Ethan Lee, otherwise known as flibitijibibo (really rolls off the tongue huh), who created FNA and has ported a ton of games to Linux, macOS and more has announced a new game maintenance service for developers.
Sounds awesome, at least in theory. It remains to be seen how much interest there is from Publishers.
I’m hoping he could revive some of the really old and poorly working Linux ports as well as games that barely run on modern Windows or Wine these days.
Although in practice I can’t think of any game in my library that is in need of such a refresh, they generally all work decently in Wine (and modern Windows) even if some have a broken Linux port.
Edit: Maybe this is more exciting for macOS as there are plenty of Mac games that remain 32 bit only and thus can’t run on Catalina and above (also who knows how long Apple will keep OpenGL compatibility and Rosetta around). And on mac you can’t just simply “run the game with Proton” instead.
Also as another thought, while the Linux port requirement is of course a plus for us, it might be off-putting particularly for publishers that have their own shitty stores / launchers without Linux support.
Sounds awesome, at least in theory. It remains to be seen how much interest there is from Publishers.
I’m hoping he could revive some of the really old and poorly working Linux ports as well as games that barely run on modern Windows or Wine these days.
Although in practice I can’t think of any game in my library that is in need of such a refresh, they generally all work decently in Wine (and modern Windows) even if some have a broken Linux port.
Edit: Maybe this is more exciting for macOS as there are plenty of Mac games that remain 32 bit only and thus can’t run on Catalina and above (also who knows how long Apple will keep OpenGL compatibility and Rosetta around). And on mac you can’t just simply “run the game with Proton” instead.
Also as another thought, while the Linux port requirement is of course a plus for us, it might be off-putting particularly for publishers that have their own shitty stores / launchers without Linux support.