Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite
This is why I have respect for Valve. They're willing to invest into changing the status quo instead of seeing it as not profitable immediately. They're playing the long game, and they've put their version of Linux into millions of hands. They've built hardware for it, they've invested a ton into Wine/Proton, they've invested in open-source graphics drivers. They're actively fixing up third party games to the point some of them run better on a their handheld than decent Windows PCs. And a good chunk of it is open-source and given away for free to everyone to use.
Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard. They can't even be bothered to try.
I would give money to Valve just so they keep going. I have no desire to buy an Epic game they're not even willing to try to at least make it easier to run in Wine.
Meanwhile Sweeney is being litigious instead of inventive.
Not that the lawsuits don’t have merit, just very interesting to see the vast difference in focus between the two companies.
I am all for valve in terms of games, even though I don’t like the buying but not owning things stuff I would always prefer Steam over anything else. They earned my trust, something no other non-human entity will ever get. This company just has it figured out.
It's what can be done only with a private company and some decent people in charge. Once you go public your company loses its soul.
Valve is one of the few companies left that are not just a pure investor-pleaser and actually do some meaningful progress rather than changing the colors of their button every so often.
Valve pushes the medium forward in most everything they do. And they do it while not being dicks, too. I hope they can stay true to this direction forever.
Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard.
I'm with you on Valve trying to be more open (in a semi-walled-garden with Steam on Steamdeck, circumventable with some effort). But gaming on Linux - practically nobody is actually writing games natively for Linux. They're writing for Windows (or a console) and the community is making the run under Proton/Wine on Linux. Is Epic intentionally preventing them from running on Proton? Well, effectively, yes - but that's not a Linux-to-hard problem, more of a "we don't want to have to police cheating on another OS" problem.
Valve doesn’t want to support Apple computers for their own games. No, Valve is not better, the two companies CEOs are just jerks.
If we only had a few more programmers
Poor, poor Epic, a tiny startup barely making it to the next month with their 3000 employees and $5B annual revenue
Translation, "You do all the heavy lifting and then I'll jump in to enjoy the results while I complain about it."
Sweeney does not want to contribute in any way towards making the steam deck more profitable.
I think he actually wants a monopoly. He wants to be, functionally, the only digital storefront on PC. And doing anything that could help Valve, even in another market, would detrimental to that goal.
I'd rather not play games at all if Epic ever gets a monopoly. Though I would of course keep playing games, just without paying for them. Epic won't see as much as a single cent from me.
There's an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.
They've presented it as "it doesn't make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count." But they don't need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say "yeah, we don't support this, do it at your own risk."
From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don't even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.
They are worried that there'll be graphical bugs or something and that'll make Fornight look bad, so it's better for their brand image to just block everything they don't have control over.
It's a worrying pattern I've seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.
... Or maybe it's just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their "enemies".
I have been wondering why they don't just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an "official" launcher. It's probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.
Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than "lol 2% market share" as they present it.
Pro individual agency? Linux.
You'll own nothing and be happy? Micrapple
We can take an easy guess at which one if these things Epic is.
In the case of fortnite, this isn't really true. The issue of fortnite is the anti cheat system is not designed to play nice with Linux and allowing Linux without having the anti cheat on point would lead to players getting mad at cheaters and the collapse of fortnite. It's happened to several games in the past that couldn't prevent people from cheating.
But they don’t need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say “yeah, we don’t support this, do it at your own risk.”
I suspect you need to factor in the efforts needed to prevent cheaters exploiting the unofficial client and spoiling the experience for other gamers
Epic already makes anticheat that supports Linux, and other games they own already run on Linux with anticheat.
They're just holding out on fortnite because... actually I'm not sure why. Probably Sweeney's personal thoughts on it. If they actually wanted it to run on Linux/deck I have no doubt they could without much trouble.
There is no "unofficial client" to exploit, there is an unofficial installer/launcher. Windows games run using proton run in exactly the same way they do on windows, the game itself is not modified in any way, that's the whole point.
It allows you to run games, as if they were on windows. All these companies have to do, is fucking allow it.
Valve is guilty of the same crime, a billionaire can’t hire anyone to do CSGO2 Apple support. It’s never been about money or support. The CEOs are just being jerks.
