Obsidian Developers Clarify Stance on Linux Gaming

After lead producer Brandon Adler claimed during the PAX Prime retrospective panel for Pillars of Eternity that Linux development hadn’t been worthwhile for Obsidian, Linux gamers have been worried that Obsidian might drop the support for the platform in the future. To clarify Obsidian’s stance on the subject, Darren Monahan, one of the co-founders and co-owners of the company, has taken his thoughts to Reddit’s Linux_Gaming sub-reddit. In short, Obsidian is still committed to support Linux in the future:

I’m one of the founders at Obsidian, and I definitely don’t regret us supporting Linux on PoE. I’m admittedly biased as a Linux fanboy myself though.

We signed up to do it during our Kickstarter campaign as a stretch goal. I think [PoE’s lead producer] Brandon’s feeling was more from the trials and tribulations of setting it all up and problems we ran into during development. For example, it was harder to develop in Linux because Unity didn’t support the tools at the time. Debugging was painful, but ultimately, we got it done, learned a bunch from the process, and now Linux is now fully supported in Unity. FWIIW, we don’t have any plans to not continue developing on Linux!

Brandon Adler himself also clarified his comment on the official forums:

Hey, guys. I probably could have chosen my words better than I did. I wasn’t trying to upset any of our Linux supporters and I didn’t mean to belittle their support. I love all of our backers and I appreciate all of their help.

We basically had to build our Linux infrastructure from scratch on our side. It wasn’t something we were used to. It was also painful for us to develop in Linux because the Unity tools didn’t support Linux at the time. This meant that we were unable to debug on the platform.

Now that we have gone through the process of creating these builds it is something that will be much easier for us in the future. Pair that with SteamOS, Steam Controller, and Steam Machine and I think Linux’s future is good with PoE games.