Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
It feels like it’s part and parcel with an overall, growing trend in software to be openly hostile to any system wherein the user has proper admin rights.
Because the potential for someone to use those rights to fuck with the software merits refusing to support systems where they can.
Further entrenching the notion that, to participate in a “modern” consumer software environment, the user must agree to be handcuffed on their own hardware.
The potential?
People are hacking the shit out of any online game without proper anticheats
I’ve heard devs say that Linux users come up with something like 90% of the bug reports. They’re often bugs that only affect Linux,so you’ve got, say 10% to the player base reporting 90% of the issues, and about 85% of those issues only affect the 10% of the player base.
Simply from an economics standpoint it doesn’t make sense to spend that much resources on such a small percentage of the player population. Additionally about half of those Linux users do have Windows computers, that they are prepared to buy your game on, if that’s the only option. So again it makes no financial sense to actually support Linux.
As far as the studios see it they are taking a 5% cut in profits, in order to reduce workload by 85% - seems like a good deal.
I can’t even really argue with that, because they make a good point. Indie devs have it even more difficult because they often have much smaller teams, and really can’t handle the workloads that Linux users would give them.
The devs from ΔV: Rings of Saturn give a completely different story. Yeah, most bug reports come from Linux - but platform specific ones a vanishingly rare: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/
Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!
Not to mention the quality of the reports from the Linux users was vastly more details and useful to them.
Who was that developer? Where are those numbers from? Any sources?
I remember ~9 years ago the Blizzard CEO said this: “[…] I would assume most of those people also have access to a Windows or Mac device capable of playing Blizzard games.” https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-entertainment-support-please-release-native-linux-clients/u/9982826
Which is pretty disrespectful, but just one part of these arguments.
Thats was a. From years before proton, b. from a dev renowned for being linux hostile, c. ignores the fact that linux users are far more likely to be technical and likely to submit a proper bug report rather than shrugging and moving on.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to but I got this off a developer forum about 3 years ago. I don’t know which dev came from just a number of developers chimed in to say they agree
I’m not confused what they said. That’s what they said, now what they said may be wrong, but I’m not confused about what they said.
However what I have been told is that actually that’s not necessarily the case. Because the reporting issues that only affect Linux operating systems so most of the user base are not actually benefiting from the reports.
Wisdom is that they would submit better quality tickets and they do but since most of them are disproportionately Linux limited is not really as much of an advantage as you would think.
