Also, Unreal Engine, which the Epic Games Launcher was built in for some reason also has a checkmark for Linux, and they refuse to tick it. It's to the point that while it is possible to do development for Unreal on Linux, they had to build a completely different way to get it up and running since the launcher doesn't support Linux.

They consciously make efforts not to support Linux, it would literally take less effort to do it.

Yeah, but to be fair, maybe that fact about the EAC SDK isn't common knowledge. I mean, we know it in our community, but a Windows-only game dev like Epic might not quite notice.

If that's the case, then maybe whoever owns EAC could get some good publicity if they could convince Tim Sweeney to do a public stunt like livestreaming the process of opening up the config for Fortnite, enabling it for Proton, and then testing it on the Steam Deck. EAC gets good publicity, and Fortnite gets all the extra revenue from the Steam Deck users.

Of course, Tim Sweeney wouldn't reach out on his own, he's probably got far too many bigger things to do. It's up to whoever owns EAC to get that ball rolling and schedule a meeting with Sweeney to make this proposal and see if they can make it work.

Does anyone know who that second person is? Not Tim Sweeney (the guy who probably doesn't realize how easy it is to enable this in EAC), but the other person (the person who owns EAC)? Because trying to get through to that first guy is a challenge, so maybe we can get that second person to try their hand at it.

/j

To be fair, you don't look at the whole picture.

Yes, generating a Linux build wouldn't require a lot of changes to the code.

But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student's first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That's 3.7% of the whole world's population! (And it's also more than the number of total Linux users.)

So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.

They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.

And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.

So it's just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?

And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don't care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.

And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn't exactly hard to figure out.