You are technically correct, but you are belittling the amount of work that Codeweavers put into the LIMBO Linux version.

That's sad. I hope this doesn't become a trend for future Indie Bundles.

I agree, but so long as they actually tested it to make sure that it works and will support issues with the wine setup, then it is acceptable, IMHO.

Update on that. I downloaded it and gave it a try and sure enough, the sound doesn't work. Looks like they didn't perform the due diligence of testing. I'm currently downloading the windows executable to try with my system install of Wine.

My rule is, if it is proprietary software, I don't fiddle with it. I dislike Playdead for making me break my rule.

That's how 90% of the Mac games you buy work.

uh, citation needed? You'd at least have to specify whether you mean "offered for sale" or "purchased by users", because I suspect a big chunk of game sales volume comes from AAA games which are probably going to be native ports.

Not a complete list, but this is a tricked out wine used by many many games: http://transgaming.com/cider/games

Agreed, working in game development, I've very rarely heard of people using the Codeweaver's approach for commercial Mac ports.

I think this is just a case of playing a game of mishearing/misremembering.

A lot of EA's stuff is ported to Mac with Cider/TransGaming. From memory The Sims 3 is done that way.

afaik quite a lot of the indie bundle games are basically this.

Negative, this is the first one.

I don't think so. I remember getting a game called "frozen synapse" which was available on the bundle and I couldn't get it to run in Linux without reconfiguring wine.

Nah, Frozen Synapse was natively ported by Ryan Gordon.

The games I tried on Linux so far, have been really high-quality ports. I know icculus did quite a few of them. I haven't played that many, though.

Isn't supplying a library for making cheap ports one of the stated goals of wine?

Yes, but all of the previously-released Linux versions of Humble Bundle games have been high-quality native ports.

What is it with that idea that somehow "Wine isn't native"? It's not an emulator and it's not a virtual machine. It runs the native executables and provides a couple of Windows-like folders, DLLs, a "registry", environment variables etc. What's not to like? Sure, would be neat if the game devs had a dedicated Linux build target working with /usr/lib/ etc. paths but -- does any gamer care? As long as Wine is as hidden and stable and packaged in the background as Transgaming's Cider (try the three GTA 3 games on Mac from the App Store -- awesome smooth gaming! -- granted they're quite old) I don't see a problem for the gamer. And the devs are free to concentrate on their games and creative instead of headaches with painful "native porting" code issues.

If you agree that Wine can be an appropriate tool for helping port games, please sign http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/use-wine-as-needed-in-fut...

Is this leading you to have some practical issues, or is it just a technical complaint?

I have used the Limbo Linux port, and didn't have any problems.