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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. Gee haven't heard that before... by redmid17 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTA: " 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." Just do what valve does. I mean I'm not going to be playing WoW, but millions do.

    1. Re:Gee haven't heard that before... by Beetjebrak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just release it for the most popular distro(-family), which is undeniably Ubuntu (covering Debian and Mint as well). The geeks will get it to work on everything else, no support needed or they wouldn't be using non-Ubuntu or non-Mint Linux anyway. As long as Blizzard provides builds for Ubuntu LTS x86 and amd64, the rest will be done for them.

      --
      Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
  2. Incompetence by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's only "unstandardised" if you want to link against every last library.

    If you treat it like OSX or Windows and ship all necessary dylibs/DLLs which aren't provided by default then it works fine.

    Somehow companies like Mathworks have been managing this happily for well over a decade without making up weird claims about standardisation. Oh and hey, I've done it too. It's easy.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.