Why Blizzard doesn’t support Linux officially in its games? (Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo etc)
Almost no one officially supports Linux. Much less Microsoft.
Blizzard games have always run very well in Wine. And when people have been erroneously banned for using Wine that was rectified pretty quickly.
So while there hasn’t been any official support, the unofficial support wasn’t that bad either.
Blizzard games have always run very well in Wine.
They run, but I wouldn’t say very well. A few counterexamples off the top of my head:
- Wine raw input patches are required to avoid subtle mouse glitches in Overwatch.
- Saving Overwatch highlight videos doesn’t work.
- Battle.net launcher changes have made it unusable in Wine more than once, leaving people suddenly unable to play for days or weeks even when the games themselves would run fine if they could be updated and launched.
You might not notice the problems (or not as often) if using Proton. That’s because Proton includes a load of Wine patches for stuff like this.
It would be nice if Blizzard tested on Wine and worked with the maintainers to ensure things stayed smooth.
I agree. There is not a high priority to have official support, as the unofficial support is good enough. I played Overwatch (and later OW2 a bit) for years on Linux. It felt like native to me. All I am really asking for is not to ban or block Linux users.
Because they’re owned by Microsoft, who certainly have no interest in Linux support.
Microsoft itself has some conflict of interests, where they use Linux in servers and work actively on Linux itself. And at the same time Microsoft wants to bring the Xbox brand to as many platforms as possible, as it is no longer the Xbox console that counts. So there should be an interest to make the games officially supported on a Linux platform.
On the other side however, they also want Windows to succeed. And not supporting a minority platform means huge savings in time and money and less complication in management. I am curious how Xbox gaming brand will handle Linux in the future.
I think cloud gaming is their solution to gaming on Linux. In which case, yuck.
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Even before their purchase by Microsoft, Activision had no love for Linux and probably viewed it as a mechanism for reduced profits
My educated guess would be that it would require a lot more work for very little benefit.
Officially supporting another platform is just more work for the developers, QA and the support team. Their games do run very well on Linux using Proton. Diablo 4 has even been marked as Steam Deck Verified before its launch on Steam.
And they work without them having to implement things like a Vulkan renderer, having to test on even more system configurations and having to teach the support team how to handle issue reports on Linux.
So I think they‘re okay with how things are right now. Everyone can play their games on Linux, but if something breaks, it‘s not their problem.
And, having played their games on Linux for many years now, I‘m personally okay with that. Proton, DXVK and all the other tools are so advanced by now, that I don‘t think there would be much of a difference if they offered native game builds for Linux.
Hmm.
For the early titles listed, when the games came out, Linux was pretty irrelevant from a gaming standpoint.
Later, many games that had cross-platform releases used engines that provided cross-platform compatibility. Those games would have been written to the platform, so I’m sure that ports weren’t as easy.
Now, the games are very elderly. The original team will be long gone. I don’t know if there’s anyone working on those at all – unless a game represents some kind of continued revenue stream, there isn’t a lot of reason to keep engineers on a game.
WINE runs them fine, so there’s a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port. In fact, as I recall, Starcraft was one of the first notable games that WINE ran…I remember Starcraft support being a big deal around 2001, IIRC. The original Warcraft was for DOS, so you can run that in a DOS emulator.
I doubt that the investment in a Linux-native port in 2025 is going to get much of a return relative to what other things one could do with the same resources.
I guess maybe I could see an argument for World of Warcraft, as a very successful, long-running MMORPG that still has players and still represents revenue. But I think that I’d be surprised to see native ports of most of their earlier library.
WINE runs them fine, so there’s a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port.
Officially supporting the Linux platform does not mean doing a native port. Look in example what Marvel Rivals does. They do support Linux, with official statements and with bug fixes related to Linux (they even specifically mentioned a specific bug fix for Bazzite in one of their recent patch notes). The game runs through Proton. Blizzard / Xbox could do the same here.
Especially now with Blizzard moving their games back to Steam, running them on Linux doesn’t even require tinkering anymore.