Famously understaffed and broke Epic Games.
This is another reason Epic games will lose everything to Valve. Their storefront is useless and is a money loser. But even if it weren’t, valve is moving themselves to be the gaming king of Linux. Where no competitor exists meaningfully. Maybe GoG?
GoG doesn't even have a Linux version so yea, there is no competition. Some games on GoG that are natively available in Linux have an installer for manual install but that's it.
Sweeney has had a chip on his shoulder with Linux for at least 15 years. It's honestly a bit weird since if you look at stuff before around 2005, he had quite a different tone.
Yeah they used to ship Linux executables on the same disk for Unreal didn't they?
Are there really that many people up in arms about this? Fuck epic and fuck fortnite, but were there really that many steam deck users that even wanted to play it in the first place? I see no issues with epic continuing to make dumb and short sighted business decisions, so long as somebody salvages unreal if they ever crash and burn.
For me it's not about fortnite but more about fast-paced multiplayer on the steam deck
When I played Rocket league on the deck instead of my Desktop with Lan, higher resolution and much higher framerate I always felt as if I'm playing much worse than I usually do which is not fun in the slightest
It's a great console for singleplayer and more tactical multiplayer but whenever reading the screen in less than a second and reacting very fast to it in an online game is necessary that's not great...
I generally suck at playing shooters with controllers but I was looking forward to try the Gyro controls for Fortnite.
You can as a workaround play Fortnite on the Deck via XBox Live in a browser. But there you don't have Gyro controls :(
Jokes on him. There is a whole infrastructure to make windows games work on linux, except those that are explicitely programmed not to work on that.
Not related to Steam Deck, but this caught my eye:
As soon as we thwarted their effort, they went around to 27 different developers and offered each one a payoff to undermine any effort we had to get their games onto our store exclusively. Activision and Riot and Supercell had direct distribution plans that they were planning on; Google paid them not to pursue those plans. Just direct blatant violations of anti-competition law, it’s crazy a company of Google’s scale would do that.
So Tim is stating that Google making exclusivity deals with applications developers is breaching laws and should be stopped, but Epic having exclusivity deals on their own stores is okay and not anti-competitive. Hypocrite much, eh?
I believe what wormtongue was saying here was that Google was paying developers to abandon their plans to release exclusively for the Epic store.
It doesn't mention forcing anyone to drop Epic, or other platforms. Not sure what is anti-competitive aside from forcing the Epic store to compete on their merits (price/platform support) instead of their exclusive game deals.
The steamdeck-like hardware market is going to explode and they are fools for not putting in even a tiny amount of effort there. Yeah a lot of steamdeck form factor devices will run windows, but idk linux has passed a critical threshold where windows just looks less and less attractive as an OS to base this kind of device around.
It doesn't really matter how well Valve does or doesn't do in the near term, the existence of the steam deck right now as a functional, easy to use gaming device irrevocably changes the pc gaming market. In the future kids are going to get these things before their parents shell out for a gaming pc, they are the clear gateway step into pc gaming because you can always buy a nice pc down the road and have all the same games to play as you do on your handheld.
It will increasingly matter more and more what multiplayer action game you can pick up and get running most easily on a steamdeck-like linux device to play with your friends. Right now for example Halo Infinite is pretty perfectly situated, it doesn't have much competition for being the easy to get into steam deck multiplayer shooter choice.
So how many Steam decks have been sold?
I heard it's over a couple millions now but my info could be outdated.
It is playable on Steam Deck... install Windows on a USB-C SSD. Problem solved.
You can run Windows on the Steam Deck but I'd argue you also introduce a bunch of new problems.
I wanted to see how Destiny 2 ran on it. Bought one of these in 2tb.
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/xs2000-portable-usb-c-solid-state-drive?capacity=2tb
No issues. Windows installed flawlessly, booted into Windows, Destiny 2 imstalled flawlessly.
Some stuff just requires Windows, it's best not to be all precious about it.
I'd argue at this point it's merely "a PC formerly known as Steam Deck".
I'd rather just not play a game than be forced to install windows.
I mean fair enough, i can also drink gasoline and douse myself in it, then set myself on fire and jump inside a shark infested ocean to put out the fire, but I'm not gonna do that either