As others have said, tiny market, but also that it often requires more development for the Linux port to get going, and even more development to actually make it run well. Like for instance, Civilization series usually release with Linux and Mac ports, but those are done by a third-party company which I imagine does add additional costs, and those suck regardless.
Not like it’s a bad thing necessarily, the vast majority of native Linux ports I’ve tried were either severely out of date, had significant performance issues, crashed a lot or had some quirks that would make it not worth playing anyway. It’s probably just easier if developers focused on proton compatibility instead.
On Steam store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/, all Linux operating systems combined have around ~2% users, compared to the MacOSX ~1.4%. This is only a recent trend, as for the longest run Mac had more Steam users than before. And building a native Mac game was more straight forward than on Linux.
Nowadays its completely different than before, thanks to Proton integrated into Steam. This means even though there is a higher percentage of Linux players on Steam, there is less reason to make native Linux games. That has some advantages: Windows binary through Proton has feature parity without the devs needing to understand the underlying Linux system and libraries, less work for the developers means higher probability of supporting Linux for longer time, thanks to Proton and the auto selection of Proton version for each game its also less worry for the end user. It does not matter what system libraries you have installed or what operating system you are using.
It would be nice to have, but in reality there is no real need for native Linux games from developers or for the end user / player.
Market share and yes, Proton/WINE ultimately lessens the need for a native Linux port.
In a fair number of cases, even when there is a native Linux port, Proton/WINE has worked better than the native game.
If Linux gets to 5-10% of the market, we’ll probably see them come back for platform specific optimization reasons. However, without a larger market share and with the translation being so good these days, there’s not a lot of need.
Civ games at launch are often a bit of a mixed bag, and the games improve over time with patches and expansions. That being said, the game isn’t even fully out yet, and early Steam reviews are notoriously unreliable and undifferentiated. For your first civ game, maybe look at earlier titles like Civ 5 or 6. They have aged very well, I still play 6 all the time.
I played 6 at launch and it was a huge downgrade from 5 but now it’s been updated so much it’s now unrecognizable from what was released as 6.
Every patch, update, and DLC will change it incrementally back into a similar experience as the others. They like to try to get real wild with the initial release but it tends to get back to the same sort of things eventually.
I am hoping that is the case, but I do have to say that this one boggles the mind just a little bit to be launching without significant features that the previous games had like hotseat multiplayer and limited era games.
I want to add on that Sid Meier had a philosophy called the one third rule, where on third of a new game would be kept from the previous, one third would be improved systems and one third would be new. I don’t think he is big into the studio at the moment, but i can see him still being a guiding light.
I don’t play many games, but civ patches will get the game polished and it will be a world better at some point. Until then, you can be the part that is booming the system or wait until the product is in a place that the community loves
I was playing Apex and any time there was a Playstation player on my team the framerate dropped down to like 5FPS for minutes at a time. So I think it’s still struggling
If you have never played Civ before it would be a good time to start with Civ 5 or maybe even Civ 3. They are cheap and quite polished.
In my opinion (having played Civ since the first game, yes I’m old), Civ 7 is quite ok in it’s foundations, but it’s clearly released too early and like the other parts before it’s mainly a game about optimizing numbers, not so much about strategy.
Biggest turn off for me is the introduction of “rogue like” mechanics that give you to play certain characters and nations in a certain way to access others. Why would I want to have that crap in a strategy game?
They stole that and some other mechanics from Humankind, a game by the same studio as Endless Legend. It wasn’t received that well in Humankind either, so I’m kinda surprised that they stole it anyway, but I guess line must go up and they didn’t have a lot of inspiration themselves?
4 is the best “old” civ in that it still has square tiles and doomstacks. Also the modding scene is insane for 4, massive total makeovers that make it a completely different game, far more interesting mods than any other civ game.
Interesting. Once you are in the game, I think it’s all Epic servers, so should work, but it’s possible there’s still some weird PSN connection that may stop it from working.
As others have said start with 5. The rule of thumb for civ games is to wait for the expansion dlc to release and buy the game on sale. 7 is also a significant departure from the previous games, so it’s probably even more important to wait or outright skip it until they get it more polished.
Also it’s worth looking into endless legend or endless space 2 if you want to try more 4x games.
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