Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisLTD | Hacker News Reader

Stadia changes the math a bit. If you’re already targeting Stadia, which uses a Linux variant under the hood, the time to make it widely available might be worth it.

View on HN

Might be... but (I assume; I don't have any specific knowledge) that Stadia runs everything on a single known software stack, and quite possibly a single hardware stack. This would make it an easier platform to target than the wider range of general consumer hardware running Linux.

Personally, I run Linux as my daily driver and I hope game developers see the success of Steam's Linux support and decide that targeting Linux is viable and worth doing. But I wouldn't assume that building for Stadia necessarily has a big overlap with building for consumer Linux.

Valve seem to have been addressing that with their runtimes.

See https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

Consider that Stadia is not the only cloud gaming platform. Also, even if the overlap between Stadia and consumer Linux is small, it's still probably much bigger than the overlap between Windows and consumer Linux

When making a game for Stadia you can target a very small subset of hardware and test on those on one single linux distribution/software stack (at the moment all stadia servers are identical). When you make a game that anyone can download on their machine the amount of different hardware + os/driver combinations grows a lot and requires a lot more effort for a quality product.

The success of Stadia means more developers who are comfortable with Vulkan and linux as a platform. That should give us better ports and even more Vulkan first titles.

That could lead to better driver support (at least from Nvidia :| ) on 'nix, and so on and so forth.

And is it successful?

Success of Stadia? It's barely Presence of Stadia at this stage.

Meant is more hypothetically, not as if it is a current fact.

When someone makes a game for Stadia they don't really care if it works on linux or Vulkan in general. All they care is that the game works on the custom hardware and drivers Google/AMD provides for Stadia. That is the only platform they will test that version on. (This is very similar to how console development happens. You have a fixed set of hardware so you just develop for that without a care for anything else really)

Sure the distance is smaller then starting with the Windows or Xbox/Playstation versions but there is still a lot of work to get it to work on any random pc someone builds.

"All they care is that the game works on the custom hardware and drivers Google/AMD provides for Stadia."

I understand, and agree. Exposure to Vulkan, Linux, and the related optimizations is helpful and I personally considering it a bonus and assume it will have downstream benefits (maybe im delusional) for gaming.

They are already comfortable with it thanks to Android NDK APIs, and you don't see those games coming to GNU/Linux.

If a game is on Stadia it can already be played on Linux via Stadia and a web browser. It can also be played on macOS. I thought that's where you were going with that.

They are saying that if a game runs on Stadia then the vendor must have already done the work to port it to a Linux-based platform, since Stadia is a Linux-based platform.

Android is a Linux-based platform. The hard part of dealing with Linux is that the userland-is-a-free-for-all model means there are effectively hundreds of Linux-based platforms out there to deal with.

That is true, but even the most niche Linux platform is still closer to the mean of Linux platforms than Windows is.

Nobody actually uses Stadia, though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com