Kinda weird when both Unreal Engine and EAC, both owned by Epic, actually already have Linux/Proton support, yet games that exclusive to Epic Store won’t support Linux, or drop Linux support once they become Epic Store exclusives.
Rocket League dropped its native Linux support to upgrade to DirectX 11. If the move to Epic were the reason and the justification is fake, why did the game also drop Mac support despite it being supported by the Epic launcher?
Previously, games like Rust and Valve’s own CS 2 stopped supporting Linux and Mac without any store changes.
You raised a good point about rocket league, which seems to be using the ancient unreal engine 3. Epic basically updated ue3 to support directx11 but neglect updating vulkan/metal support on the old engine. But Fortnite is using unreal engine 5 though, which has excellent Linux support. Epic had a presentation bragging about how they got Fortnite running on Vulkan as “same game, not port”, so the decision to not support Linux is certainly not a technical one.
He means they have a problem with Linux users. What other reason would there be to buy up games and remove native Linux support the second its removed from the steam store? (Rocket League for example)
The Epic Games Store doesn’t have a Linux client, so it’s understandable from a business perspective to not develop a product no new customers will be able to buy.
It’s a middle finger to existing customers though, especially with the outdated Linux version being downloaded by default. They should prioritize proton to enable online play on multiplayer game, but as established, they don’t care about Steam Linux users
Yes, those launchers are great. But I don’t think Epic will ever acknowledge third-party clients exist, so their existence makes no difference from their perspective.
Eh… “gaslighting 101” – swears randomly (against the victim/target), throws in a (non-random) praise to “raise the fire even more”, refuses to elaborate.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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).
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn’t play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I’m aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam’s rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn’t need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve’s servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn’t be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it’s not like Steam doesn’t add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve’s decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren’t, I can cite:
Valve’s work on Wine/Proton
the open SteamOS
repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they’re making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games
It’s really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.
They also had to get sued by multiple states before they started offering refunds in the US. Valve doesn’t do anything that doesn’t make them money. They just have a longer term view towards profit than a publicly traded company. That’s what lemmy/reddit doesn’t understand.
Yup, Valve isn’t my friend, but there’s a lot of overlap in my and their interests. So I support them, because they support me. They make a product I like, and actively work to make my platform of choice better.
They’re as good as a friend, but unlike a friend, I’ll drop them as soon as they stop providing value.
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.
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
Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible.
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 https://areweanticheatyet.com/game/fortnite, 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.
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.
Actually, Valve & the community will do most of the work if Epic does the bare minimum on their end.
It is a money thing, not an emotional “Tim does not like Linux” thing.
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)>⌐■-■
2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS
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
It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor.
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?
because when shit doesn’t work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that’s bad PR.
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.
I’m thinking maybe you’re not aware of the extent at which Proton works these days. It’s come a long way, and fewer and fewer games are incompatible every day. Even games that Steam marks “unsupported” often work (for example, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix).
Games often play better with Proton than using their own native Linux runtime. On Steam Deck, and on my shitty Linux laptop.
My understanding about Fortnite, is that it’s literally just a switch they’d have to flip to allow EAC.
I am fully aware of the state of Linux gaming, and I do play game with Proton, but the experience is far from perfect with many games having visual glitches and unexpected crashes. Epic likely do not want to deal with this and Valve will certainly not help a competitor get on their platform . It may be true that for the EAC, it is a switch to be toggled, but this does not show the entire story which is also the game experience.
The last two games I’ve played: Lethal Company and BeamNG.Drive, both games that should be basically perfect. They both ran fine enough for me to play for an extended period, but there were some visual glitches like flickering or stuttering.
Edit: the person talking about echo chambers was so right… I’m getting downvoted for sharing my experience that happens to go slightly (!) contradict the “Linux is the best gaming platform” narrative
Well that must be why on my 2 computers I’ve had some minor issues like the game crashing for having the misfortune of changing my workspace or having flickering on the top of my screen for 3 hours that persists after restarts and reboots.
