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.
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.
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.