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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming
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(Copied from a comment I made in another community about this)
There's an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.
They've presented it as "it doesn't make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count." But they don't need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say "yeah, we don't support this, do it at your own risk."
From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don't even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.
They are worried that there'll be graphical bugs or something and that'll make Fornight look bad, so it's better for their brand image to just block everything they don't have control over.
It's a worrying pattern I've seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.
... Or maybe it's just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their "enemies".
I have been wondering why they don't just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an "official" launcher. It's probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.
Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than "lol 2% market share" as they present it.
Sweeney doesn't want his games to be available anywhere but Epic's proprietary shit. Which is hilarious given his crusades against Apple and Google
Nah that's precisely why he's on the crusade so epic will be free to do that and he thinks it'll make him look like the good guy when they do it
Meanwhile, I'm glad that lawsuit happened but wish it had been anyone else because fuck epic.
Rules for thee not for me
The CEO of Epic is a world renowned twat.
They probably just don't want to make it available on steam, or get their client working on linux.
The thing is, they don't have to. We have Heroic/Legendary Games Launcher, and Lutris too.
I’ve gotten all my Epic Games Store games working in Lutris and/or Heroic. Fall Guys was the only one I had any real trouble with.
They probably don't want to make Heroic the official way to play Fortnite on the Steam Deck either.
Install sunshine/moonlight on a PC and deck pair, and you should be able to play Epic Games from the heroic launcher. I didn't get much into it at the time, but you can shortcut games in the moonlight client so everything starts when it's selected. Without setup, you can already stream desktop mode, open Heroic and start there.
I don't use the deck, but I do stream to a micro Linux box connected to my TV and an Xbox controller.
It also gives you a lot of value, since Linux users are better at reporting bugs(i saw a post from a developer who called this out) and therefore it's easier to find and fix them. A bug free game is something everyone benefits from. If Linux users see bugs more often and therefore report them more often you save a lot of money since you don't have to pay people who test your game.
And not even a little.
The current HW survery says that about 1.9% of Steam users are on Linux. According to 3rd party sources, there's on the order of 120M to 130M people who used Steam this year. Extrapolating the HW survey, that's about 2.5M Linux on Linux users.
Fortnite is leaving money from ~2.5M possible customers on the table because of stupid ideology.
Isn't official support legally binding, or seen as that by a regular consumer, or their board? Like, they just don't provide anything to other OS unless they can troubleshoot here. And they are donation-based too, meaning they are very alarmed about any liability, or any unpredictable sutuation at all, since both cash and questionable consent are involved.
I don't thing Deck can take a dent here, but there are a lot of cheap chromebooks and the likes in edu, where their primary targets are. I think they can bank on it. But it's good they weren't as smart to do so.