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CCP To Discontinue EVE Online Support For Linux
maotx writes "CCP's recent support for EVE Online in Linux is now set to be discontinued this March. Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client. Feedback on the EVE Online forums, which includes the e-mail in which CCP announced this decision, suggest that the client was not preferred for Linux users as it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine. For those who wish to stop playing EVE Online, CCP is offering a refund towards unused game time. Select quote from the e-mail: 'The feedback and commitment we obtained from players like you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system.'"
Considering how they have trouble getting stuff right in general, no big surprizes.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=975896
New slashdot layout sucks.
If your Win32 client works better in Linux than the Linux client, then you've got a problem. They should have just entered into a distribution agreement with Transgaming from the start to bundle their code with Cedega.
As an avid slashdot reader, I would have expected their profits to triple as soon as they released a linux client, since SO MANY people use linux (and not windows), and it's so much easier to write supportable code on linux.
Instead, it seems almost as though supporting a linux installation is a tremendous waste of time because it's an inconsistent bitch to program for, everyone runs a different distribution that is somehow quirky or incompatible, and the community will literally attack your effort until it becomes so unmonetized that you are literally losing money to provide software.
It seems to me that they may have realized that wine makes it unnecessary to waste any cash on linux development, since it's a win-win. On the plus side, you get to develop the software in windows where you've got real development tools and libraries, since games are harder to write than perl scripts, and then you don't have to worry about getting support tickets from some moron running gentoo-- plus it's absolutely free to let "software advocates" put in all the crappy work porting your product through wine. If it breaks, it's Wine (or Transgaming)'s problem, not yours! Bonus!
Hell, look at what happened with JavaFX-- even Sun, developers of Solaris, can't yet get JavaFX running in opensolaris or linux because of how difficult it is to get that smooth graphical jazz running in X with all its assorted crapitude-- but they've already got it humming on Windows and Mac-- or Google, getting Chrome and Google Talk out the door on Windows first, and pushing out Google Earth for linux as a wine-based solution.
So the linux community is not large enough to support the money necessary to make the port, and then if you somehow do, they attack you for not open sourcing your code!-- just like what happened with Loki and Corel.
I would say CCP made an intelligent and well informed move with all factors taken into account. Unix has been around since the 70's, and somehow, it's never had a gaming market of any note. This has never ceased not to amaze me.