Couple hours ago Serious Sam 3 public beta was suspended for Linux Steam beta testers. Now the game is available for purchase at $5 until 10 December instead of $20. According to the lead developer Alen:
Well, how many other games (that are otherwise not free, unlike TF2) were available for free for Linux testing? A few demos, but no full games at all. I thought so. We decided to step forward and gave this for free so as many people as possible can test it. The original caveat was “until the end of the closed beta”.
But the size of the beta is now getting so large that it is hard to consider this a closed beta. The number of people is nearing the order of magnitude of current owners of the game. The result is that we are getting a lot of bug reports, where a significant number of them are not helpful. The beta was intended for Ubuntu 12.04. Now we have reports from people running exotic home-made distros with custom kernels and some window managers no one ever heard of. We definitely support the ability to do so, but you should _first_ complain to the maintainer of that exotic artifact, not to us, if you find problems there.
In short, the traffic here is getting too busy. We don’t have infinite resources to handle it all, so we have to back down a bit.
From another POV, you can consider it as a beta test for commercial viability of this Linux build. If no one will buy it, then… hm…. will we maintain it? 🙂
Tomorrow, here at UbuntuXtreme we will publish a Serious Sam 3 GPU Performance review with no less than 17 graphics cards. Just don’t say you weren’t warned 😉
Thank you CroTeam 😀
Utappia 
Sweet cannot wait for the results.
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Currently making the charts. Probably tomorrow or Saturday the review will be published. I am sure you will love it.
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“From another POV, you can consider it as a beta test for commercial viability of this Linux build. If no one will buy it, then… hm…. will we maintain it?” So what about the windows users who already bought the game then download the linux version? How are those folk measured. The developers are making out like we are all free loaders,during a god damn beta test after offering the game for free lol. I have ss3 on disk bought from a shop not through steam but will download the linux version from steam.Will i be counted as a paying customer? Will support drop so low im forced back to the windows version? Its pretty simple fix the bugs and game performance stop offering the game for free and those that enjoy it will buy it.
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I think you are assuming that steam people are dumb. I think they know what happens in their servers. I’m sure companies investing in/with other companies share some kind of reports to know how things are going.
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I am not entirely sure, as this system is still in flux, but windows buyers should count as linux if they will be playing on linux.
The game is supported, and being fixed, but the number of reports was getting unmanageable, and that was counterproductive.
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Could not find results until you posted the link on omg http://utappia.org/serious-sam-3bfe-gpu-graphics-performance-in-ubuntu/
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