least, Sony and Nintendo.
Any sources to show I’m wrong?
Killed physical ownership of PC games. (Half Life 2 required Steam to work, locking your key to a single account)
Pioneered lootboxes. (Team Fortress 2)
Has price parity rules. (Prevent keys being sold cheaper elsewhere so gamers can’t avoid giving 30% of their money to Valve)
Those aren’t particularly pro-consumer.
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn’t play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I’m aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam’s rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn’t need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve’s servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn’t be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it’s not like Steam doesn’t add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve’s decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren’t, I can cite:
- Valve’s work on Wine/Proton
- the open SteamOS
- repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
- all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they’re making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
- the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
- their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games
It’s really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.
They also had to get sued by multiple states before they started offering refunds in the US. Valve doesn’t do anything that doesn’t make them money. They just have a longer term view towards profit than a publicly traded company. That’s what lemmy/reddit doesn’t understand.
Yup, Valve isn’t my friend, but there’s a lot of overlap in my and their interests. So I support them, because they support me. They make a product I like, and actively work to make my platform of choice better.
They’re as good as a friend, but unlike a friend, I’ll drop them as soon as they stop providing value.
There’s a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).
I can’t really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no “trying to create a competitor to Steam” isn’t pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it’s not like Epic couldn’t have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.
And even Unreal is annoying since, at least when I last tried it, they don’t provide binaries. I understand why, but the support is just good enough, not ideal.
And that’s Epic’s MO, everything is just good enough to make them money. They’re not suing Google and Apple to take down a big evil corp, they’re suing to not share their profits. That’s it.
And EGS doesn’t exist to make money from game sales, it exists to funnel people into their live service games. But they need people to come to their platform, so they also offer game sales, free games, etc.
He hates penguins?
“club all those fucking penguins to death” - Tim Sweeney probably
Tim Sweeney might be the reason club penguins shut down
Tim Sweeney has the emotional development of an 8 year old
Maybe the nerdy Linux guy stole his gf in high school?
I can tell you one thing and it’s that this is not about his feelings. It is about it not being worth the effort of porting the game to Linux. If there was as many steam decks as there are switches, you can bet it would be on steam deck. He doesn’t not care about Linux, he cares about placing his effort in the right place to make profit.
They Do Not have to port the game, only tick a checkbox to enable Proton support in the EAC SDK and maybe contact BattlEye to enable Proton support in BattlEye.
Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible. If they enable it, it is a huge responsability for them to make sure there are no experience breaking bugs, just like any other platform. It is a money thing, not an emotional “Tim does not like Linux” thing. Epic preferred being removed from the App store and they basically killed their Android version because they tought it was worth it during their lawsuits. And let me tell you, there are a LOT more iPhones than there are Steam Decks and desktop Linux computers out in the wild. If Epic is willing to give up on mobile platforms with millions and millions of potential players because they feel it costs them more to keep the game up rather than just shut it down, it means they don’t give a shit about the maybe 20 something thousand potential players on Linux.
Look, I would love for them to enable the anti-cheat on Linux and I would love to be able to play any game without booting my Windows partition, but I can’t. Such is life when you decide to use something that barely has 2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS. To add to my previous points, the variance between setups is so great on Linux that is makes it basically impossible to fully support. We would need for immutable distros to be the main thing and we are not there yet. So many people have missing drivers, incompatible hardware, iffy setups that are unstable. That would be great for the Steam Deck, but if they make it for the Steam Deck, I doubt they could make it Steam Deck Linux exclusive
Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible.
Take a look at AreWeAntiCheatYet EAC Breakdown, as you can see, exactly half of the one’s that ticked the box in EAC SDK work. And guess what, that’s a slightly outdated list for a few games. For example : Warhammer : Vermintide 2; which should be categorized as “Running” not broken.
If you notice, Fortnite isn’t broken; it’s straight up denied, they haven’t even given it a chance at all.
Also, don’t you find it funny how Apex Legends; a direct competitor of Fortnite; can do it, but Epic somehow magically can’t despite having way more resources and literally owning EAC.If they enable it, it is a huge responsability for them to make sure there are no experience breaking bugs, just like any other platform.
