27 ms·

Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

414 points by belltaco 8y ago

gpderetta 8y ago
So, free beta testing?
hawski 8y ago
Please mark it with (2014): https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080380532108619776 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080380532108619776 > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro.
dcbadacd 8y ago
This sounds like complaining about users being able to report bugs.
- brianwawok 8y ago
  Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Depends. Sometimes the complainers are telling you about issues that everyone else doesn't like about you, so you better fix those issues, otherwise the other customers will leave to someone else. Other times those complainers are just complainers who will never be satisfied and I'd fire those customers. Generally it is a mix so you need to read and consider every complaint.
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    It depends on how much the .1% cost, how much they provide, and how ok it is to ignore them.
  - chme 8y ago
    That depends on the complaints. If those complaints are valid and lead to a better service for everyone, then I would rather have them instead of not having any feedback.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - code_duck 8y ago
    If that .1% was using a specific version, I’d conclude the quality of that version was far lower than the mainstream offering.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?
    - zeroname 8y ago
      It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.
      - rightbyte 8y ago
        Maybe cat owners complain because their cats were eaten by the dogs, and you scared away other cat owners and lost profit.
        zeroname 8y ago
        Same outcome. How am I going to convince those cat owners that I totally fixed the dogs-eating-the-cats problem? Cats don't even need to be walked really, certainly not alongside the dogs. Putting the cats into the equation was a questionable business decision to begin with.
    - noselasd 8y ago
      The conclusion here is stated in the article as "Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform." So somewhat similar to having 0.5% of your pet walking customers complaining about issues you can't do much about, or have to do extra work to make them happy - their doghouse at home is too small, their car has an issue so they can't come and pick up the cat - basically a subset of your customers giving you a whole lot of extra work for very little gain.
      - rightbyte 8y ago
        Ye, well I agree it's probably not worth the fuzz support Mac or Linux for gaming. But I mean, without numbers on how much extra dev time the linux port demanded it's hard to reason about what a 0.1% revenue increase means. 0.1% is still 0.1% and could have been more if it didn't crash at that rate and discouraged buyers. Since they released for Mac the game must have been programmed with cross platform functionality in mind.
  - dejaime 8y ago
    Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review. Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones: > "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this game to its full extent" > "Constant crashing. When it wasent crashing there were so many bugs involved it wasent funny. The classic one was way better and im happy I still have it so I can play. I will change my review if they fix the game and get it so people can play it, but fornow its just contant crashes. Beware! "
    - brianwawok 8y ago
      They are bugs, due to issues with linux drivers. Not helpful things to improve.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  In this case it sounds like the bugs were mostly Linux-specific ("gfx driver related").
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019, they don't seem to exist. Anecdotal experience but I think things have improved and it wouldn't be this hard any longer.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      In particular, AMD released the open source graphics drivers (AMDGPU) in 2016. There are still problems with nVidia/nouveau, but that's easily solved by not buying their hardware. The Intel iGPU drivers have also been solid for a long time, though the hardware may not be fast enough depending on the game.
      - zanny 8y ago
        AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux. The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  what?
- boomlinde 8y ago
  I read it more as an admission that they underestimated how hard it is to a game to work consistently across Linux graphics drivers. The user reports are used as a metric, not to damn the users.
- ergo14 8y ago
  Well as he mentioned those were autogenerated reports. That being said... I tried Planetary Annihilation and it worked without issues for me on Linux.
SteveNuts 8y ago
Gaming is the #1 reason I haven't fully switched to Linux on the desktop at home (at work I exclusively run Linux). A lot of my Steam games work flawlessly with Linux but others will just silently fail to launch and it takes hours to properly diagnose and fix, which isn't what I'm after when I get some time to play games.
- jenscow 8y ago
  Your comment is the perfect example of how there's an "invisible" demand demand for gaming on Linux. Nobody can see it, because those who want it will mostly make do with Windows.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    +1. Personally, I spend 98% of my time in Linux, but I dual-boot just for the sake of the few games I like that need Windows to run. If not for that, I'd have dropped Windows years ago.
