Why do indie game developers almost always port their games to linux as opposed to triple a devs who never do...

I can't remember all the pastas man, especially when there's a chance it could actually be a linux autist.

Indie devs usually don't have to deal with managers and PRfags dictating which platforms they support, and most popular engines these days support Linux by default, while AAA devs generally use their own engines and hire someone else to write a compatibility layer or port their engine to use SDL2 and OpenGL. Steam Dev Days 2014 had some great videos on the subject in case you'd like to know more about the process.
Source: I'm a Linux-based /agdg/ dev with nothing to show because I'm still figuring out ODE

Show me your penis

Programmer here with lots of experience shipping multiplatform products (but not games; I have a job that doesn't suck shit, and game programming is a shit industry to be in for 98% of the game programming jobs).

* Linux users are more likely to pay for Indie games than AAA games.
* Linux users aren't as susceptible to marketing (or they'd more likely be using Windows or OSX).
* Linux is such a small marketshare, a big business would have to justify the decision to port it, balancing cost to port vs the money made. Indie devs will make the decision based on things other than money.
* AAA budget is allocated by management, rather than programmers. Programmers are usually the people who would want to port to Linux (or develop on Linux in the first place), not management.
* AAA codebases are a hell of a lot more code, and it is optimized more heavily. More code is more work to port, and heavier optimization is more likely to be lower-level, using platform-specific functionality. Indie games are much more likely to be a higher-level framework or language that is already platform-independent (using C#, Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, Java, PyGame, LÖVE, etc) or at the least using a lower-level language without heavy optimization tricks that will compile for another platform with very minimal code changes at the worst.
* Porting to Linux and having a Linux version is instant hype and instant clout among the indie crowd. It comes off as "being for the people", where most AAA games it would just appear as expanding the marketshare, so it's more instant payoff just based on being indie in the first place. Linux is also now much more hip among the anti-corporate crowd, which indie developers are more likely to be.

Linux is a better platform on every technical level, but it comes down to money and marketing at the bottom line. If I was putting all my money and all of 50 of my collegues' money into a game that was going to make or break us, we'd obviously target Windows and nothing else, because that's where our bigges return will be, possibly planning a later Linux port for an extra surge if things go well.
If I'm making a game on my free time for fun, I'm doing it in Linux and maybe porting to Windows if there's enough demand or if somebody wants to pay me to do it.

Good answer

...

There's still the lousy state of OpenGL multithreading, quibbles over people's favourite audio server or init system, and we're still in an awkward pre-transition stage with Wayland which will resolve some issues with 4K displays, but other than that you're right on the money.

(nice)
Don't forget systemd

>>>Holla Forums

That's the case everywhere tbh. It's one the larger motivations for Vulkan.

That was implied by init system, faggot.

It's one button in Unity/Unreal 4. It's still easy in other engines
Toby ported Undertale to Linux way after it was released and it only took him an afternoon or so.

That's not a technical issue with the platform, but with graphics drivers (and partially with OpenGL everywhere, as unless you use it in a very careful way, it doesn't multithread at all, being that it's still derived from a giant state machine). Unfortunately, Linux is designated to a tiny fraction of driver developer efforts, and still stuck on X because there's not enough momentum to shove everybody onto Wayland yet.

Audio server is largely unimportant. JACK is inarguably better in every way except ease of use, and you can already use it in every real audio situation, and PulseAudio is a mess, but works without any hitches for normal desktop use.
systemd is shit, but if you want to avoid it, you can use Gentoo or another distro that lets you choose, and it's not a big deal for most people who don't care how their system starts up and manages daemons. Much ado about nothing.

I actually have had no issues with X on my 4K display, even when using xinerama to tile it with my 1080p television set horizontally. Check it out. What issues are you referring to? I'm curious if it's just my drivers that are written better (I'm using the FOSS AMDGPU stack with standard Mesa and Xorg) or if it's something else.

Resources is not the factor. Cost and gain is. It'll cost them more to port the game to Linux than they'll get from sales on Linux.
Indie devs have smaller projects, easier to port because they're probably using portable languages, and because the fact that they're indie means they get more "cred" by porting to Linux.

Me and you both brother.

Should have clarified that I was referring to Mesa's multithreaded OpenGL support, which is especially bad somehow from what I've heard I don't know much about this and could be wrong, so forgive me if it's false. Apparently Mesa doesn't support most AZDO extensions yet either, and those should give a nice performance boost once the devs have implemented them.
The 4K comment was based off some shit I read on PCGamingWiki where it recommended github.com/CyberShadow/hax11 for people having issues with 4K gaming.