Actually, Valve & the community will do most of the work if Epic does the bare minimum on their end.
It is a money thing, not an emotional “Tim does not like Linux” thing.
Yeah, Epic totally killed the pre-existing, and flawlessly working Linux version of Rocket League when they acquired the studio and then refused to refund because “it’s a money thing” (ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■
2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS
That 2.5-3%(Global OS web usage) is still several million users, about 33 Million total give or take and growing. (Especially once ChromeOS joins our numbers after it’s Linux-ified).
It’s actually way less on steam, but that’s because Linux gaming is a barley tapped market thanks to dumb fucks like Tim who refuse to even try tapping into it.
If Linux gaming was more expansive you could very much potentially see massive spikes as 33Million is dead ass almost half of the total traffic steam got in 2022(69 Million). Ofc they’ll never be able to tap into it completely but that’s still a shit load of money left on the table.
Tapping into just 4% of the global total would be 1,320,000 users or +2100 from what steam already has(1,317,900) according to their survey. The average player spends ~$84.67 USD in fortnite.
Doing the math, that comes out to a potential 111.7644 million USD market cap just sitting there.You’re definitely pointing real things, but it may not be as simple as you think making a game as large and as complete as Fortnite. Also, the point of 33M users is kind of moot imo, because the vast majority of those people won’t even install steam on their computer, just like there may be a billion Microsoft computers and only a fraction has steam installed. It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor. I am not saying fortnite wouldn’t work, I am saying they do not want to assume the maintenance burden of making such a large game run on an compatibility layer, because when shit doesn’t work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that’s bad PR
It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor.
Wrong, Proton is open source and Valve would still benefit if Fortnite succeeded on Linux as it’d grow the ecosystem they’re investenting in. Valve has said themselves they’re open to supporting any game that takes advantage of Proton, including competitors. Unlike Epic, they’re not trying to monopolize the entire market. If they were, they’d be trying to make deals with Microsoft to come pre-installed or some other invasive shit like that.
Hell, Valve already dead ass worked directly with Epic Games to add Proton support to EAC & EAC support in Proton(proton_eac_runtime) in the first place. Why the hell wouldn’t Valve be obligated to support them?because when shit doesn’t work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that’s bad PR.
All they have to do is say “running under Valve Proton report bugs here↗” similar to what Steam does, problem solved.
Not to mention, Linux users are 1000× better at making actually useful bug reports.
I’m thinking maybe you’re not aware of the extent at which Proton works these days. It’s come a long way, and fewer and fewer games are incompatible every day. Even games that Steam marks “unsupported” often work (for example, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix).
Games often play better with Proton than using their own native Linux runtime. On Steam Deck, and on my shitty Linux laptop.
My understanding about Fortnite, is that it’s literally just a switch they’d have to flip to allow EAC.
I am fully aware of the state of Linux gaming, and I do play game with Proton, but the experience is far from perfect with many games having visual glitches and unexpected crashes. Epic likely do not want to deal with this and Valve will certainly not help a competitor get on their platform . It may be true that for the EAC, it is a switch to be toggled, but this does not show the entire story which is also the game experience.
Which games have you had visual glitches and crashes?
The effort from the dev side would be negligible as all they need to do is allow people to play it through Proton. Nobody needs to engineer a Linux runtime. Most games that work on Steam Deck don’t have Linux support.
Important to note that Fortnite does launch on the steam deck, but the anticheat kicks you out a couple seconds into the match.
The game does run. It’s Epic.
lol so he’s completely lying then
Yes
No, he didn’t say it needs more users to port it, just to support it. Support means more than getting it working, it means testing and customer support if there are issues, which means training testers and support people.
The extra load here would be much lower if it was a single player game, but because it’s MP, they need to know how exploitable it is by cheaters, and perhaps patch some vulnerabilities out.
It’s a lot more than flipping a switch, but it’s also something Epic could totally handle. He’s not lying, he’s just content to milk his cash cow as long as he expects to not lose too many customers by not supporting Linux.
No
No
It’s Epic
That doesn’t sound very Epic to me.
also why the fuck does Lego Fortnite require anticheat? it’s a survival co-op, there’s no competitive element, and yet from what I’ve read it still kicks you out when you’re trying to play it on Linux.