    - basilgohar 8y ago
      I haven't logged my hours, but substitute 98% above with whatever my number is (90+%). I don't even have Windows installed on my main, but older, desktop. I just have it on my newer laptop, which is where I do any gaming of significance (when I have time nowadays).
  - p0nce 8y ago
    Invisible demand is undistinguishable from no demand, as far as B2C is concerned.
    - kurtisc 8y ago
      I agree that they can't distinguish it but there was no visible demand for an iPhone before the iPhone.
      - 8y ago
bryanlarsen 8y ago
How do they measure the 0.1%? Many times I've purchased games because of the promised Linux support, and played it on Windows until the promised Linux support arrives.
- anonymfus 8y ago
  Judging by its Wikipedia article this game had Linux support since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation#Release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation#Release
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  I'm sure it is measured by number of installs or downloads. Either way the statistic is still very telling. If 0.1% of installs/downloads/purchases created 20% of the bug reports, I can understand the developer's frustration.
  - jgtrosh 8y ago
    The stats might be measured differently: Steam might not report a Linux user as such if they played on Windows at first (or something like that), while the tickets might be correctly labeled as Linux-specific by the user.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      For sure, it's harder to understand what platform people WANT to play it on based on an action they performed at checkout. I know personally, when it comes to purchases on Steam, I've bought ~200 games/applications, and I've probably only installed a third of them.
    - swish_bob 8y ago
      The original release was online only, so I imagine they have some fairly accurate idea on the number of clients connected. Even when the same user is using multiple different clients.
diffeomorphism 8y ago
https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384 Follow-up tweet by the same author: > As a follow up to this, I've been told by those actually involved with Linux stuff that this wasn't true. I probably just stopped paying attention to Linux issues at a time when everything was broken. Just so the discussion does not overly focus on the (apparently wrong?) numbers.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  This is a follow up to another tweet though
sz4kerto 8y ago
"I didn't want to touch on Mac support in the original post, but Mac support also cost way more than it made in sales."
tpush 8y ago
The situation seems to be similar for Mac: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080327518983315457 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080327518983315457 > Yeah, I didn't want to touch on Mac support in the original post, but Mac support also cost way more than it made in sales.
- andai 8y ago
  Innumerate person here, does that mean that supporting Mac is a net loss for a business?
  - backpropaganda 8y ago
    For this particular business. I don't think he's representative. Using tools like Unity makes it much easier to deploy on Mac and Linux.
  - ken 8y ago
    It's impossible to say for sure, without knowing people's behavior and motivations. In the past, I've certainly been more likely to buy software if I see it's cross-platform, even if I know I'll never use it on those other platforms. Or it might be a corporate requirement. There are many possible reasons. For example, if a restaurant serves only steak, is it a net loss for them to put a pasta option on the menu, if they know they'll never sell enough to make up the cost of ingredients and preparation? Maybe not -- it could mean a party of 10 (with 1 vegetarian) is willing to eat there, when they otherwise wouldn't have been.
    - jenscow 8y ago
      A "loss leader"
ShakataGaNai 8y ago
While I love Linux, I think this is a totally fair "state of the union". At the end of the day, gaming or kickstarters or similar... are a business. You need to figure out your ROI (Return On Investment). It doesn't many any logical sense to spend a huge amount of time on a platform that nets you tiny amounts of sales (and gains you a huge amount of support costs). This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting to be a real thing. Not a decade or so ago, there were still relatively small numbers of people using a Mac. It cost a lot to develop for a new platform and didn't make much money. Now it makes more sense. Of course Linux fragmentation will probably hold it back for significantly longer.
- rusk 8y ago
  > This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting to be a real thing. Is it? I mean, there's a good amount of support for gaming on the Mac, but I think it's always been so ... I wouldn't call it "a thing" though ... not in comparison to PC or Console ...
