Is ID Software Abandoning Linux?

Yesterday I was surfing at ubuntuforums.org and saw very interesting thread about ID software and the future of their Linux ports. As you know, ID Software was(?!) the biggest company that supports Linux and produces Linux ports to their games. Naikon89 sent two e-mails to John Carmack, and according the replies of John Carmack, id software (owned by Zenimax now) is abondoning linux ports. Here is direct link to the thread at ubuntuforums.org and the two e-mails John Carmarck replied :



> Dear Mr Carmack, I am just wondering if the graphics renderer for
> Rage is still
> built using OpenGL 3.* as a target? Will id still port to Linux if
> user numbers are
> small or not as big as say Mac OS or Windows?
>
> Gratzi,
> naikon89

The PC and Mac versions are still OpenGL 2.x.

We are not currently scheduling native linux ports. It isn't out of the
question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If
there are hundreds of thousands of linux users playing Quake Live when
we are done with Rage, that would certainly influence our decision...

John Carmack

Follow up :

> Ok, it must be alot more difficult to port
> than older id software games :(

Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics
technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It
probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the
closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the
fully tested and tuned experience...

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