Epic won’t update Fortnite to run on the Steam Deck. Tim Sweeney says Linux is ‘a terrifically hard audience to serve’ (2022)
Epic won’t update Fortnite to run on the Steam Deck
Not that I give a crap about Fortnite, but what an asshole.
Yeah, Timmy's had a hate-boner for anything related to Valve and Linux for years. He's been lying through his teeth non-stop whenever either topic comes up.
A terrifically hard audience to serve given the variety of incompatible configurations.
If your game doesn't work with my fully functional operating system (while others do), isn't it literally your game that's "incompatible?"
Plus He's talking about the steam deck here. That's 1 configuration. And Rocket League is already on steam for those who bought it before epic did, runs fine in proton. The dude is full of shit and making up excuses, it's obvious this is a business agreement and nothing to do with practicality and in lying about it he's hurting his reputation.
Maybe an incomplete product they don't want to dive back in
Plus it isn't like there aren't tons of compatibility issues with all the versions of hardware on PC.
My kids, unfortunately, love the game, so I’ve kept up with performance a little bit. It seems they’re trying their best to make it run like trash. They can’t even support the few operating systems it does run on. I haven’t noticed any mind blowing graphics updates, but fps is around a third of what it used go be. Such a garbage company.
The cartoonish artstyle might hide it a bit, but Fortnite is basically Epic's showcase of all the newest Unreal Engine tech. The move to UE5 a couple years ago brought with it all those new features and a huge leap in graphics. Fortnite has been around for a long time now, so the minimum performance targets are probably changing as tech and average system hardware improve. I don't actually play it, but it's pretty much a different game now compared to when BR mode was first released.
This from the man who thinks he's "competing" with Valve?
Valve is figuring out how to run games they didn't even develop on Linux, while Epic complains it's too hard to do for even their own games...
That's rich.
No it isn't, I didn't claim it was, and Valve is doing a good bit more than mere pre-configuration.
Valve is contributing efforts to improve Wine, DXVK, VK3D, shader-cache management, and making their use simple and easy.
If I figure out how to use Bottles, then in a literary sense it is completely correct to say: I figured out how to run windows software on Linux.
The sentence doesn't suddenly become false if I didn't write every line of code, from kernel to compatibility layer, that my PC is executing to do it.
Valve invested time and money in Wine and DXVK. Claiming Valve is not trying to figure out how to run games on Linux because they're contributing to a project instead of creating a new one from the ground up, then only Linus contributes to the kernel?
Sometimes you need a few developers getting paid full time to truly get a project like DXVK off the ground. Some of the biggest open source projects wouldn't even exist without the time and money from companies that actively support it.
This is why I don't give Epic and any exclusives on it's store any money. I know 0% of it is going back into making linux gaming better.
Why is a 2 year old article being posted now?
Good catch I was just wondering he doubling down all of a sudden.
Yeah, please downvote.
By a mod, no less!
"We don't have enough developers to support Linux!"
He can go fuck himself with a 6" railroad spike.
At least Gaben is pushing the Linux gaming community forward!
BUT 30%!!!!!
Yeah, that 30% means I can ditch Windows. At least it's being used for good and not just* yachts.
Anyone who actually complains about steam's cut is either misinformed or lying.
Uh, not to take away from your point about Steam making it possible to ditch Windows, but that money is absolutely being put towards buying yachts. Gabe Newel owns $1 billion worth of yachts, 6 of them in total. Like, good on Valve for making Linux accessible, but the money is still quite literally going towards Gabe's yacht collection.
Gaben is well-known for being a yacht aficionado, and owns several large ones.
This would be news if it were current. At 2 years old it's just clickbait
Just an FYI: This article is 2 years old. Not saying anything has changed or not.
Look, it's just that the engine they use doesn't have Linux support... Wait no that's not true
I just used lutris lol.
Some would say not having Fortnite on Linux is a feature...
No. I don't care for them game, but I want people to be able to play it on Linux still.
Over 15k verifiable playable games work on Linux
I know this is an older article, but EAC has had compatibility with Linux for years at this point. Linux is also really easy to compile and develop for compared to MacOS. They just don't want to because there aren't enough players to justify the cost, most likely. Also might have some incentive to keep their game off the hardware of their biggest competitor.
Actually, I think they don't want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.
