If only we had more programmers
MFer you just fired like a thousand of them
Meanwhile back in 2004, Epic released Unreal Tournament 2004, with a dedicated Linux installer on the first disc.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it was hidden on the last disk! (And the box did not mention it in any way)
Good times.
I conveniently had my UT04 retail box sitting on the shelf next to me. I can confirm there’s a little penguin on the back of package, and under OS requirements they list Linux with an asterisk explaining it’s not supported by Atari (publisher).
There is nothing else in the manual indicating how to use the Linux version, which disk to use, or any additional information that I can find.
Edit: geez I miss game manuals sometimes. All the game mechanics are so nicely explained, and it has instructions to setup modding tools!
Epic shut down the UT2004 master server back in this spring, before it died the community had created a new public master server, I had to edit the master server address in ut2004.ini but it works.
Epic does deserve credit for running the master server for a game for 19 years, regardless of their current actions, that deserves mad respect.
They even ran their stats tracking service untill then IIRC…
Imagine being the editor of a cross-platform game engine and pretending you don’t have enough developers to port the games you developed for other platforms…
What’s your message here Timmy huh?
“Our game engine is so shitty that even us can’t afford to develop our games on Linux with it”
What a fraud…
(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
They probably just don’t want to make it available on steam, or get their client working on linux.
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.
Linux support is almost free.
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.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
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.
(All copy-pasted from what I’ve written in the linux_gaming subreddit)
This is the same guy who compared Linux to moving to Canada once, had moved away from PC gaming because of “rampant piracy” only to return back to it because he wanted that sweet, sweet pie of the market Valve had ripened, built the shittiest store imaginable, that was initially literally spyware and took 3 years to get a fucking shopping cart feature, did all these shitty exclusives to keep the said store afloat, instead of you know, trying to improve it? The same guy who allowed shitty creepto games into his store only when Steam had banned them (btw does anyone remember that Epic Shit Store was supposed to be a “highly curated store”)?
And this is the same company who specifically makes sure Fortnite won’t run on Linux because they literally use several anti cheat software, apart from the one they’re literally developing themselves, deliberately to NOT make Linux run it (such confidence on their software amirite :V)? The same company who has (hopefully had) a dumbass developer complaining about Steam Deck “not having Fortnite???” and that’s “fragmenting his library???”.
And there is also the matter of Rocket League, Artstation, Bandcamp, and so many other things.
Epic and Tim Sweeney are the most two-faced scumbags I’ve ever witnessed in my life, and it still fucking hurts me because I’ve loved the Unreal series so goddamn much, man.
In fact, I’m more angry at Heroic and Lutris and co. for allowing games to be installed from that store. Epic shouldn’t get this amount of work done for them for free.
*Owned. It’s since been sold a couple months ago to a greazy music licensing company, who immediately fired half the staff (120 positions gone).