Does it have a Funbucks store?
Even though it’s cooperative, can randos still join your game and grief you? I wouldn’t want to deal with a cheat engine enabled griefer.
no, only your friends can join you, and you have the option to kick them out from your party before they actually enter the game.
Then sounds like Epic is just being greedy fucks.
Its to prevent piracy thats why and also to prevent modders from adding mods
Piracy? The game is free?!
People will still steal it to avoid using the Epic store
Source: Me
They don’t want pirates removing the slot machine monetization from their game for children.
what’s fortnite’s anticheat like? my understanding is that a lot of games that would normally have no problem running on some flavor of linux or another but their anticheat software requires some ridiculous level of privilege that linux won’t (and shouldn’t) give it
Fortnite uses Easy Anti Cheat, which is made by Epic (that is, Fortnite’s own developer). EAC works fine on Linux; it just needs the developer to enable it.
Note
Epic bought Easy and made the Linux version for it. It’s there because of them
The issues are likely development related not anti-cheat
It could be that, or they just really know their community. If the cost of getting it working on steam deck and maintaining it is not substantially less than the income brought from the platform It doesn’t make any sense to utilize the platform.
It’s the same thing basically, you could have unlimited devs if cost wasn’t an issue
But they have 9 platforms already that all have to work together and every feature has to work on before release so it’s a lot of work.
Like the last line says, they want the user base to be big enough for them to support it
Exactly, Sweeney isn’t a complicated man, he’s just a greedy one. If choice a is less profitable than choice b, he’ll pick choice b. In this case, it’s Linux support vs other dev efforts, and the other dev efforts are apparently more profitable than Linux support.
And that’s my favorite quality about him, and it makes it really easy to avoid his products. It’s why I mostly play indies and use lemmy, I’m fine with lower production value if the quality of the overall experience is better.
I wouldn’t call Epic greedy
They have one of the more indie friendly Engines
That’s a side effect, not the goal. The goal is to make a ton of money on microtransactions, that’s why they have a revenue sharing licensing model, not a per seat model. They don’t lose much by being friendly to smaller devs, because they’re banking on raking in profits from the few that go viral.
I argue that until the recent change, Unity was the best engine for indie devs. You pay per seat and that’s it, you keep the rest. And you don’t pay until you make more than $100k, just like Unreal (Unreal is 5% after your first $1M). So if you earn $2M, you’ll pay $50k to Epic or $2k/seat for Unity (assuming pro plan). If you expect to make >$1M, Unity will probably be cheaper for smaller studios. If you want support, Unreal charges $1500/seat/year for the Enterprise option, and you still need to pay for royalties.
So here’s how I’d decide which to use:
- Godot - most indie games
- Unity - indie games with high revenue expectation (if it takes off), and studios with infrequent releases (you only pay if you’re making >$100k)
- Unreal - big 3D games with latest tech, or indie studios with lots of smaller games with lower average revenue targets
Most studios don’t need the features of Unreal, so it’s an odd choice for your random indie studio.
Excuse me? EAC is Exact Audio Copy. There can be no other.
Out of all the hills that are out there, this is the one you’re going for?
Interesting choice
Wooooosh
Wiiiiiiiiish
Whoa.
…What?
i fucking love exact audio copy btw
I thought it had a combination, eac and something else.
My understanding is that it uses EAC and Battleye, but in an “either/or” arrangement. That is, both are installed but which one is activated when you boot the game is essentially random (or driven by some logic that is not readily apparent).
Battleye also claims to have native Linux support.
But even if it didn’t, it would be trivial to have a Linux version which only used (the Linux version of) EAC. Presumably Epic have enough faith in their own anticheat product to rely on it for their flagship game for a small minority of users.
Compare and contrast
You weren’t supposed to see this!
I mean we all know that, he didn’t need to say anything. They want to make billions and they think Linux doesn’t have enough users to get those billions going. Not worth it to them. But hey, fuck him, fortnite is a shit game anyway.
I think, people here look at it from the wrong side.
The code changes required for Linux support aren’t the issue.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
I’m not saying that it’s good, but top capitalists tend to be capitalists.
And in the end, I’m pretty sure someone who has all the business figures and frequently has to defend those in front of the shareholders probably knows much better what makes business sense than any of us. Someone like him goes where the money flows.