It's probably a good thing because your average Joe Public can't write the bug report to save their life.
You get titles like "It's broken and not working". If you are very lucky you'll also get a screenshot where everything looks absolutely fine and with absolutely no context as to what the problem supposedly is. The reason technical savvy people can write good bug reports is because they disproportionately work in IT and see terrible support tickets everyday, and know what not to do.
For example, if you're reporting that outlook will not load it's possibly a good idea to give a phone number and not an email address for contact purposes. Just a thought.
I think most Linux gamers understand they're not going to get official Linux support. And most of the cases it's also not necessary because the compatibility layer is pretty good. The only big hurdle is anticheat and that's where epic would have to do the bare minimum of adding their own native EAC client to Fortnite.
Now the argument that it would increase cheating in a hugely popular game like Fortnite is somewhat legitimate, but I think it's more likely Sweeney would rather let leopards eat his face than support anything related to Valve.
Why tf would you post this without at least putting a date on it lol
I noticed too late, I forgot the steam deck is old now.
Oh yeah, there's so many Steam Deck configurations! /s
There's one, which is higher than the average number of games EGS users paid for.
I got it and I'm just absolutely shocked at how happy I am with it! It's just slightly less powerful than my old gaming rig and dramatically more versatile! I'd expect a trade-off like it feeling hacky or having a frustrating interface but not at all!
Well yeah…. They’re clearly developmentally challenged at Epic. In every sense of the word. I’m not exactly surprised that a platform still lacking basic functionality that should’ve been there on day one, has trouble figuring out Linux.
I’m not exactly surprised that a platform still lacking basic functionality that should’ve been there on day one, has trouble figuring out Linux.
Epic's sole contact with Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which they support in UE because of Hollywood.
Linux users are not your audience. Owners of the Steam Deck are. I'd wager the vast majority of Deck users do not have a computer that runs Linux. You don't really need to know how to do anything in Linux even in desktop mode. The environment is so similar to mac and windows for most tasks.
He's just pissy about the idea of designing anything that would benefit Steam; the heavyweight he has tried and failed to emulate.
Sweeney generally has a hate boner for Linux. It's nothing really new.
And it represents so few people that the investment isn't worth it, especially as most of them have a hate boner for Epic.
This is a 2 and a half (almost) year old article. I figured Tim's thoughts on this were common knowledge at this point?
Okay, now give me another free game Epic. I've got over 100 probably on you wacko store and have not paid for a single one.
You say that like you're getting one over on them. But they've successfully got you to download their shitty software. You think they aren't aware of what they're doing?
They know what they're trying to do, which is to bait people into spending money on their platform so they can have revenue numbers to show developers to get them to release on their platform to get people to want to spend money with them without bait.
Taking the bait but not getting caught in the trap isn't quite pulling one over on them, but it's also not what they were hoping for, so it's not not taking advantage.
This is where the Heroic Games Launcher comes in, it only downloads the game itself, no Epic Games Launcher to be seen
I've got like 400.
Think I only paid for Outer Wilds plus the DLC, and Untitled Goose Game out of all those, because everybody should play Outer Wilds.
This is old news but I do often think about the flaw in Tim Sweeney's strategy to try and bully apple and Microsoft into making their platforms work his way.
Honestly Epic should have got in the Linux bandwagon years ago so they could provide their own hardware.
Thank you, Tim Epic
The wording in the tweet in the article is a little less bombastic. He's concerned about maintaining anti-cheat for custom kernels and other Linux-exclusive issues at the scale that Fortnite runs at. Given how large the audience for that game is and the age range (which has a lot more time to dedicate) I can see how that would be a costly endeavor and look at TF2 right now as an example of what happens if you fail to do so. Combine that with the much smaller footprint of the Linux base (which is changing!) and thus, less incentive to tackle any of that in the first place.
Maybe I'm just trying to not read ill intent, but I see "Linux gamers are a hard audience to serve" as "You guys use an OS focused on freedom and customization, which means it's literally harder to serve you all effectively" and not as "Linux gamers are mean".
Or ya know, the steam deck is on a platform they are trying to take over by throwing money at their store. Of course they aren't going to make it easy for kids to play on deck.
Yeah but they haven't bothered making their store run natively on linux.