  - antris 8y ago
    I remember when major games being launched on Mac was worth a mention, or even a full feature in an Apple Keynote. Nowadays games are being released on the Mac constantly and nobody bats an eye. It's a better time to be a Mac gamer than ever before.
    - bluedino 8y ago
      It would be even better if they had decent GPU's available without spending $1000+ on an external setup.
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        Or if they went with Vulkan instead of rolling yet another half-baked graphics API while also deprecating OpenGL because reasons.
    - 8y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform. Just want to point this out before this discussion starts blaming the devs for 'not writing with portability in mind' or other such nonsense like the twitter thread did.
mrspeaker 8y ago
This is just an out-of-context tweet (well, the context is there - it's a reply to another tweet, which is out of context)... so perhaps it was just auto-crash reports, but I wonder if you get more tickets from Linux users, because Linux users are more likely to file tickets? When something crashes on my partner's computer she yells at it and restarts it. When something crashes on my computer I spend an hour trying to figure out WHY. If I can't figure it out, I log a ticket thinking I'm being a good citizen!
- kosievdmerwe 8y ago
  They still represent a vastly disproportionate amount of work for how much extra money they get you. They get you 0.1% extra sales, but they cost you 25% (= 20/80*100) extra support work. And this is nevermind the extra time spent during development. Your point would hold if the issues reported by Linux users would also fix issues on Windows. Some issues would occur on both systems, but I bet the vast majority is weird Linux and setup specific bugs.
  - rusk 8y ago
    > I bet the vast majority This is the crux of your assertion and requires substantiation. On the other hands, all these Linux user might be doing you "a favour" taking the time to log these tickets that less conscientious users on other systems would. Of course that does depend on the classification of the tickets but coming from that community I wouldn't expect them to be trivial issues ...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Jach 8y ago
      It's even more of a favor if the bugs aren't just linux-only. But if they're in gfx drivers like the tweet implies and auto-reported, the only thing you'd really care about is "newest drivers?" Same as the parade of crashes in Windows for the same reason, you want to just tell people to update.
Ologn 8y ago
I should note Android runs with a Linux kernel. It has been estimated that games like Pokemon Go have made over $1 billion on revenue from Android devices - larger than its revenue from iOS. Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Dragon Ball Z etc. do well on Android as well. So the "would totally skip Linux" advice is not heeded by every company for every platform.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Linux in the thread specifically refers to the Linux Desktop, and even more specifically to the only two supported distros: Ubuntu and Mint. Citing the success of an Android game does not in any way invalidate the advice.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  Pokemon Go sold because it had the "Pokemon" IP. This is a very bad example to generalise from.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  This comes up all the time by people that usually lack Android developer experience, specially with the NDK. Nothing on the Android app stack exposes the underlying Linux kernel to app developers. Yes it is possible to access certain paths or syscalls, however none of them are part of the public API nor guarantee to work across devices. Only OEMs have direct contact with the underlying Linux kernel, which could be replaced tomorrow without any issues for app developers, e.g. Fuchsia.
projectramo 8y ago
The conclusion I draw is that we should raise linux game prices by 200x
- NelsonMinar 8y ago
  Except Linux users want all their software to be free.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    It sounds like they just want it to not crash
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Maybe the game devs should do like RedHat and release the Linux version for free but charge for support.
  - Phenix88be 8y ago
    Many Linux user would pay for games, and they would pay more for a Linux version than a windows version.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      Maybe, but many Linux users would also complain that the Linux version is more expensive.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    There are Linux users who buy MS Windows just to enable them to play games. Win10 is £120. I'm building a PC now, that's going to be about 20% added to the cost; I'd rather spend that on games.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    I'm a Linux user and supporter of free software and I certainly want source code for my software. I'm quite happy to pay for it, though (and I do believe it or not). Not a lot of games offer source code, though, which is a shame. I've bought several games simply because they offer source code and I want to encourage it. I've bought a few games that don't offer source code as well (the only such software on my computer). It's a bit frustrating seeing facile comments like these both conflating the "free as in beer" vs "free as in freedom" as well as implying that those who care about "free as in freedom" are just a bunch of deadbeat freeloaders. You can imagine how insulting it must feel to be tarred with such a brush when it is completely untrue (at least in your specific case). If you want to make a statement about a population, at least back it up with some evidence. Do you have access to any studies showing that people using free operating systems are unwilling to pay for software?
warmwaffles 8y ago
Also I wonder how many of those crashes would have happened in windows or mac. I suspect the code is shared and would have happened.