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros
It absolutely does not mean that.
Pick a steam deck, support a steam deck, 3 major releases. If the SD runs on enterprise Linux that’s a 10 year support window.
That’s a perfectly viable plan - much like “releasing on x box” - and with an understandable market clearly delineated. Everything else can be “hey try, but don’t call us” and we’d all still try.
This is a really good idea–they officially support the steam deck, and that means it’s unofficially supported on other Linux distros. The community gets what it wants without a huge extra load on Epic.
Honestly, I’d just test on Steam Deck (performance, recent libs) and Debian (desktop experience, older libs) and that’s it.
They also need to fix any exploits they find, which means they probably need Linux devs.
You don’t have to support all distros anymore. Just take whatever windows build and test it with Proton.
Sure, but things work differently under the hood on Linux vs Windows, so they still need to validate every build. That means QA resources every release (and they release often), as well as development efforts to patch any Linux-specific exploits.
If supporting Linux doesn’t bring in more money than other dev efforts, it’s not worth it.
Proton with what? Stable or experimental? DXVK or Wine3D? X11 or Wayland? Nvidia closed source or open source?
That’s just what I came up with. There are probably a few more of these questions. Even Proton alone is not an easy target.
Especially if you want some low-level anticheat. And you know, if they have one platform that is easier to cheat, cheaters will all use that platform.
I don’t know about you, but playing with tons of cheaters doesn’t seem like a lot of fun to me.
You are making it sound way more difficult than it actually is. If some lone indie developer can manage it, a huge corporation with billions of dollars could do it without a thought.
Lone indie devs don’t have to care about giving support to players, testing or cheaters.
So sure, if you completely ignore the difficult/expensive parts, the rest is super easy.
Yeah that’s just Linux evangelists here, it’s not really worth discussing anything with them lol.
Pick any Proton release you like. Support X11, Wayland will then probably work anyway unless people have nvidia gpus. Support DXVK and force people to use it.
If you support one way to run Proton you’re already most of the way there. Besides that majority of games just work fine without any work whatsoever.
They should actually target Wayland. Since Wayland will be what supports HDR, VRR, and is what the Steam Deck and most distros use.
Seems like you didn’t read my first comment that you replied to before.
But still, your view is totally fine for a little indie studio, but that doesn’t work for a game with >200 mio players.
Lol, nvidia…
Most games that work on Steam Deck aren’t technically Linux-compatible and therefore have no “Linux support” needed. Proton has come very very far, and most games are running the Windows exe through Steam using Proton.
In fact, I’ve played several games that do have native Linux support, and they still play better using the Windows version through Proton. On my Steam Deck, and on my shitty non-gaming laptop.
So no, they don’t have to support anything new.
Exactly. Making the game WINE-compatible is not the same thing as committing to support. In reality, the only thing stopping WINE from working is Epic Anti-Cheat and the absurd thing about this is that Epic already gave EAC a WINE-compatibility mode – they’re just actively choosing not to turn it on.
What Tim’s really saying is this:
I don’t want our flagship game to be used as a way to highlight Steam’s better Linux support, so the game won’t come to Linux until EGS on Linux is at parity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense for us to bother doing that right now because the Linux usershare is too small to matter.
I’ve tried running fortnite on Linux . It installed fine started to play and then I get booted out because of the anti cheat . I believe the game would run fine if the anti cheat supported Linux .
That’s the fun part, the anti cheat does support Linux. Apex Legends also uses easyanticheat and it’s compatible with the Steam Deck, with a Gold rating on protondb.
Yeah. Fortnite’s implementation of EAC literally sabotages itself on Linux mainly because Tim Sweeney doesn’t want it to run on Linux
That’s even more annoying because the game will run . It just boots you out before you touch the ground. I was thinking about playing it again lately but I can’t build with controller like I can with a keyboard and mouse.
Just release it as an unsupported “beta”. The Linux users will figure out any issues and give higher quality bug reports.
The only thing stopping Fortnite from running on Linux is the anticheat. The anticheat it uses it made by Epic, and has a specific option for WINE compatibility.