Just because your experience has been perfect does not mean mine and other people’s been. This community needs to stop taking criticism of real issues as an insult to their mother.
If you have bugs that the vast majority don’t have, then why don’t you… let’s say… go report them instead of complaining on some random forum so they can can actually get patched…
The devs can’t patch a bug only a handful of people experience if those said people don’t submit proper bug reports.
Because I have not been able to isolate and reproduce it yet. I also did no troubleshooting to see if it was present on other proton versions yet. And also the game crashing on workspace switching has been reported in the past, it is a known issue.
The effort from the dev side would be negligible as all they need to do is allow people to play it through Proton. Nobody needs to engineer a Linux runtime. Most games that work on Steam Deck don’t have Linux support.
but i can’t seem to find any posts saying hiding vm doesn’t work with intel and multiple posts about hiding vm status with intel specific instructions on a quick ddg search so you might want to try again.
What if, and hear me out on this one, Epic Games really just love closed platforms for the built-in DRM of “secret sauce” and binary blobs to protect their intellectual property, even if the Steam Deck now has a TPM 2.0 equivalent. In fact, they would rather deprive the user of as much agency as possible to retain most of the control.
That might be a tinfoil hat take, but I stand by it.
If they do think that - and I absolutely do not claim you are wrong - Then it’s through ignorance. Developers can just as easily distribute compiled binaries for linux as they can for Windows, and even encrypt them if that’s what they want to do.
Because linux itself is free and open, it doesn’t mean you can’t run commercial software on it without it being ripped off. I mean, my work pays many tens of thousands of pounds for commercial software running on Linux, and it’s not just licencing that stops it being spread.
Tim Sweeney is awesome. He’s one of the biggest conservation donors in my state and is personally responsible for permanently saving over 50,000 acres of land from development, protecting crucial habitat in a rapidly developing state, allowing public trail and nature preserves to get created. He lives in a normal house and drives a normal car and hikes the land he preserves when he’s not working. He’s a billionaire that lives a modest life, doesn’t mess with politics, and a true philanthropist. He doesn’t give to get press. The few articles out there about his philanthropy are because reporters stumble across it when reporting on whatever new nature preserve is opening in their area.
He might have some business practices that are problematic but are endemic to the industry.
You sound like someone who doesn’t know much about philanthropy and falls prey to confirmation bias as much as anyone. The fact that you put money laundering ahead of tax-write offs is telling. He’s not a mexican drug cartel buying US real estate.
Like I said, he’s a stealth philanthropist to the degree that it does next to nothing to burnish his reputation. The only reason I know about it is because I’m in land conservation. He doesn’t seek out any press attention at all, and the limited number of news articles about his donations are a testament to that. I am not saying that Epic business practices don’t have issues that are common between his competitors, but I am saying that he himself is not a slimeball. His personality is about as far as you can get from a psychopathic self-enriching tech bro. Basically he hit the jackpot with Unreal, then fortnite.
Thanks for the insight. It’s quite tiring to watch human beings distilled into binary good or evil based on something as innocuous as adding proton support to a game…
No, just defending someone that I know for a fact is a genuinely decent human being. He doesn’t give a shit about burnishing his reputation through the philanthropy he does. He does it because he hates seeing billionaire mansions on mountaintops as much as anyone who isn’t a fuck, because he wants everyone to have natural places to enjoy in the future. If you can’t see the difference between someone like Sweeney and someone like Musk, DeVoss, etc., that’s on you. He’s not trying to make the world worse for everyone.
Do I have issues with the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the US? Yes. If you gave me a list of billionaires, where I had to rank them in terms of their benefit to the world vs. negative impact to the world, would I put him high in benefit and low in negative impact? Yes. He’s not spouting antisemitic nonsense, or trying to influence politics, or ruin education, or poison the minds of the American public. He’s just running his business, treating his employees well, and preserving land. So if you want to call me a bootlicker for points, fine. Given the world we live in, I’d rather have our billionaires be like Sweeney instead of Musk or DeVoss.
