For at least a decade now, gamers who use Linux as their primary operating system due to it’s awesome stability and security compared to Windows have requested over and over for Blizzard to release a Linux port of their games.
In the beginning, requests posted in the forums, which by the way is pretty much the only way of submitting requests, would instantly be locked or deleted by forum administrators. This of course made it very difficult for Linux gamers to get the word out to the actual decision makers at Blizzard.
Since the forums were redone some years back, the auto deletion and lock down of forum topics regarding Linux request have stopped but the message still gets lost if you will from all the Windows fan boys who have nothing better to do than bring negativity and stupidity to the topic.
One of the most common reply Windows gamers like to mention is on the various distributions of Linux. What makes this such a stupid reply is the fact that it does not matter what distribution a person uses since behind the graphical interface, most are pretty much the same.
Now I am no Linux guru by any means but many Linux programmers have stated that it would not be difficult to make the games work on all distrobutions by simply adding a command to verify any required packages are installed first and if any is missing, the installer auto downloads and installs it.
Another stupid comment is Linux gamers can use WINE and thus an official Linux port is not needed. Unfortunately, most Windows applications do not run the same as they would if there was an actual Linux port. Take Valve’s Left 4 Dead for example. Before it was released on Linux, a lot of gamers could not play it through WINE. Myself, the game could barely get through the opening movie. Now with the Linux release, I can play the game without any problems and in fact Valve found the game ran better than in Windows.
Another misconception is on something called “Market Share”. The problem with using Market Share is that you can not properly calculate what the current value is since Linux is a free operating system. You also cannot rely on values provided by websites since most of those sites are places a Linux user would not visit.
There have also been many gamers who have stated they only put up with Windows just so they can play their favourite Blizzard game(s).
So why does Blizzard hate Linux? Well that is one question Linux gamers have been wondering for MANY years but which Blizzard has always refused to make a statement about. Are they cowards, afraid they may receive backlash or is it something else? No one knows for sure and we may never know.
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