If I remember correctly it actually uses two separate anti-cheat, and the second one not made by Epic doesn’t have Linux or Wine support.
But it’s still a weak excuse that they could just make a Linux version without that redundant second anti-cheat.
Unless they changed it, the other one is Battle eye which also has Linux support
I’m going to do a hard disagree here - they don’t have to support Linux, just add compatibility in terms of anti-cheat for Linux. Proton is likely good enough to run the game itself but the anti-cheat sees Linux and just craps itself.
They don’t even have to provide support - League of Legends runs on Linux if you install the game using community scripts and custom proton, and while the client runs poorly nobody spams the Riot Games support about how the “Linux version” client doesn’t work the well because people understand that it’s a community effort. Riot themselves have only made a statement saying how they’ll try not to break the game for Linux users, and that’s pretty much it.
League of Legends is a massively popular game as well, yet Riot barely has to do anything to maintain it on Linux, let community fix issues that come up, let community provide support as it’s their tools.
And while I do understand that porting an anti-cheat to be more friendly to another operating system isn’t an easy task (such as for Rust, where they tried to make the anti-cheat compatible with Linux but it introduced other issues so it got shelved), I think you’re vastly overstating the amount of areas a company has to cover for a game to be playable on Linux.
There’s a difference though.
If the game doesn’t work for (some or all) Linux users, that’s not a big problem from Epic’s POV. They’ll lose a couple users that wouldn’t have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.
But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That’s now a problem for the whole game’s user base and consequently for the publisher as well.
Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn’t work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.
(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it “just works as expected”)
Speaking as a former game cheater…
Cheaters are going to cheat. Booting into Linux isn’t going to change that.
Anti-cheats just keep the filthy casuals from cheating. A broken anti-cheat on Linux would be fixed pretty quickly.
Sure, but that’s dev resources they need to spend on a small market, and they’d suggest need to hire Linux devs or pull from other projects. It’s quite likely the math just doesn’t add up given the likelihood for profit for other uses of those resources.
I doubt Epic would lose money in it, but they probably wouldn’t make as much as other options.
EAC has a check box for Proton compatibility. Battleeye is linux native. All they have to do is check a box, and test to see if they can break it. If they let it out in the works and there’s some influx of cheaters, they can check the box again. Halo Infinite, Apex Legends, Smite, Battlebit etc etc were all capable of checking the box and testing.
I suspect Sweenys hesitation over support is caused by a lack of control.
Upgrading EAC in an unreal engine game is trivial, it’s basically baked into the engine. They update EAC all the time.
Dude, steam ships with a bunch of libraries enabling cross distro support. It ain’t that complicated https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md
To be honest… Yes it’s that complicated. I’ve read that, Apparently valve had to spent massive ressource to figure out the load order of librairies and what to include for the steam runtime.
Granted, all they made is open source iirc. But it was a massive pita
Yes, their first attempt used load order overrides and search patch patching. Now, it uses linux containers to ship an isolated environment. Think of it as more similar to docker (or LXC/LXD). That said, I haven’t used it myself to so cannot comment on how difficult it is to use. Most people here are advocating for them permitting proton use without necessarily supporting it officially though. Which can easily be done by changing an option in EAC.
deleted by creator
Did you read the second line of my post?
The code changes aren’t the issue.
Did you read my comment? They ship with libraries to unify distribution across distros
I said: Code changes are easy, all the other things in regards to supporting playing on Linux (anticheat, support requests, testing, …) is hard.
You said: But code changes are easy because steam has libraries to unify distribution.
Do you see the problem here?
What are you going to tell me next? That code changes are easy?
It’s more that epic have a competing store and Tim doesn’t want to do anything that might help steam gain more traction.
If it can be made to run via Steam, then they only need to support it as far as getting it installed in Steam. Either Proton or native, it can be made an invisible issue from the user perspective. They have made a choice not to do so.
Right, no need to support 20 distros. One distro, known hardware. Anything else, you’re on your own.
If Steam can install on it, then it’s done. The distro doesn’t matter in this case. If Steam’ll install, then you’re done.
EA/Respawn somehow haven’t had a problem with doing that with Apex legends.
Apparently, their cost calculation is different. Also, Fortnite has about 50x active users compared to Apex Legends. That also changes a lot.
