Diablo 3 Game Director on Linux Support

First of all, no its not coming to Linux.

AusGamers recently interviewed Diablo 3 game director Jay Wilson and they asked him about possible Linux support after all the recent Steam on Linux talk. There are no surprises in his reply but it pretty much sums everything that big game studios have to say on Linux support.

Jay Wilson:

You know, what’s interesting about making decisions like that is that they’re generally not ones that I make. Whether we support something like that or not, really kind of comes out almost more from our Birmingham team a lot of the times. Like if it was something that they saw a lot of demand out in the community, they would just come up and say “hey, we think we can support Linux” or something like that. 

I haven’t had any particular conversations about that. I know we actually have a lot of stuff that we... like a lot of our server stuff actually uses Linux, so I don’t think that it would be outrageous, but I think that we’d have to see that there’d be a demand for it. And then we’d have to see that that demand would be worth the time we take away from the other things that we could do. 

One of the things that... I know we’re Blizzard, so people kind of think we can do anything, but the truth is, we’ve got limited resources just level everybody else, it’s just... our plate’s just a little bigger. 

So it’s like, well if we had the choice between getting PvP out earlier, or doing a Linux version, well PvP comes out earlier. That’s always what kind of ends up happening. Whenever anybody ever asks us “well why didn’t you do this thing?”, it’s, like, “well because we did this other awesome thing that we thought was more important”. 

May be the situation will change in couple of years and new AAA titles will be made for Linux from big studios. Steam on Linux can change everything and we probably need one success story.