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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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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.
Didn’t they also release schematics for 3D printing parts?
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
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.
Actually, Valve & the community will do most of the work if Epic does the bare minimum on their end.
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)>⌐■-■
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
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?
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.