Will Blizzard Be Bringing Their Games To Linux?

[stiiixy]

With MacOS/OpenGL compatibility, it's small effort from there to get more Linux compatibility. Emphasis on compatibility. Blizzard games have always run well in OpenGL (and even DirectX, but not as well as -opengl) in WINE, sans the occassional WINE regression oe driver issue. I personally ran WC3-FT on Ubuntu (after 6 rounds of dist-upgrades which really made the machine struggle) with a Sempron 1150 and 2GB RAM, onboard 6150 nVidia and 80GB HDD. Still managed to work a treat. But I digress.

For Blizzard, it'd not take much to move over. They can do native now. The OpenGL option has always been there for WoW and W3 at least, and there's not really that much in the likes of WoW, their cash-cow, (not sure about D3, and personally I'd put a bullet in my head that play it again) since their DX upgrades that couldn't either be updated, or jsut simply removed to make a stable client.

But why should they? What would they lose by opening up a Linux channel and, what would be gained? Various issues like MS' history of rape and pillage and payouts, linux lack of a coherent platform similar to consoles and Windows (XP, Vista, 7 et al compared to the Flagships Ubuntu and Fedora, with new versions every 6 months and Debian a rolling albeit stable distro!) come to mind. Unfortunately game companies tend to be extremely protective of thier assets because of rip-off's that occur within 3 months of leaked data (employee's paid off to supply? heheh conjecture, I love it) and I can only wonder why considering they would considering they've danced the jig to the likes of Nintendo, Sega, Sony and MS for decades.

Anyway, just putting out some perspective in the hopes of seeking more yummy input.

[dcc24]

Soo... This entire non-article can be summarized with one word: "No". Again Michael, this isn't an article, it's a tweet!

[oliver]

With regard to the platform diversity etc etc, don't think that's an issue.

Blizzard games always have been quite self-contained. Probably due to their multi-platform ability. No weird DLL requirements, no depending on the registry etc.

If they'd release the linux binary, only Wow.exe as Wow(.bin) chances are, it would work on a _lot_ of distro's without hassle. If you grep for strings in the Wow, SC2 and D3 exe's, there's obvious Linux references. All they have to do, is release it to the public and put a 'this is unsupported' disclaimer on it.

But one of the reasons they might not, is due to their anti-cheating tech, which may be lacking in the Linux builds ...

[mememe]

I'm fairly happy with Windows 7 so I'm not sure if and how MS screwed it up as much as Valve and Blizzard are trying to make us believe. That said, I don't really care about the reason as long as it motivates them to support our favorite operating system :P.

[zeealpal]

Me?

I'd hate to say it here, for fear of hate :P But I personally don't mind Windows 8.

I use 3 24" monitors with an AMD 7970, and sadly I've never had that good an experience with Linux (when using all 3) (First Ubuntu, then Mint) with 3 monitors and a 7970. Some of that can be blamed on AMD.

I see Metro as an extended start menu (abit like using the search in Unity) that displays ALOT more than the Win7 start Menu, and not squished into a little rectangle at the bottom of your screen.

I've found Metro to be no hinderence (that was a surprise) to my workflow, or have it slow me down in any way. Plus Win8 boots really fast on my SSD.

I will see how the MS Store goes, but it can only be better than the current way of finding/installing apps for Windows... but that won't be gone either. Also, the ability to dock the messenger app alongside my other metro apps, or desktop is quite nice. As are the notifications. However these are new/better integrated features to Windows, other OS(s) have been able to have those in for a while. The FB integration, Google calendar etc... displayed nicely on the lock screen, as well as notifications are nice features for Windows

Also, the way Win8 handles my 3 monitors probably makes it a better experience than those with one (but my experience is the one that matters to me), it will only show Metro on 1 monitor, so the other 2 are always showing the Desktop or apps I have open then.

I also play a number of games, so I'm not going to be able to get rid of Windows if I wanted anyhow. (Some of which will be available on Linux when Steam arrives! )

I am in first year Software Engineering at Uni, and I still run Linux (Ubuntu now) on my laptop, and virtualize it on my desktop for any work I have to do in my course

[Chewi]

It's probably worth mentioning that Blizzard had Sam Lantinga on their team until recently... when he moved to Valve.

[meklu]

I still wouldn't support Blizzard.

[dimko]

Not really fair on Blizzard

I looked into this situation of wine users being banned.

it appears to me, that there was some sort of hack. That hack could be executed from under wine. They went holy war on hack and made "friendly fire"(where bunch of innocent people was offected). Later on shit storm started. So they genuinely made mistake and simply later on didn't admit that they actually did it. Non the less, I do believe they did fight cheaters.

But apart from that, I ain't gonna defend them, nor gonna buy any of their games/products. FU Blizzard.

[araxth]

indeed it was an exploit and Blizz never made a secret their work on kicking out the cheaters from WOW (even those awful chinese farmers).

When legit players got caught in this fight, Blizz actively worked with Transgaming (Cedega devs) to have this matter fixed, then, subsequently unban the unfortunate victims: "reference" End of story.

As i said, Blizz is playing by their own rules which by the professional book means: fine games / fine sales records. If they are careful in using a new, unproved platform, i wouldn't blame them by the start since i cannot ask someone to put his own hide (in this case wallet) in jeopardy for the sake of being logged in the EE Industry history book. TBH i never expect huge media corps (Vivendi, in Blizz's case) to risk money on unproven deals. The heroism and adventure on strange new paths is the little guy's way of getting big or die trying.

Valve's Gabe N. made this heroic step with a distribution platform, an engine and a game, and i am pretty happy to see that couple of other devs are following (Croteam with Serious Sam 3 for instance).

Remember the boost registered on the MAC gaming branch when Steam provided the MAC Client. I am working inside this industry and i was fortunate to see this process from inside a dev / publisher's perspective.

Linux gaming is far a more difficult topic than MAC gaming, but there are huge chances for Valve to make it work on *nix. Strictly technical, both platforms are sharing the OpenGL technology (along with PS3 in a limited way) and both can be a later launch platform for an AAA (multiplatform) title, following the Consoles (1'st wave) and Windoze (2'nd wave) . But this is a different topic.

kindly,
n.

[chrisr]

I don't think "anti-cheating tech" is a problem

If they'd release the linux binary, only Wow.exe as Wow(.bin) chances are, it would work on a _lot_ of distro's without hassle. If you grep for strings in the Wow, SC2 and D3 exe's, there's obvious Linux references. All they have to do, is release it to the public and put a 'this is unsupported' disclaimer on it.

But one of the reasons they might not, is due to their anti-cheating tech, which may be lacking in the Linux builds ...

Blizzard's "anti-cheating tech" must work fine when running under Wine. So how would a native binary be less secure that a Windows binary running under an open source third-party Win32 API layer?

I suspect the biggest problem for a native WoW client would be the native graphics drivers. OpenGL mode in the Windows binary doesn't support the more sophisticated graphics features, which are reserved for DirectX. For these features to work on Linux, we'd probably need wider availability for OpenGL 3+ support.