Game Porter Feral Interactive Is Up To Around 72 Employees

[Zoll]

Still waiting for Rise Of The Tomb Raider... Unfurtunately Feral seems to release many games well after people may have bought it on sale or for playing in Wine/Windows.

I came here to exactly say that. Maybe Feral should survey existing paying customers of what ports the users are interested in before they commit?

[mike44]

So and how would you include that? Well you could upload it to dropbox or so and have users compile kernels....

I've waited several months for Rise of Tomb Raider. I guess I'll start playing in Wine in the next days.

[Elyotna]

I have a feeling game developers are afraid of cheaters. Because on linux, you can write a cheat directly into the kernel.. Allowing you to completely bypass client-side anti cheats.

PUBG for example relies heavily on BattleEye, a Windows anti cheat that checks for rogue Windows kernel drivers and processes. Good luck doing that on linux..

[nomadewolf]

As a windows user (I always say this when I comment to know what you are dealing with), I think feral do a good job.
Obviously there is a penalty in performance comparing to windows versions, and that scares people away.

Dispite Linux have a ton of games already, they need really more AAA games, PUBG like they said, it would be an easy port, since UE4 allow for easily porting games like this.
What linux needs is more people on it, but I think people usually gets overwhelmed but the ammount of distros available, even so, most of them are just small different changes than others, it's always difficult to decide for one distro.
And then for AMD users, if we stick with a LTS version of ubuntu for example, the Mesa will stick the the same feature version for a long time.
It would be great if there was more possibilities to update without going through terminals and risking having a conflict with X.org or whatever dependencies.
I know there is Olaf and other repositories, but would be amazing to have an official way and direct way to keep drivers updated.

Like I said, I'm a windows User, I can't see myself using linux only, since I do a ton of benchmarking, and I love to squeezze each frame advantage in my build, also I play a lot of games that aren't available on Windows, but regarding other software that I would need, I think I would miss some video editing software that I have, and MSI Afterburner and Visual studio IDE if I needed to performance some development with it.
Aside from that I could easily move on to linux.

Sometimes, Windows is better, and that's ok.
What you need to know about Linux, is this:
- It's hard to get into! I am a software engineer and had lots of trouble getting into it. Because it's such a different philosophy...
- If it were the same as Windows, it would be impossible to be better. Therefore, it HAS to be different.
-Picking a distro, is not hard, it's fun. You can set up different / (root) and /home partitions and all you have to do next is format / (root) and mount /home every time you distro hop. Yuo can take your sweet time, test all you want, and savour all the Linux flavors you please until you find somthing that suits you.
- About drivers, i have an AMD and didn't had to install anything. It just works. I didn't even bother to check what drivers are installed... Do it get the absolute maximum performance to the last drop? NO! Is it enough? Hell yeah!

Bottom line, it's a bout choice:
-With M$ you get more performance and more choice when it comes to gaming.
-With Linux you get more freedom, privacy and RAW power, but less choice and performance when gaming.

As long as you're happy with your choice, it's completly fine.
My recommended distro for Linux Starters is Linux Mint (personal choice).

[nomadewolf]

If feral could strike a deal for PUBG on Linux, I'm sure that would give them a nice boost for 2018!

While Warhammer and F1 are nice games, their not overly popular games people play. I would suggest some Bethesda games but we all know that company has quite allot of animosity for linux.

If they could get RIOT to pay them for a League Of Legends port, it would be very good.
I'd actually pay for that, as a player, but i don't know about the rest of the player base...

[bosjc]

Remember Linuxgamepublishing and Loki? I hope Feral doesn't go that way, but with Mac they seems to be on the secure side. Linuxgaming seems still on the abyss edge in my opinion with 0.* on steam etc.

Loki was kind of a... special case - the founder was basically embezzling from it from what I recall (from what I have read on the topic). LGP also seemed kind of... odd, they really didn't do that much especially towards the end and really never seemed to get many AAA titles that would make money.

[lectrode]

And then for AMD users, if we stick with a LTS version of ubuntu for example, the Mesa will stick the the same feature version for a long time.
It would be great if there was more possibilities to update without going through terminals and risking having a conflict with X.org or whatever dependencies.
I know there is Olaf and other repositories, but would be amazing to have an official way and direct way to keep drivers updated.

I started out using Mint Xfce. Went to Xubuntu from there. But neither provided easy access to updated drivers. Depending on a separate repository for updated graphics drivers proved to be more of a hassle than it was worth.

I've been on a rolling release distro (specifically, Manjaro) for the last 2 years now, and I never have to worry about drivers with it. The latest available drivers are kept updated along with the rest of the software. Not only that, Steam comes pre-installed with recommended dependencies. There is also a `steam-native` package available that allows you to easily switch between using the provided Steam libraries, and the latest libraries available in case games have issues with one or the other.

As with other rolling release distros, updates are provided fairly often, and they are easiest to deal with if you keep your system up-to-date. There is an active community eager to answer any questions you might have.

If Manjaro isn't appealing, there are other rolling releases out there you can try that would probably easily provide the latest drivers available as well.

[fuzz]

Port Elite: Dangerous please.

[tegs]

That's cute, but where's PUBG?

[Leopard]

It felt like Feral was doing less Linux ports in 2017 than in 2016. Did anyone check the actual numbers?

If my gut feeling is right I wonder if it was because of their Vulkan efforts.

In any case I hope they do more ports next year ;-)

Both because of Vulkan and Metal work.

MacOS simply lacks on OpenGL side with it's version 4.1 and terrible drivers.

Porting a game solely for Linux is not profitable i think. With Mac sales , Linux ports are becoming less risky.

They released a couple games with Linux first ( Hitman and Deus Ex ) but it is not so profitable. So they spent a big time on their Metal work for ditching OpenGL on Mac and make performance much more acceptable. Vulkan work was a secondary target i guess , because we have performant OpenGL on our side.

I hope they can bring much more AAA's to both Mac and Linux , because they help transition phase from Windows to Mac or Linux.

Mac has some advantages though , when people start spending on Mac app store they just became more and more locked in Apple ecosystem. As for devs ; if you want to develop and release an app for Ios you should purchase a Mac.

That is why Mac numbers are so steady , people are loyal to it because of previous purchases , for work etc.

On Linux , people are trying it and then a problem occurs. They just simply jump to Windows wagon again because there is nothing you can't do on other platforms while you can on Linux.