Interesting read. So it sounds like they are using some of the investor money from Colossus for CU. Hopefully it all works out. I'll play Colossus (get it free anyway) but really only care about CU.
Question for those who understand the server tech. Mark mentioned moving from Windows based servers to Linux. What is the benefit of that?
Windows is notoriously bad for game servers. GCC vs MSVC is not even a fair comparison; linux-based servers blow Microsoft's compiler out of the water. Windows has very flimsy netcode in the form of Windows Sockets - which often are rife with compatibility issues and weird edge case scenarios where other Microsoft components (Windows Update, Firewall, Defender, among others) break functionality out of the blue.
Most games that are made now a days are made with consoles/mobile in mind, if not immediately, then down the road. So most are going to use a cross-platform engine like Unity or Unreal because PS4/Switch/iOS/Android/OSX uses the clang compiler, and Xbox has its own toolchain that is mostly similar to the old Games for Windows Live framework.
So not only is the server going to run faster, but it will be easier to diagnose issues that arise. (tools like Valgrind are horribly absent from Windows and are left to third party app developers)
The benefits of using MSVC is that you have a nice GUI to debug your issues with. I wouldn't be all surprised if they use Windows based servers internally and for production use Linux. We do that with our Unreal 4 servers at work.
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