Sweeny said it doesn’t make business sense for them and if it will make sense in the future, they will support Linux.
I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.
I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.
Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.
Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.
Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.
Well, if half a million people are guessing on a choice of two options, some are going to get it right. But that’s not due to the insight of the people, but due to numbers.
Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.
These examples really don’t apply here.
- Windows Phone, Blackberry and Nokia were caught up in a massive market change where they where too little and too late.
- Stadia was a purpously risky gamble to be first at a potential “next big thing” and was scrapped when the global economy crumbled and cloud gaming showed no signs of wide spread adoption. If anything, this is the opposite situation than Epic and Linux.
- Hangouts was renamed and merged with other Google chat apps, but in the end they now have messages, which is the messenger with the highest install count worldwide.
- EGS is still a comparably new thing, considering that Steam is in the market since ~20 years while the EGS is here only ~5 years. They are growing steadily, so this is not an example that we can look at in retrospect, because it’s still unfolding. Also, sure it would have been great if they would have had to run a game distribution platform in 2003, but their money shower didn’t start until Fortnite exploded in 2017. And they pretty much immediately got into the business when they had the money to.
Also, there are some other factors in play that you didn’t consider.
Smartphones exploded between 2007 and 2010. It went from nothing to almost everything in just a few years, and those who got lucky and where ready at the right time managed to take the new market. Windows Mobile proves that it’s not enough to be super early. You need the right timing in both directions.
There is no indication that Linux will have >50% market share among gamers within the next 3 years. Yes, it nudged Linux over the 3% mark but at that rate it’s going to take a long while. Also, contrary to smartphones vs feature phones, the steam deck is an additional gaming PC for on the go. It doesn’t replace desktop gaming.
Also, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Steam Deck is a distant fourth between Android, iOS and the Switch.
And even if you limit the scope to x86 mobile gaming, they are by far not the only competitor. There are lots of others, many of them using Windows, who do the same.
And the biggest edge the Steam Deck is it’s value, because Steam subsidizes the Deck with their Store sales. Most people don’t care whether it runs Linux or not.
Does it have to support every permutation or just a standard one like SteamOS?
It feels like none of the replies to you actually read your comment. I appreciate you taking the time to offer up possible explanations with examples. Thank you!
Except he’s completely wrong because containers work specifically to solve the problem of deploying across different configurations. Valve already figured this out a decade ago with the steam runtime. That’s why I can run a relatively obscure OS like Bazzite and nearly my entire library of AAA just works like it would on any other distro. You can run a container across hundreds of thousands of different configurations, it doesn’t matter.
Yeah, pretty much all answers are “You are wrong, the code change is easy”.
Kinda sad that people don’t make it even to the first line.
lol why are you simping for them? they made a choice not to do this. they could easily do it with their manpower if they didn’t, you know, keep laying people off in order to maximize profits. You’re also overinflating how difficult it is to make games cross-platform compatible with the tools available today.
It sucks a lot when people are so deep in their petty trench fights over brands that they think there is only “Me for this, You for that, You simp”.
I don’t care about Epic and neither do I care for Steam. I buy my games where I get them the cheapest: Key resellers. And I don’t care on which online store the cheapest price lands.
If I was still developing games, I’d deploy them on both or on the one who pays me the most for an exclusivity deal.
With that out of the way: I am only explaining simple backgrounds to people interested to listen.
But sadly so many people fight over an online shop as if it was politics.
Do you fight like that for your favourite online retailer? Or your favourite supermarket chain?
What Steam and Epic do is business. They are no charities. They do stuff that makes them money. So any sane user should see it as a business transaction and buy where the price is best for what you get.
LOL I have no skin in this game. Your comment is pure projection and I think that you have demonstrated precisely what I was arguing.
I bet Tim doesn’t even know how to use terminal
IDK, ZZT was essentially a CLI game.
Man, ZZT was great. Plus it paved the way for MegaZeux, which is still my favorite “game nobody’s heard of before”. I want that Tim Sweeney back.
Best we can do is billionaire Tim Sweeney that cares more about money than games.
Needs more programmers in order to check the AC checkbox, can’t afford that.
If only they had the funds for just a few more programmers, but alas, they barely survive off their niche title as is.
