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Blizzard Reportedly Planning A Linux Game For 2013

Posted by samzenpus on from the play-more-games dept.

It looks like the recent success of Linux gaming has caught Blizzard's eye. According to "a reliable source at the company" 2013 will be the year that "at least one of their very popular titles will see a release for Ubuntu Linux." From the article: "It's been a poorly-kept secret that Blizzard has a native Linux client of World of Warcraft. As recently as 2011, the World of Warcraft Linux client was still being maintained internally. The client has been around for years and done by their own developers as a form of testing for the popular MMORPG currently offered on Windows and Mac OS X. As for why they haven't released the client, it's come down to "targeting a specific version of the platform" with Linux being "unstandardized" due to the many different distributions. There's still some fundamental problems with gaming on Linux. With World of Warcraft working generally fine under Wine as well, the company is further unmotivated to officially support a Linux build of the game."

3 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No future by arth1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gaming for Linux (or, more specifically, binary blobs in Linux) have absolutely no future, since every distro has its own version of every library.

    You know, you look at this the exact wrong way.
    Linux can allow the game distributor to provide the exact versions of the libraries they want. All you need to do is plop them all into one directory, say $INSTALL_DIR/lib/, and then have the wrapper run script prepend that directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

    And if that wasn't enough, the games company can even provide a bootable Linux DVD or USB stick which boots into linux and starts the game. Can't have much more control over the OS software than that!

  2. Re:Too Late by wiggles · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nope, they were going down hill long before the Activision merger.

  3. Re:Gee haven't heard that before... by deek · · Score: 3, Informative

    They don't even need to target a distribution. Statically link the binaries, release them as a tar.gz, under the provisio that they are not officially supported, but issues can be reported in some forum. Let the distributions do the work of packaging it. The world (of warcraft) is your oyster, or whatever other mollusc takes your fancy.