Yep and that's a separate issue I think you would be perfectly entitled to be upset about. I'm just thinking through serving something as complex as anticheat to an audience the size of Fortnite's for the potential gain of a small Linux footprint (for now). Not many businesses would jump for that.
They deliberately DROPPED linux support for rocket league when they bought it. Like, immediately. It's just a hate-on for Linux.
I don't think that the bots problem in tf2 is because of linux, I think that valve just doesn't care about tf2 enough to fix it
Custom kernels aren't commonly used, it's a niche within a niche. They literally don't need to "tackle" anything here, they can just support the Steam Deck and call it a day.
The biggest legitimate concern here is cheating, since cheaters could conceivably customize their kernel to bypass whatever EAC does. That's a theoretical attack only, and there are plenty more theoretical attacks that aren't unique to Linux.
It's not an issue of compatibility, but Tim thinking he owns your computer. I don't want any software that needs to control my computer; if it can't run in a sandbox, I don't want it. I understand him worrying about a base level of compatibility, but I don't have any sympathy for the "but Linux is so diverse" argument, officially support one and the rest will figure it out.
I think 'we won't serve you cause we can't rootkit your device' also rubs some linux people wrong, but to each their own ig
This is incredibly short-sighted. Having your business model hitched to a single vendor is just asking to screwed by whatever walled garden that vendor puts up. There's a reason Valve is pushing Linux.
Tim Sweeney is a terrifically hard person to get to fuck off.
Linux is ‘a terrifically hard audience to serve’
said owner of a company that last tried to oficially support Linux in late '90s.
I mean, they're not really wrong. Even if Epic was able to make Fortnite run on Linux, literally every Linux user is the kind of person to complain about kernel level anti-cheat, despite that being the most effective way for an anti-cheat to operate.
Just look at all the negative sentiment and anger in this thread. Probably all 2% or whatever of the total global Linux Desktop OS users are in this thread complaining about something or other, and most of them probably would never even play/install Fortnite if it was Linux compatible. I don't blame them, really.
Tim refuses to stop shooting himself in the foot against Valve. More news at 11
Tim Sweeney doesn't work hard.
Fuck Tim Sweeney and fuck Epic. Apparently selling a game that already works with Linux and even Windows is too much him.
Good old Tim never misses an opportunity to tell Linux users about his nonsense dated opinions
Oh noes! The customers won't happily swallow whatever bullshit we shove down their throats! Oh the humanity!
It's not that hard to make a game run on Linux thoses days, they're just lazy ass
Lmfao SO many games that were never meant to run on Linux work perfectly well on my machine, some better than windows. He's just throwing a hissy fit because Linux won't allow kernel level malware - I mean anti-cheat. What a dickhead. Apex is a better game anyway.
2 year old article. Stupid comment. Low key true but still stupid.
I mean... I don't really disagree in this specific context.
I assume Fortnite has kernel level/rootkit anti-cheat. And Epic make massive amounts of cash from all the goku skins people buy. Unless they have the resources to test at least the major distros and keep aware of possible hacks/bypasses on that side it is just begging for exploits. And it is big enough that the moment one is identified EVERYBODY is grabbing an ubuntu live CD to get some goku dollars.
I still think it is shit that they don't directly support Linux with the EGS (especially since they distribute Unreal Engine and marketplace stuff via that). But for their "more revenue than the GDP of a small nation" live game? I get it.
A buddy who works on one of the popular live games made the comparison to pokemon cards. Everyone thinks it is a great idea to show them off at school. Until the kid trips, they get scattered on the floor, and it is a god damned feeding frenzy of every single kid losing their minds to scramble and fight over that dog eared pikachu card.
In no way shocked about that one. Sweeney aint gonna help the competition.
variety of incompatible configurations
Steam Linux Runtime is a stable "configuration" across all distributions. That's its entire point.
Completely unrelated, but what’s the game in the header image?
dead cells
Thank you!
The problem will only get solved if there will be reliable methods for detecting cheats that don't require direct ingeration in a client operating system directly.
Are there ways of doing that reliably?
Probably not yet
Adding that extra file that takes care of everything related for anti cheat must be quite difficult for such a small team. /s
God, Lemmy is filled with sweaty Linux evangelists.
Oh no, that's terrible. I hope you managed to survive your Lemmy comment section unscathed :((
Wow, there are a lot of entitled Linux users in here.
That you, Tim?