Back to Reddit you fucking newfag.

You're using ODE too?
I've heard Bullet is generally faster than ODE, but does it scale down to older hardware?

Because the big companies are spoiled and can always afford to cut corners, while the small ones will go out of their way for every crumb of profit they can get. And let's be honest, Linux is indeed a crumb.

Coin Crypt, Necrodancer, Risk of Rain, Lethal League, want more examples?

Except when Rocket League runs like shit because something with shader compilation.

bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97879

Hoping someone fixes it.

AMDGPU is very cool and pretty damn efficient for most situations, but it does have some pretty serious bugs still (and some of the bugs are different for different cards). I'd give it at least another year before it hits stability. The FOSS drivers are still alpha quality, and the AMDGPU Pro beta drivers are more stable, but have bugs too.

That's the price of using testing software for new hardware.

This. There's a button that says port to linux in the dev kit and boom there we go, about 50 bucks made from all the purchases it will get.

It's one thing to not know every pasta. It's a whole other thing to not know ancient fucking pasta like that.

God dammit. You beat me too it.

the engines they use are mainly those easy to use ones where it's just clicking export to linux and their games are simple enough that optimization is a non issue.

AAA games devs use bigger engines that either A: requires some for of in depth work for it to run in linux
B: require some sort of wine wrapper for it to work in linux
C: not work in linux

they don't think the money/effort would be worth it so they just don't bother. sure there are engines like unreal now coming out with vulkan and linux support but publishers like zenimax actively refuse to support linux for some reason despite ID having a solid history of supporting linux and having fantastic openGL support and open sourcing their engines.

tl;dr blame zenimax and don't support their games

tl;dr AAA devs are jews that don't give a single shit about anything other than wonderful Wincucks 10 user shekels

Because indie developers don't recieve fat cheques from Microsoft et al in exchange for using directx or some other platform locked garbage.

Don't worry, you'll always be a retarded piece of shit in my book.

Every single linux thread has to have this.

What you’re referring to as a linux thread, is in fact, a GNU/Linux thread, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, a GNU plus Linux thread.

Because the effort isn't worth the small returns for AAA devs, while indie devs desperately need a wider audience.

In the beginning, there was UNIX.
>only modern unix-likes are OSX and systemD/Linux
To illustrate:
>and when you want to use something like a USB, the computer mounts it somewhere along /, like /media/USB123456789, or you can mount something manually using #sudo mount /dev/ /mnt

Why can't the open source community make a successful product? They're such vindictive little faggots to, forking shit out of spite and things like that. They aren't even good programmers.

Because they want to sell their games to the maximum amount of people possible. Because it's unlikely a lot of people will play it to begin with. It also doesn't usually take that much time considering their game is usually pretty simple to begin with. It can take less than a month, if that, to do.

Whereas to a big time developer, porting a huge game of theirs isn't an easy thing. It can potentially take months. Months they'd rather spend making the game work on a platform they know people will actually buy the game on.

These developers are perfectly aware of linux but they're also perfectly aware that according to steam stats that less than 1% of Steam's entire userbase actually uses Linux. There's even more people using Mac than Linux on Steam. Most of the time whenever a developer ports their game to linux it's usually for good P/R rather than to sell actual copies on it.

why don't you help out?

If I was a programmer I would be 100% closed source except for libraries and shit or whatever they're called. I'd include my little acknowledgement open source license in the most hard to find screen of the program. I would avoid those idiots. Fortunately I make more than programmers so it would be a downgrade.

Suit yourself faggot. What job?

Teledildonics

without-systemd.org and go nuts, running Void Linux myself.
Wouldn't recommend it, I figured out way too late they only have 32bit WINE available because building the 64bit version is apparently "too hard". I tried myself to no avail and am too lazy to switch distros and reinstall everything now

Worst case scenerio just grab playonlinux and get it to set up a 64 bit instance.
I personally have yet to encounter any other problems with Void tbh fam
**I have yet to figure out how to do an update all but this soecific package command with xbps
but that is probably me being an idiot**

that spoiler has no line breaks and should technically work perfectly
test

well you sure did fish up a bunch of them

bcuz Unity/UE4/Godot/Clickteam/Construct 2 all have simple exporting selections to other OS other than Windows

The trend is growing but let's not exaggerate here. I hope it continues.

