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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.'"
how hard can it be to write a client with native Linux support?
Very hard.
Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.
If you can even get the thing to install and launch, sound definitely won't work.
The reason people have a hard time developing complicated commercial software on Linux is that said software is distributed in binary form, and Linux is *not* built for binary distribution.
Libraries break their ABI periodically on Linux because no one really thinks about binary developers. Think about this: a deb package for Ubuntu from a release six months ago will probably not work on the next release.
Aside from that, sound is an enormous clusterfuck on Linux. Sound is kind of important for games.
Considering all these problems, the return on investment is very low. There are very few Desktop Linux users. The mac has about 10% desktop marketshare now, but Linux is under 1%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
and most Linux users, including myself, just dual boot to play games. So why should a game company pay a bunch of developers full time for a year to port the game? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars they will *never* make back on a market like that.
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