14 DAY TRIAL // Randy Pitchford, the president and the CEO of Gearbox Software, the studio that developed the Borderlands franchise, has announced that the company might release a Linux port for the latest Borderlands title.
Borderlands 2 is probably the most successful game made by Gearbox so far and it's not actually a major surprise that the developers might look into making a Linux port. The publisher of the Borderlands games, 2K Software, has already announced that Civilization V will get a Linux version, and Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth will also be ported at a later date.
The Civilization games are being handled by another studio, Firaxis, and the ports will likely be made by Aspyr Media, a company that specializes in making ports for the Mac OS X system. Firaxis is under the same 2K umbrella, so it's conceivable that Gearbox could do the same.
Nothing has been confirmed until now, and Randy Pitchford only promised to test the waters on this issue, not to actually make the game. Still, it's nice to see that developers are closely looking at the community and are taking inspiration from it.
“It seems reddit wants a Linux port of Borderlands 2. I'll probably chat with some folks on twitter about that this weekend,” said Randy Pitchford in a tweet.
This was enough to pour oil on the fire and the Linux community is now looking towards Gearbox Software with great interest. Even if the game doesn't get ported, it's very likely that the next one in the series might get a Linux version right from the get-go.
Porting a game at a later date might prove to be harder than developing it from scratch, even if you are using another company. Also, Borderlands 2 is a huge game with numerous DLCs, so the porting price will be very high.
That investment will have to be recuperated somehow, but the Steam for Linux share is very small for now and the publisher might lose some money in the process. This is the main reason why other publishers are not heavily investing in Linux. They know that there will be no immediate profit due to the small Linux market share, but if they don't invest, the market will not grow. They are trapped in a reasoning circle.
Also, if the port ever gets made, it will be months until Linux users will be able to buy Borderlands 2 for the open source platform.