Linux Gaming: Anti-Cheats question - eviltoast

There are games that we cannot play on Linux because of anticheat, which detects wine/proton translation.

How do I tell the company that produces this game that I am interested in playing it on Linux?

The company behind the game I am interested in does not allow any e-mail contact. The only way to contact them is the ticket system. I sent a ticket that I’d like to play it on Linux, but got only a generic response to follow up on news etc.

Maybe if we flooded them with such tickets, they would finally see that it might be worth considering?

What do you think about it?

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    The support people:

    • Have no agency over the choices the company makes - a lot of the time they are subcontractors, and have no better access to senior management than you do
    • Are not told anything that isn’t publicly available - even if the company were working on a Linux port, they wouldn’t know about it either
    • Are typically working to a script - tier 1 support people are given a script and a troubleshooting workflow, and are strongly discouraged from going off script - “question: will you bring $game to other platforms. Answer: we have nothing to announce, but keep an eye on our social media account”. If you escalate questions that you have the answer to, you aren’t going to keep your job for very long (remember subcontractors?)

    If you are going to contact support, be polite. Support agents put up with a ton of shit, don’t add to it. If you want to make noise, you are probably better off making noise on social media - but be realistic. Bringing a game to a new platform is phenomenally expensive - 7 or 8 figures for a large game. It’s not just the port, it’s testing, it’s updating docs, it’s updating support people. That is money someone has to invest up-front, so the people with the money need to know they are going to get a reasonable return on that money compared to building a new game

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      71·
      1 year ago

      Bringing a game to a new platform is phenomenally expensive - 7 or 8 figures for a large game. It’s not just the port, it’s testing, it’s updating docs, it’s updating support people. That is money someone has to invest up-front, so the people with the money need to know they are going to get a reasonable return on that money compared to building a new game

      In this case, it really isn’t. The platform they need to support is Windows before and after. No change there.
      The only actual change they need to do is set a setting in their anti-cheat middleware to allow Proton and distribute the required binaries. Obviously a bit of QA that that part actually works.
      The rest is up to WINE/Proton/Valve and supporting systems and 99.9% of that should already work. We as the broader Linux community have full control over those, so there’s no further input required from the game dev after that.

      It’s maybe 1-2 dev days, perhaps a week. That works out to 3-4 figures, maybe 5. I suspect that’d be offset in the first 5min of even just announcing Linux support.