ticho writes:
"Followers of the Penguin, Marcin Iwiński, one of the founders of CD Projekt RED, has spoken out about why the developer of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet shown any support towards Linux.
Marcin says: "You know, one of the reasons we have not released The Witcher on Linux is that we most probably have to address five different versions of Linux and this is always terrible to support the quality of the games afterwards. The patches, the updates, and everything. If Steam will deliver a constant Linux environment, call it SteamOS or anything like that, we would love to have our games there because, you know, the more people play our games, the better for us."
Entire podcast (in MP3 form) here."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jameso_ on Monday February 17 2014, @09:06AM
Yes. Specifically, Steam on Linux uses what they call the "Steam Runtime" (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime) which is just a collection of consistent versions of libraries they expect to be in common use, that any software can simply use via LD_LIBRARY_PATH or such.
(Score: 1) by githaron on Monday February 17 2014, @02:21PM
Isn't it just for Steam related services like chat, achievements, and etc? You still have to worry about all the game related stuff like graphics, audio, platform optimizations and so forth.
(Score: 1) by Jameso_ on Monday February 17 2014, @06:30PM
Steam integration features are provided by the "Steamworks" API, which I believe requires a partner agreement before you can use it. The "Steam Runtime" is separate and intended merely as a consistent set of base dependencies to avoid any kind of dynamic linking issues across distros using different versions/patchsets/etc.