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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

> industry just seems not to have bitten.

I know folks at AAA game studios/publishers and the primary reason I've repeatedly heard is: Stadia requires that we port to Linux.

Completely insane requirement. Steam, meanwhile, is making Linux gaming better than ever with their investment in Proton (which is incredible, wine has never been so good) and Nvidia's game streaming service "just works" and you bring your own games (just log into steam).

Stadia is screwed from the get-go by thrusting inane requirements onto their potential partners. If they had huge market power, maybe it'd fly, but it's effectively a new console as far as publishers are concerned.

Instead it should just work with PC games. End of story.

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> Completely insane requirement.

They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?

No. Porting engines across complicated SDKs and build environments is what these studios do every day of their existence, and virtually all the backends run fine on Linux already.

Again, the reason the big studios aren't on board is because they don't want to be part of an app store ecosystem. It's not a technical thing at all.

It’s a financial thing. Porting to Linux costs money, that’s what it means.

Depending on the engine it can be quite a lot of time. Especially if you don’t already have a Vulkan backend.

Therefore if you don’t think the additional sales are worth the expense, including the opportunity cost of your devs, why bother?

> They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?

Ports to Xbox, Switch and PS5 have a long established record of making money, those devices have huge established userbases and they have very good toolsets for doing the ports. The engines will have already been ported.

None of those are true for Linux, and the toolsets for doing so are not mature in the slightest, for a completely unproven market.

It using Linux shouldn't be an issue. You could use Wine and Proton to make the difference the same way Valve does.

They purposefully hamper the systems though. So even a game like Destiny 2 is running at Medium settings on a datacenter. Just to be able to containerize it and all that noise.

You're right that it should just work from the devloper's perspective. I personally think this is all possible with existing tech, but Google failed to deliver. Game devs have weird gripes about porting to Linux.

It's because their expertise is in Linux for most of their products. They are incentivised to leverage their domain expertise here, and maybe only Amazon has comparable expertise in.

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