Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite
97 comments
-
If only we had more programmers
MFer you just fired like a thousand of them
-
If only we could fire a couple more of them...
-
-
Meanwhile back in 2004, Epic released Unreal Tournament 2004, with a dedicated Linux installer on the first disc.
-
Correct me if I’m wrong but it was hidden on the last disk! (And the box did not mention it in any way)
Good times.
-
I conveniently had my UT04 retail box sitting on the shelf next to me. I can confirm there's a little penguin on the back of package, and under OS requirements they list Linux with an asterisk explaining it's not supported by Atari (publisher).
There is nothing else in the manual indicating how to use the Linux version, which disk to use, or any additional information that I can find.
Edit: geez I miss game manuals sometimes. All the game mechanics are so nicely explained, and it has instructions to setup modding tools!
-
You may absolutely be correct, I only learned of it a decade after I bought the game.
Still awesome to include a native Linux version of the game back in 2004!
-
-
Unreal Tournament ‘99 for my nostalgia vibes. 🥹
-
Epic shut down the UT2004 master server back in this spring, before it died the community had created a new public master server, I had to edit the master server address in ut2004.ini but it works.
Epic does deserve credit for running the master server for a game for 19 years, regardless of their current actions, that deserves mad respect.
They even ran their stats tracking service untill then IIRC...
-
-
-
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”
What a fraud…
-
They literally just need to enable it in the dev page of EAC and Proton handles the reat.
-
-
(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.
-
Sweeney doesn't want his games to be available anywhere but Epic's proprietary shit. Which is hilarious given his crusades against Apple and Google
-
The CEO of Epic is a world renowned twat.
-
Linux support is almost free.
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
(All copy-pasted from what I've written in the linux_gaming subreddit)
This is the same guy who compared Linux to moving to Canada once, had moved away from PC gaming because of "rampant piracy" only to return back to it because he wanted that sweet, sweet pie of the market Valve had ripened, built the shittiest store imaginable, that was initially literally spyware and took 3 years to get a fucking shopping cart feature, did all these shitty exclusives to keep the said store afloat, instead of you know, trying to improve it? The same guy who allowed shitty creepto games into his store only when Steam had banned them (btw does anyone remember that Epic Shit Store was supposed to be a "highly curated store")?
And this is the same company who specifically makes sure Fortnite won't run on Linux because they literally use several anti cheat software, apart from the one they're literally developing themselves, deliberately to NOT make Linux run it (such confidence on their software amirite :V)? The same company who has (hopefully had) a dumbass developer complaining about Steam Deck "not having Fortnite???" and that's "fragmenting his library???".
And there is also the matter of Rocket League, Artstation, Bandcamp, and so many other things.
Epic and Tim Sweeney are the most two-faced scumbags I've ever witnessed in my life, and it still fucking hurts me because I've loved the Unreal series so goddamn much, man.
In fact, I'm more angry at Heroic and Lutris and co. for allowing games to be installed from that store. Epic shouldn't get this amount of work done for them for free.
-
Tim Sweeney is a fuckin removed.
\ All it takes is one click in the EAC SDK to support Valve's Proton. (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻-
At this point, they've invested more in not supporting Linux. This is after Linux decided to support Fortnite instead.
-
It's just Tim Slimy being an absolute jackass
-
You surely need many dev to accomplish this horrendous task..
-
Fortnite uses both EAC and BattleEye, so it really isn't that easy to integrate with their custom solution. Also, they have to test it to make sure no bugs are introduced. Afterall, it's a multi-billion USD game.
But as we know, they really don't care, so even if it was only a day of development time, they wouldn't do it.
-
Don’t take any words as truth, from this jerkoff. Tim will do literally anything to avoid giving people what they’re asking for
-
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.
-
-
-
Fuck Tim Sweeney.
-
Nvidia in the other castle
-
-
you’re paying other developers off to convince them not to launch their own stores
lmao says the ceo of the company that pays developers off to launch exclusively on egs
-
Not having Fortnite sounds more like a feature than a fault.
-
What did he meant by The Linux problem?
-
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
-
-
Eh... "gaslighting 101" -- swears randomly (against the victim/target), throws in a (non-random) praise to "raise the fire even more", refuses to elaborate.
-
Linux users have too much self respect and expect too much privacy and control over their own devices. That's a problem.
-
I think he means the whole “Not enough users to justify porting applications, users don’t use it because applications don’t support it” thing.
The problem is that logic has been dead for years. Users are here. The Steam Deck is wildly popular. Tim Sweeney is just a dumbass.
-
What a tool. Fortnite generated $6 billion in 2022. He could throw hundreds of programmers just at Linux compatibility and it would still be obscenely profitable.
-
Just out of curiosity but how many users have the deck? Aren't they already ~10M?
-
No, definitely not but getting there! Last year despite slow production ramp up, about one million were sold. Source: a SteamOS developer on a KDE conference in autumn.
This year a financial analyst company predicted an additional two million until the end of this year but that was before the OLED announcement. Valve then recently said "millions". So I guess 3 million may be a somewhat conservative estimate now that the OLED model is out. 4 million if we're generous. It'll take a while until 10 million are reached, if they'll be reached at all. My memory is a bit foggy but I think Valve people said that the Steam Deck was intended to launch earlier but the Covid semiconductor crisis delayed the announcement. My guess is that at least a Steam Deck Lite will be announced first but the overall performance will stay about the same, so that could drive sales a bit before the eventual successor comes out.
-
-
Despite how much people hate this dude, which is understandable because he's only doing this for money, it's good that Google's shady practices were brought to light. I do wonder if it'll actually have an impact. The judge hasn't spoken yet, correct?
-
Enemy of your enemy can still be your enemy. It's unlikely the Google vs Epic case will amount to anything for us personally.
-
-
-
fyi you can play fortnite in a single gpu passthrough win10 vm on linux if you configure your vm to hide the hypervisor status.
-
Yes but then they'd be playing Fortnite
-
BattlEye still will detect virtualization. At least on intel.
-
maybe, i have amd.
for ref i used this: https://superuser.com/questions/1387935/hiding-virtual-machine-status-from-guest-operating-system
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.
-
-
-
Instead of asking for Linux support maybe we should be asking companies for wine/proton support, since that works for Mac and Linux. Not ideal but probably more realistic and that would solve issues for all the non-windows desktops. I would also imagine it's less work for the company to just ensure it works on wine, than it is to compile a seperate client for Linux. I don't know about anti cheat stuff but personally I wouldn't run a game that wanted that level of access to my system.
-
Let's just take a moment to recognize his struggle to find a few more programmers
Maybe if we pool together and buy just one more pack of gems (or whatever they call them) they can pull off what must surely be a truly Herculean technical feat
97 comments