It can do that? Well I guess I'll give it a try, i've been liking the distribution on other fronts.
xbps-pkgdb -m hold xeyes
xeyes now won't update ever until you run the command above with -m hold, did this to keep xinput from fucking up for a few months

...

*with -m unhold
fuck my fingers aaaaaa

Because they just make shitty clones of 90s PC games instead of making something original.

AAA tend to use stuff with more dependencies that might not all be available on linux.

From what I can guess, for multiplayer games its a fear of hackers. I'm sure its a hell of a lot easier to come up with an undetectable injection on Linux than it is on Windows.

Because Linux community leaders are one of the biggest pain in the ass ever.

A lot of Linux users want to buy games. Even closed source games. That's a good thing, because some devs are making a Linux game.
But as soon as a Linux community leader (someone who feels in charge, such as an admin, a modo, etc) heard a game is closed source, you hit a wall. Hard.
Of course, you can continue to talk to Linux users one by one. But in order to really gain more traction, you need support from community leaders, who will make part of the job for you and talk about the game to thousands of other users, managing all those problems related to various configs and distros.

You need the support of community leaders to sell a game to a community, and when almost all community leaders of a very broad community are hostile against closed source games, it's really, really hard to gain any traction in those communities.

When you are spending all this time and money to make a game for people who will buy it even if it's closed source, it's kind of anger-inducing to get a perpetual rebuttal from people who block you for ideological reasons and refusing to answer the needs of their users.

Do you all understand that I can compile to any operating system and architecture without changing a single line of code, right?

youtube.com/watch?v=eHHT7dTmw8U

flipmode is the greatest

It's always these gatekeepers that are the biggest problem.

Morrowind has plenty of vague directions, and some literally wrong directions.

Whats bad about first two?

YEAAAAAH

There aren't many Pakis in Kent, but a fuckton of brown people.

that comes from Todd Howard's personal stash

show me all the QTE

Bunch of bombs inside the sarcophagus. John dimaggio's character is just chilling at the end with the mummy that inside of it, watching the fireworks he planted from outside the city limits. That's why you don't open it.

Also Snape kills dumbledore.

How long do I have to play until it starts to be enjoyable?

steamcommunity.com/id/kawaiianimeshoujo
add me up losers

He is just mad. I can tell ya for a fact there is at least two other people besides me that requests her probably more people just to meme.

how

I'm one of a handful of engine programmers at our studio and our shit runs fine on Linux in-house (not hard if you already support PS4/Android/iOS in your mix of platforms, because that'll get you 95% of the way there, just need to worry about X11+glx/egl or use something like SDL for abstracting the window system), but the executives won't green light shipping for that platform because they say they can't justify QA and long-term maintenance for something with 1% market share.

None of them of course care about escaping the Windows plantation, typical yuppie libshits. But they pay my salary.

Maybe when Trump gets rid of a ton of small-business regulations, you'll see a lot more people with actual talent currently stuck at the big companies leaving to create their own game studios. Can only hope there will be more Linux games as a result.

Don't fucking open it.

Yeah its not like one of the biggest arteries in your body runs through your leg

If you're trying to imply that every major news outlet don't have their own plotical bias then you're a fucking idiot. There was not one source of truth throughout this entire shitfest and everyone was just speaking from their ass because they had an agenda to fill but now because Trump won all the outlets that were for him were suddenly right? Fucking please.

I didn't want to evolve my Torracat because I didn't like how drastic the change was. But when I finally gave in I actually ended up liking him. I liked Vikavolt as soon as I saw it (In spite of the complete goofing of its stats) and ended up liking the damn persian.

AAA developers often use proprietary frameworks that either they don't have the capability or the resources to port to Linux.

Because it's really really easy to pirate on linux.
By design.
Idiot.

It is super easy to pirate on Windows as well though.

This isn't the real reason unfortunately, they could just have a shell corporation port it or outsource the work and let them bear the legal responsibilities of consumer support and long term maintenance of the SKU. Back during the late 90's and early 2000's many major games were ported to GNU/Linux and Mac this way. Hell Microsoft even ported Halo to the Mac using this scheme but that was due to a contractual obligation.

If you port to GNU/Linux or Mac you get on Microsoft's shitlist and don't get lucrative advertising deals for promoting their latest version of DirectX or any of the other ways they legally bribe major publishers to stay on Windows. Those terrible DX12 patches for many PC games that don't work or have worse performance than DX11 are a good example of such a program.

The higher the budget, the less the developers care.

b8