alt Hacker NewsI don't need to imagine a made-up scenario that doesn't make sense. We can look at what has happened at face value.
The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
It is not uncommon for indie games on custom engines to support Windows, Playstation, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox. And, depending on the game, iOS or Android. Sometimes macOS although that's increasingly rare.
Native Linux builds are pretty rare. Especially before Proton got pretty good with Steamdeck release.
Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively. So painful that emulating Win32 is a clear win. Valve's runtime helps a lot. And supporting another path is just a waste of time.
Very sad!
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> Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively.
Funny, I have the same feelings after 5 seconds of using MSVC or looking at Win32 documentation. Or is it WinRT now, or is it .NET Core, or .NET Framework, or UWP or OLE or COM, or whatever the API du jour is which will be slightly incompatible and incomplete with the rest of the ecosystem in poorly documented and inscrutable ways?
Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. What's your equivalent to strace again, the one that's built into the system natively? There isn't one?
All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.
I guess there's a reason 80% of the servers in the world run Windows. Because it's so hard to develop for. Er, uh...no wait!
> The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
Companies end up not doing profitable things all the time, for many reasons. One rational reason is that while action 1 might be profitable, action 2 is even more profitable. So the fact that Linux is not supported does not show that it would not be profitable, but rather that there are other things the companies can use labour for which they think is even more profitable. If they could freely clone their employees (and "unclone" them afterwards) all profitable things would get done.
(This is just nitpicking about your economic argument, I have no reason to think your conclusion is wrong).