I’m asking because I just bought Cronos: The New Dawn on Steam because it has a native Linux port. To be fair, I would have bought it at some point anyway but I got excited when I saw it had a Linux port. The game is missing features that the Windows version has, It runs horribly at any setting other than very low. I think they only bothered testing for the SteamDeck. But if that’s the case, why does it support FSR 4.0? To be fair, the Windows version doesn’t run amazing either if you enable ray tracing but it still performs way better than the Linux port. Why do devs keep doing this? I’ve bought many Linux games that have problems that the Windows versions don’t have. Why even make a port if you’re not going to bother testing or optimizing it?
I know this is gonna dig deep, but consider this…
Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?
Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros, but let’s say you can get a passable port, may not be the best but for minimal effort you can sell to a handful of that 3%, the business thinks “why not?”
In the grand scheme of things, native Linix ports is still low on the priority list for a company focused on making money
A lot of the “native ports” are done by a third party studio, and they don’t maintain it. Because of this, many games perform better through proton than natively.
Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you’ve already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.
Ya, and with Proton working so well, I’d rather focus on Windows, then at most work with Valve on making sure the game runs well with Proton. Way less work.