Speaking of "missin", your rep is draining a whole lot faster than Trump's swamp. ;p

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Everyone misses out on alot of things in life, 'cause you can't have it all. If i skip missing out trying to decipher your posts, i'll miss out on time that could be spent elsewhere playing games, reading/hearing philosophy, coding, or anything more enjoyable for that matter. If i really wanted the humor of dealing with hillbilly speak as comedy, i'd go watch the Beverly Hillbillies, or just about anything where someone is speaking instead of typing funny. I could understand some shorthand, but don't kid yourself, that takes talent and practice, and it gets old fast. A joke is only funny for so long, before it becomes annoying. After watching Ratrace about 15 times, i'm about sick of it. Believe it or not, people might appreciate it more if you reserved it for very special moments of pure blunder, not most of your posts. I've been known to do the same thing, too, both in speaking and in instant messaging, but I mostly save it for moments when it fits a particular goal of mine.

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Games; especially AAA games should not be exclusively made for one OS. In this Oligarch-Monopoly type of PC environment costumers have little choice!

I would make a Fair Rule that; At least two Operating Systems must be utilized on/for PC environment in order for Games to be released a (Fairplay Rule). This will end OS monopoly. End taking advantage of unaware users and create innovation. I'm hoping.

What are your thoughts?

P.s Maybe I'm writing nonsense but it is as my Topic subject, so yeah win7 support ends soon, for me it sort of ended already since I can't run new releases here on GOG so I guess I'm a bit sad that I cannot buy more games to support the cause.

So... umm... who exactly is gonna pay for this?

Games' prices already pretty much didn't grow with inflation in the past 30 years. If they did (same as all consumer products) we'd be paying $110 per game right now. Personally I don't mind, but I get a feeling that quite a few people would mind very much. And if you legislate increasing the development costs further, I'm certainly curious who, in your opinion, would be footing the bill?

In theory it should be happening anyway. We focus on coding cross-platform to begin with, so why not be cross-compile ready? I mean, i thought that was the whole point of using languages like C++ instead of assembly, which is much easier (despite what people say about it), or using something like game-maker or unity, which protects you from yourself much, much better than any programming language. If you're going to platform lock, anyway, why not use a more specialized tool to make your stuff to get it out faster.

I feel like the industry's sick in this regard: the potential is actually already there for most games, it just doesn't actually happen because of support concerns.

What kohlrak said, yeah!

Theories are great, and I too would love to live in an ideal perfect world.

That said, we both know it doesn't quite work that way. Sure we can write a "Hello, world!" in C++ and it will work on nearly every system there's a compiler for, but for complex software, such as games, it's nowhere near that simple. Cross-platform games require tremendous time investment, and time investment is money investment.

Why do you suppose Witcher 3 wasn't released on Linux? Is it because:
a) it would cost a lot to do that, or
b) the devs just didn't really feel like it, plus they hate Linux, or
c) it's a conspiracy between evil corporations, evil oligarchs, the evil Illuminati, and evil Rothschild personally

How about...

d) They made a bad choice in libraries to build their engine against, because they wanted to follow some common practice and use cool library X because a manager said so, and the library itself was precompiled and they had no interest in cross compiling the library for any other platforms.

So they are complete n00bs, have stupid managers, have never heard of OSs other than Windows, and so on.

No.

You might like it to be that way, because that would neatly place everything within your world view where software development is a straightforward and entirely predictable task. Hell, I would actually like you to be right. That said, I have 20 years of experience in the industry and know that to not be true. So no, I cannot accept "d" as the answer.

This is a simple truth: cross-platform software costs more to develop. No two ways about it.

Care to explain why, then?

He can't. Once you associate yourself and get brainwashed by Giant Tech; you lose sense of who you are.
Free Will is out the windows.

Never assume malice where stupidity suffices. Most devs don't understand how things work under the hood, so they just automatically assume that because something's not happening it's because the situation's genuinely complicated. We're straight up seeing unity games that aren't cross platform, and there's really no reason for that when unity is a cross-platform virtual machine. However, programmers are usually trained from the beginning in a concept called "information hiding" which is part of Object Oriented Programming, and easily one of the worst problems with OOP. It creates this magic box idea that turns into cargo cult and all sorts of other known programmer issues. I can understand wanting beginners not to face a bunch of info at once or have to understand alot to get your "hello world" working, but at the same time we need to abandon this "magic box" and "i'll tell you that i'll tell you later, but in reality i won't tell you later" crap that basically produces this mentality. You have good coders out there that basically only understand the systems they create (which is the objective), but this leads to problems like what we're seeing here. I remember arguing with C++ programmers on whether or not a universal graphics library could actually be achieved. Ironically, SDL was mentioned by the same people that said it was impossible.

I edited out "ethical" right after I read my post because it wasn't right for me to say that. Sorry about this!