One of the refunds reasons you can select is "the game doesn't run on my PC". This is completely valid.
Or do as I do.
Buy game.
Never play it.
I have a problem.
Or as I do:
Currently I’m thinking of Baldur’s gate 3, but you know… I’ll probably get around to it in a few years.
Buying any game after 3-5 years is the way to go. The bugs are fixed, patches are out, so mods are stable and most of the time you can find a sale where it costs 10-20€. And if you forget about it before that time, that means the game was not worth it
On top of that, there might be a bundle with the base game + a few DLCs + christmas discount or whatever.
Complex and recent games run on Linux these days.
Not allowing run a game in Linux is, nowadays, a choice from its developer rather then a causality. Proton is a really powerful tool!
If a game don't run in Linux, via Proton or natively, that's dev issue that actively blocked Linux.
It is almost always due to the anticheat programs.
Still... There are anticheats that allow Linux, like EAC, Hyperion and many others... If they choose one that does not allow Linux, or choose one that allow Linux but block it, it's a dev issue
Blaming the Publishers and Devs because it's actually pretty hard to fuck up a game so that it doesn't work on proton these days
If there's a game that can't run on Linux in the current year then that's intentional and it's not worth anyone's money.
You almost have to go out of your way to make a game incompatible with linux. Considering wine/proton and their various forks cover the vast majority of things at this point.
Even with ACs, the two most used ones completely support Linux. One is completely out of the box, maybe even as far as linux support being opt out. The other requires you to contact its developers to enable compatibility their end iirc.
I've been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2014. Gaming on Linux is so good nowadays, thanks to Proton, there are so many amazing titles available to play. Proton makes it all easy - thanks to it, it's just a matter of hitting install and play on Steam (in most cases).
There are so many of them, If something doesn't run on Linux, I just don't care. My backlog of great games is so big, who cares about some singular titles that are not available.
I've recently been playing Baldurs Gate 3, ARMORED CORE VI, Anno 1800 and Battlebit Remastered on my Ubuntu rig. All run great. Neither need any special tweaks (I own them on Steam).
BG3 and Battlebit Remastered are especially stellar.
I recommend BG3 to anyone who likes true roleplaying games with great writing, reactivity and player agency.
Battlebit Remastered is a great multiplayer title with massive 256 player battles and it sits somewhere between Battlefield and Squad (a mixture of arcade and mil-sim elements).
Especially if they use an engine that natively supports Linux, they have no excuse not to release a Linux version.
There are tons of reasons my dude. You can still have platform-dependant technologies in your game even if the base engine itself supports linux.
For me Linux gaming is Steam/Proton. If is works with Steam/Proton, I am playing them. I find that native Linux games are not updated regularly or at all. And Steam wants games to run with the Steam deck. And they are willing work to make that happen.
And game companies know there are a lot of Steam decks out there. And it is not hard to put some effort to see that it runs on that equipment.
All this is a big help for the Linux community. Many gamers don't know that they don't need to buy windows to game. Linux/Steam/Proton is a great option. That is why I make a point to tell people that I am playing Baldur's Gate 3 on my Linux Ubuntu gaming PC. This is how I found out that Linux can play games and switch from Windows. Another Linux gamer told me it was possible.
Agreed. It’s just so sad to me that GOG to this day does not seem to understand their target audience. Seems to me that people who value DRM-free Games overlap vastly with the group of Linux users and still GOG Galaxy is not available on Linux. I would absolutely love GOG Galaxy natively on Linux with Proton integration. Sure we can run it with Lutris etc. but this has been asked from GOG for years. I tried buying everything on GOG instead of Steam until that point where that whole Proton and Steam Deck integration happened. Now I buy everything on steam, just for convenience. I would love to buy everything from GOG but there are just to many hoops to jump through.
Yeah I can't play rainbow 6 siege since I switched to Linux but I'm staying strong. Fuck ubisoft. And fuck my friends for trying to make me go back to windoz.
The fact that it even supports vulkan, and BattleEye has a Linux version, they just don't use it
I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Steam/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by Steam Proton, DXVK, and vital Wine components comprising a full OS as defined by Valve.
