Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite

mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml to Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 661 points –
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Apparently they have enough developers to add in crappy emotes and crossovers but not enough to support one of the most popular operating systems.. makes sense

Adding emotes is a different skill set than getting it to run on Linux, but there's plenty of UE5 games on steam deck already so surely it can't be that hard...

adifferent skill set

you're right, given that all it'd take for it to work on Linux would be ticking a box in EAC console, the anticheat software that they develop themselves.

Saying “one of the most popular operating systems” when there’s only 3-4 serious, mainstream contenders doesn’t mean much.

And Linux desktop is less than 2%

Yeah exactly, it’s the lowest of the major ones… not saying it’s bad or anything, just not exactly attractive to game devs

Yeah, I think 10% is where it's definitely attractive, though macOS got away with far less, probably because of how much their customers tend to spend on hardware and software.

Lmao at one of the most popular.

I don't agree that Epic doesn't have enough resources, but realistically Linux makes up such a tiny proportion of systems I don't blame any other developer for not supporting it. Would be a waste of resources.

Well Linux is certainly one of the top 3 most popular pc operating systems.

Yup, with ~2% market share. That's like a fart in the wind, you'll probably smell it, but it's not worth actively doing anything about.

I love Linux and use it 100% outside of work (macOS at work), but I also 100% appreciate how little large companies care about it since it doesn't even make a dent either way to their profits. We're a rounding error to them, and until we get more marketshare, it'll continue to be that way.

I wish they would support Linux, but I honestly only see risks and not many benefits to Epic to do so. Steam dominates Linux, so EGS probably wouldn't make a dent there, and the costs to fix potential bugs that enable cheaters on Linux is probably higher than the revenue they expect to make (at least compared to other ways they could spend their resources).