For a long time, an overwhelmingly popular view among game developers and publishers has been that offering Linux builds would involve too much work, because they had either tried it briefly or heard from other devs who had tried it, and found that their problem reports massively increased. Their conclusion was often that Linux causes too many bugs to be supportable. As a gamer, I was of course disappointed every time I read this.
More importantly, as a developer, I couldn’t help noticing ways in which this reasoning seemed flawed. I always felt that it was either poorly informed or not completely honest.
So, when this refreshingly different perspective from a game developer surfaced on social media, it warmed my heart. I thought the rest of you might find it interesting.
That was a few years ago. I imagine the influx of gamers using Linux since then (since it’s easier now) might mean a smaller portion of our group has the technical skills described in that post, but I think it still applies. I hope it also gives us something to aspire to when interacting with the people who make the games we play.
Its not burying your head in the sand.
If it is isolated or people just don’t care? Then… it kind of doesn’t actually matter. You scan the forums and optimally have community managers/PR people to do the same to keep an eye out for “This was weird?” style comments but you mostly focus on the stuff that naturally rises to the top or that you identify as an issue.
The more bug reports you have? That is engineer time spent assessing what is and isn’t a priority. And the sad reality is that it is a LOT easier to say “we have our five thousandth number one priority” rather than to say something doesn’t matter. Because if stuff does go down? Suddenly you are on record saying the most important thing ever (whether it is a critical vulnerability or just something people fixate on) didn’t matter and you can bet everyone will throw you under the bus.
As a developer? I want every bug reported to me because I genuinely do want to make the best product I can. That said… if you don’t care enough about reporting a bug or it isn’t reproducible enough to matter… I am not going to complain about getting some extra time to work on things that actually interest me. Which may very well be trying to reproduce that “weird behavior” myself because it sounds like it could be bad.
And… as someone managing a project/team of developers? I can watch in real time as people become more and more drained as every single day is fixing all the “this would be low impact if we were allowed to call it low impact” bugs. And that person who clearly was bored and searching for the corneriest of corner cases (the bug that “nobody knows about”)… that causes significant psychic damage to the person who reads the report and has to fix it.
It sounds like you’ve worked in a pretty bad development environment in relation to bugs in the past
This takes a hell of a lot more time than just reading a bug report and adding it to the list.
From your comment, I doubt you’ve ever done any software development before.