I love you Richard Steaman
Wine and DXVK made it increadably easy to support Linux and if a company doesn't even put in that much effort or intentionally breaks the game for you it's certainly not worth your money! I pirate rather than use the refund window but the principal is the same since I do buy good games after all.
I mean, it is not a fault on Linux's end. We have all the tools we need in the form of wine and dxvk, it's the game which fails to work due to some obscure dependency or a mandatory rootkit. One great example is genshin- the game itself works flawlessly, but it has a rootkit which obviously does not work on Linux and you have to patch it out.
A reminder that on last steam report, Linux overcome Mac as second in usage operating system. They don't have to excuse of only support the top 2 OS.
Instead to refund is to negative review, games companies are much more affected by losing a positive rating that a refund.
Jesus lol.
This is probably true for big games, but I wouldn't get angry at any small developer for not supporting Linux. It's just not worth it/still such a small base.
Most of the time indie games actually do run on Linux, it's the games from big studios that don't (in my experience)
At this point I wouldn't be suprised that some dev companies are taking Microsoft kickback money under the table. There is really no excuse for a game not to work on Linux natively on 2023.
Well, the thing is that developers need to go out of their way to intentionally break Linux support. The community does 99% of the work in most cases. Launchers, along with anti-cheat are the most egregious.
Anti-cheat I can semi-understand, the developer has to do some work, but popular anti-cheats support Linux no problem.
Launchers, however are 100% useless other than Steam itself, I wish Valve would ban third-party launchers. I wouldn't be surprised though if some publishers would pull their games from Steam if Valve outright banned them.
Honestly, the 2 hour refund window is the perfect length to see how bad the Linux compatibility is. A half hour to try a few tweaks, if I care enough to. Another hour to see if there are subtle bugs or intermittant crashes.
I definitely have tried to run a few games I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.
The infinite refund window offered by piracy also works, mind you
Also sometimes due to DRM/launcher shit the pirate version actually works much easier on wine/proton. I've downloaded cracked versions of games I actually bought in the past due to this
My experience is that all games run on Linux these days. Wine, DXVK and Vulkan are really good. The only games that don't run are those that explicitly ban Linux users with some creepy anti-cheat.
Ok, hear me out. Linux is not an easy platform to develop for because it's in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly. Linux itself is a somewhat slippery concept (if we expand from the kernel) where "works on linux" can really mean it's been tested on one particular distro. Debian stable and rolling releases are not the same. Unless I am completely mistaken, I can see why major developers are hesitant to support linux, whatever it even is. Is Android linux?
Now, I'm all for this message. Given how OSs have been developing, I advocate for linux adoption and wish people would "vote with their wallet". Otherwise things just will not change. Well, not for better, if recent history is anything to go by. I just feel that this problem has more prongs than we like to admit, being linux enthusiasts.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Not really the case anymore because of proton, game devs develop for Windows and proton and then it'll run on anything that can run proton, Linux, android, Mac or otherwise in the future
From what I hear thanks to proton it's incredibly easy to develop for Linux, as long as you don't use one of the anticheats that doesn't support it or intentionally prevent it from running in proton you're fine
A friend recently asked me to play a game with him that had an anticheat that Intentinay made it impossible to play the game on linux
I had both linux and windows on my computer, but windows was broken
I tried to make a virtual machine and install windows on it, but i couldnt install it
He blamed all the problems on linux
Unfortunately for him, the game devs are the problem
Linux compatibility or I send it back!
In my experience, the effort to fix Linux issues serve as a good litmus test as to how well supported the game is in general.
At least with games that aren't from big studios.
To be fair, game programming is very often hot garbage. Most things I run do not respond for a while at startup. How difficult can it be to decouple your threads?
There's some BS happening around Linux support from some devs. e.g. Metro Exodus is Linux native, Metro Exodus Enhanced is Windows only and doesn't work with AMD GPUs.
I bought the game twice (made a mistake and bought it on Epic at launch and now bought it again on Steam to support Linux development and companies that release native builds).
I'm disappointed to see I'm unable to play the Enhanced version.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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