The idea gaming on Linux has been a joke for a long time that is until Valve announced their Steam OS and a legion of Steam Machines running Linux. With that announcement, we are seeing a rise in the number of games available for Linux with more AAA game developers and major game engines supporting Linux. While we Linux users are happy to see game developers supporting our beloved OS, the makers of Pillars of Eternity feels that supporting Linux is not worthwhile.

During a PAX Prime panel happened this weekend, Brandon Adler, lead producer for Pillars of Eternity stated that they regret their decision to embrace Linux.

I do not think it was worthwhile developing for Linux. They are a very, very small portion of our active user base – I think around one and a half percent of our users were Linux.

While statements like this are disheartening to Linux fans, we have to agree with the second part of the statement. Even in Steam, Linux gamers are less than 2 percent of the total gamers and even Windows 10 gamers surpassed that number in less than a week of its official release.

One of the initial promises the game developer had made during their Kickstarter campaign was to bring Pillars of Eternity to both Mac and Linux platforms, but, looking back, Adler felt like the challenges involved were simply not worth the return that the studio received.

Adam Brennecke a lead developer of Pillars of Eternity said, “Getting it up and running on Linux wasn’t that bad” but admitted, “There’s a lot of other logistical problems”. Brennecke went through a surprisingly long list of issues that, even for a veteran studio like Obsidian, proved to make Linux a less and less desirable platform to create games.

Gaming on Linux is at a weird point right now. Developers that have long shunned the open-source operating system are toeing the waters with Steam Machines looming. However, it seems inexperience in developing for Linux and lack of polished game development tools is the major problem for developers than the lack of users. We can only hope that Steam Machines will be successful and attract more users to Linux making it worthwhile for developers to learn and invest in Linux gaming.