Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers?
Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn’t magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
This is a business decision
Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: “maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content”. My point is regarding the “maintaining […] across many distros” and not the “taking time away”. A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.
hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux
Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.
every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested
This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.
The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as “Industry-leading multiplatform support” with the motto “Create once, ship anywhere”.
So my argument still stands. And as I said, it’s not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.
The game has been released 4 years ago. An average worker in the US works 1770 hours a year.
10 developers working full time over 4 years (and this doesn’t even include the time they spent building the initial release) would work a total of ~70 000 hours, not “hundreds or thousands” of hours.
In fact, even thousands of hours would be only a single man year.
They’ve released 23 content updates so far, bugfix patches are probably much more. Even just building, superficially testing and deploying a release easily takes 4-5h. And this game is not just a plain and simple flat screen game, but one that supports SteamVR, something that’s not remotely trivial on Linux.
Even a single non-trivial bug can cost 20h of total work time from support handling the report, a dev reproducing it, the bug going trough refinement, bugfixing, code review, testing, deployment and so on.
I guess you haven’t worked in a real company before and don’t know how project management and processes work. Stuff takes a lot of time.
And believing that Unity just magically abstracts all OS-specific bugs away is very naive.
And it’s ridiculous to claim that they are dropping Linux support after 4(!) years because they are too incompetent to figure out how to support Linux. Obviously they could support Linux just fine from a technological standpoint.
Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn’t magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: “maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content”. My point is regarding the “maintaining […] across many distros” and not the “taking time away”. A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.
Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.
This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.
The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as “Industry-leading multiplatform support” with the motto “Create once, ship anywhere”.
So my argument still stands. And as I said, it’s not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.
Unless you’re developing graphics-heavy application that uses platrofm-specific API for optimisation. Like a video game for example.
The game has been released 4 years ago. An average worker in the US works 1770 hours a year.
10 developers working full time over 4 years (and this doesn’t even include the time they spent building the initial release) would work a total of ~70 000 hours, not “hundreds or thousands” of hours.
In fact, even thousands of hours would be only a single man year.
They’ve released 23 content updates so far, bugfix patches are probably much more. Even just building, superficially testing and deploying a release easily takes 4-5h. And this game is not just a plain and simple flat screen game, but one that supports SteamVR, something that’s not remotely trivial on Linux.
Even a single non-trivial bug can cost 20h of total work time from support handling the report, a dev reproducing it, the bug going trough refinement, bugfixing, code review, testing, deployment and so on.
I guess you haven’t worked in a real company before and don’t know how project management and processes work. Stuff takes a lot of time.
And believing that Unity just magically abstracts all OS-specific bugs away is very naive.
And it’s ridiculous to claim that they are dropping Linux support after 4(!) years because they are too incompetent to figure out how to support Linux. Obviously they could support Linux just fine from a technological standpoint.