Doing good with one hand doesn’t excuse using the other to smother FOSS progress. No matter how humble you are materially, or reasonable in local policy, that doesn’t mean he is right in the many bullshit stances he’s dug himself into where the games industry is concerned. He does have a point in some places, but holy shit is it hard to take him seriously when half the shit he gripes about other companies doing, Epic does too. And that’s before we talk about the scummy BS only Epic does.
Epic has donated a sizable amount to fund Godot Engine, and other FOSS projects. UE4 and UE5 can both be built from source to run on Linux natively. They are not smothering FOSS or Linux.
You can call someone a slimeball about something specific if they are a slimeball specifically about that thing, and Sweeny has proven repeatedly to be slimy in regards to Linux support.
I’m sure he’s a great guy in other ways, but when the topic is specifically about scumbag corpo practices, calling him a slimebag isn’t inaccurate.
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”
Every engine in this generation has the ability to do multibuilds. The networking and security will be the only thing other than that. This is Unreal Engines official Linux documentation so it’s all bullshit. docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/…/GettingStarted/
also why the fuck does Lego Fortnite require anticheat? it’s a survival co-op, there’s no competitive element, and yet from what I’ve read it still kicks you out when you’re trying to play it on Linux.
It is well known that Tim Sweeney has an unfounded hate for Linux in general and routinely makes up lies to support his idiotic views.
Especially in the case of a game like Fortnite, which uses EAC, it would require enabling a checkbox and recompiling once to make it compatible with proton, which in itself is a rather unnecessary measure imposed by Epic.
So no, it’s not simplistic, it’s literally how it would work in this case. As demonstrated by the countless other games which use EAC and did just that.
However, Fortnite makes so much money that it wouldn’t be a hardship at all for them to do it. It may not be as profitable as other things they could do, but I think it would be a good gesture.
But Epic really doesn’t benefit if the Deck succeeds, especially since they don’t have a store there. It doesn’t really hurt them that much though, but they have no reason to facilitate Deck adoption.
Except if they did enable Fortnite on Deck… As the game is not on steam, people who want to play it would be encouraged to install the epic store on their Decks (which IS possible, and already something people do to play other games from the Epic store on Deck), which would give Epic an in on SteamDeck.
Enabling EACs proton support for Fortnite would be a means to get their foot in the door with Deck players, but you’re saying they wont do it because they don’t have a foot in with Deck players?
I’m saying they won’t do it because it requires work and they don’t think the market is big enough. As you noted, the process for getting EGS on Linux (Deck or otherwise) isn’t straightforward, so few people would do it, which makes the market even smaller.
And it’s not just enabling an option once, they would also need to do some level of QA testing to make sure it’s playable and not easily exploitable by cheaters on Linux. That all costs time and money.
So I completely understand why they wouldn’t bother, the profit just isn’t there. I still think they should, I just understand why they don’t.
I think in this thread we’ve both proven your point about echo chambers on Lemmy… People on here do not seem to realize that 2.5-3% of all desktops is not a great market to get into and that the vast majority of those 2.5% are not even interested in playing the damn game. I also find it funny that so many people on here seem to hate Epic Games saying they would never buy anything from yet they are still very angry they don’t support Linux, like it would affect them.
Apex Legends works fine on my Steam Deck. It’s awesome now that there’s cross progression now finally across Steam, Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo. I had progress across all of them and it’s all together in one account now.
I really enjoyed the last season of Fortnite. The OG season where they brought back the style and gameplay of how Fortnite was when it first launched its Battle Royale mode. The new season is very gimmicky and I don’t like it. But my younger brothers and cousins love it. It would be amazing to be able to play with them on Steam Deck. If Apex can do it, so should Fortnite.
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