Timothee Besset aka TTimo, the GNU/Linux game/engine porter of id software wrote on his blog :
“There has been a bit of unrest among Linux gamers about id’s commitment to releasing Linux versions of the games we make.
I don’t want to be rehashing old subjects, but I’ll offer a few thoughts:
Fundamentally nothing has changed with our policy regarding Linux games. Trying to shoehorn the ZeniMax acquisition into this is pointless, as they are true to their word of focusing on the business and letting the studio focus on the games.
Linux players represent about 5% of the QuakeLive population, which is in line with the company’s previous releases. Nothing new there, releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform.
We never commit to releasing Linux versions for any of our titles, at least not until we are reasonably sure that we have the resources to put into it. In the past few years I am pretty much the only one who has been involved in our Linux versions, and most of that work was done in my spare time. It worked out because I spent significant time working on each of those projects to get them shipped (Doom3, Quake4, ETQW), and making sure we had working Linux builds was a natural part of that process.
It is unlikely the new Wolfenstein title is going to get a native Linux release. None of it was done in house, and I had no involvement in the project. QuakeLive offers a lot of challenges and eats away everything else right now.
As far as idTech 5 (the Rage engine), it runs on PS3 and Mac already. Setting up idTech 5 to run on those platforms early on in our development cycle was a direct result of carrying Linux/Mac support in idTech 4 beforehand. It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I’ll be damned if we don’t find the time to get Linux builds done.”
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Taken from TTimo’s Blog : http://ttimo.vox.com/library/post/id-software-and-linux.html
So, hope is not lost …
Well that is good to hear, it is certainly good to native Linux games. WINE is great and all but it can’t handle everything and it is really just a crutch to be honest.
Good news about idTech 5. Good on TTimo to have such dedication!