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!
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.
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.
hey look, a billionaire bootlicker, what are the odds
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
Hey look everyone, this guy only sees black or white!
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.
Shhh. Tim said something the Internet disagrees with so we all have dog pile on him.
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.
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
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?
“The Linux Problem” = “Not enough people using it for us to care”
That’s a public line. It’s BS. Sweeny has been actively trying to torpedo gaming on Linux for YEARS. I don’t know if it’s just “Steam is good for Valve so it’s bad for me”, or if it goes deeper than that, but it’s obvious in the last decade of behaviour.
IDK, Unreal Engine runs on Linux, can export to Linux, and the Unreal Tournament games are released on Linux.
I really don’t think he hates Linux, I believe him that he didn’t see a financial point in supporting it for their games. People seem willing to use Windows to play their games, so there’s not a strong financial incentive to support another platform.
If you want Sweeney to change his mind, get more people to use Linux exclusively. Personally, I prefer to ignore him.
IDK, Unreal Engine runs on Linux, can export to Linux, and the Unreal Tournament games are released on Linux.
You are cherry picking. What about EVERYTHING ELSE?
What are you talking about? I’m merely showing that he has supported Linux in the past, and at least some of his companies products support it today (Unreal and EAC).
The reason EGS and Fortnite don’t support Linux isn’t because he hates Linux, but because he doesn’t see profit in it. And I don’t blame him, Linux probably isn’t profitable in the short or medium term for EGS or Fortnite.
Steam didn’t start supporting Linux because they saw short or medium term profit, it was a long term investment to keep an option open in case Windows was able to force stores to share profit on their platform. Now that Windows has kind of backed off that, they’re doubling down because the Steam Deck provides another option to increasing sales and appealing to more people.
I don’t hate Tim Sweeney for not supporting Linux, but I am a bit disappointed though. But if Linux gains enough marketshare (not sure how much we’d need, but maybe 5%?), he’ll likely change his mind. He’s interested in profit, and Linux just isn’t an attractive enough platform for that right now for EGS. Maybe that’ll change in the future.
I have never and probably will never give EGS any of my money, but that didn’t mean I hate Sweeney or his products, it just means they provide no value to me, so I’m uninterested, much like he is with Linux.
I love Lemmy, but it’s quickly becoming a vacuum chamber of blind hate for certain people and topics.
While yah, some of that statement is bs. Not all of it is false.
Shit like “JusT ENabLE PRoTon!” Is ridiculously simplistic and not how anything works. Otherwise every game everywhere would just do it.
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.
Tim is not preventing people from using Linux. Linux is.
Linux is preventing people from booting up Steam Deck?
