Why do game companies only port to Windows and Mac, not Linux?

Question

I've tried using Wine and other software in Linux, but you always end up losing quality.

Answer 1

Because Linux users are about 2% of the total installed base. And many of them aren't gamers. It' not worth the time, support issues, etc.



In addition, games depend on very high performance support from the video card drivers. Video card makers (just like game designers) put very little effort into their Linux ports, if they do them at all. The video card drivers written by the Linux dev community aren't really up to the performance levels of the Windows or Mac equivalents either.

Answer 2

As a Linux user I will tell what most other Linux users don't like to admit:



1. Windows/Mac are *standardized* operating systems, for example all Win7 and OS X 10.7 operating systems are the basically the same.



2. Unlike Windows and OS X, there is no standardized linux platform. Linux has 100s of different distributions, making the game run on one distribution does not mean it will work on others. Companies in the past have found supporting even major Linux distros to be a nightmare, they get flooded with complaints from customers who cannot get their game working..



2. Proprietary reasons. Porting to Linux requires companies to release a portion of their source code, most companies are not willing to give part or all of their source code away for free. Even if they found a way around that, the Linux market is not big enough for most companies to invest large amounts of money in trying to support even just the major distributions.

Answer 3

Because desktop Linux has a tiny fraction of the market and it would be a massive pain in the butt to test on it on the myriad of distros.



Infernal, building software for Linux does NOT require you to open source it. If a company used GPL code, then yes, they are required to open source it, but here's a shocker: You can build proprietary code that runs just fine in Linux without using a shred of GPL code. Imagine that!



Oh Yeah, that's nice. Firefox is a relatively simple application compared to a 3D game. Just try working with all the different OpenGL and audio implementations among many, many things. Yes, it can be done (Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a Linux version, but I don't know how well it runs across distros), but the company has to be willing to put the extra time and money into testing/debugging, and even then you usually get support for a few distros and "Well, it should work..." support for the rest.

Answer 4

Many game companies feel that it's not worth their effort to compile their games over to Linux.



It wouldn't be that hard unless their games rely heavily on Windows APIs.



The number of Linux distributions is pretty irrelevant. Just look at Firefox, a single tarball download will work on all Linux distros provided they have the proper dependencies installed.



http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fx/



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I didn't say it was a walk in the park. They have lots of programmers, and with all of them working together they can move the games over to Linux as well. If you want a better example than Firefox, then I give you Alien Arena.



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Adobe Flash and Autodesk Maya both work on Linux and are entirely proprietary. So it is false that game developers would have to release their source code if they develop for Linux, although it would be highly encouraged.



"A company that USES and MODIFIES OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE as part of their own software, must make THAT PORTION of their source code available..."



So if they don't use any GNU GPL licensed software, then the above won't apply to them. Even if they do use GNU GPL licensed software they only have to make the GNU GPL part of their software available and nothing else.

Answer 5

It's a matter of economics. Linux is a very small fraction of the marketplace for games.

The cost of porting the software to Linux, then publishing a third version and placing boxes in stores is not going to return sufficient income to warrant the cost.

Answer 6

Mac is used by 12%, Windows by 87%, Linux is like .4%, so thats why. Why spend all that extra money on coders to do that when linux is getting smaller, not larger. More people are moving to mac now, Linux is fading out and even windows is declining by a small share.