- swish_bob 8y ago
  "gfx driver related" code is unlikely to be shared between Windows, Linux and OSX ...
  - chme 8y ago
    Then redirecting those issues to the right mailing list could still be very welcome by someone. IMO issues does not need to be fixed by the game developers and drv developers might be happy to have them and some code that reproduces them. Not sure why the game dev complains here.
    - swish_bob 8y ago
      Because dealing with the users who experience the problems costs more than they make in sales? If every additional Linux sale costs you more than it makes? There's being a good citizen. There's wanting to offer support to a small set of customers. Then there's losing money. At some point, you just can't afford to service the long tail.
      - chme 8y ago
        If the issue the user has found is in the driver, then redirecting them there or maybe sending an automatic email for each unique issue to the driver mailing list might help fix the issue without much effort on the game dev side.
  - fooker 8y ago
    Nvidia shares a huge chunk of it's (proprietary) driver code across operating systems. I suspect the crashes are coming from bad OpenGL usage since he mentions the same thing happens with Mac.
HugoDaniel 8y ago
But wasn't this supposed to be the year of linux on the desktop ?
Tehchops 8y ago
Too bad Planetary Annihilation was a poorly optimized, buggy, under-delivered piece of shit on Windows too.
wil421 8y ago
>There is no denying that there are plenty of issues with some parts of Linux, but still I believe it will become predominant gaming platform, especially in the more "appliance" space. It is worth investing in the know-how early. Bold claim to make. I doubt Linux will ever be a predominant gaming platform.
- antris 8y ago
  Umm... Phone games? All Android devices are based on Linux. Android is a major player in the mobile gaming industry.
  - detaro 8y ago
    What skills/tech you use for Android games is "Linux" specific and would transfer from/to a desktop Linux system or other Linux platform? (instead of being Android-specific, or specific to an engine etc)
    - antris 8y ago
      Anything from Android can be forked into any number of Linux distros you want to make. So none of it is Android-specific, really. For example Android software worked on Jolla's Sailfish OS.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        Sailfish has a crappy Android simulation layer. You don't really want that on the Desktop. Android and Desktop Linux are completely different platforms, except maybe for the graphics APIs (Vulkan/OpenGL).
        antris 8y ago
        I'm not saying I would want that. My original point was that the person I was replying to said that they won't believe Linux gaming would ever be predominant. I'm saying it already is.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
Part of the problem in 2019 is that the vendor with the best drivers on Windows is the vendor with the worst drivers on Linux. (aka Nvidia).
- wtracy 8y ago
  Care to elaborate? Nvidia used to be the only discrete GPU manufacturer that had Linux support worth mentioning. I know that AMD/ATi has made a lot of progress, but is Nvidia really the worst at this point?
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    I have perfectly working nVidia binary drivers that allow me to subject OpenGL to novel and creative abuses without problems. The rate at which I discover driver bugs has gone done a lot. Mesa, in contrast, had floating point texture formats blocked because of suspected patent issues until a few weeks ago. These are ste mandated formats in the OpenGL standard so Mesa was never technically compatible. And these formats do matter a lot in practice.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    I just went through the process of getting NVIDIA drivers working on my brother's dual-boot Ubuntu. Here's the issues we hit: 1. You don't don't get drivers out of the box. The NVIDIA driver is non-free, so Ubuntu's (and other Linux distros') hands are tied here: they're not permitted to distribute it. Getting it is relatively easy (check a box, install a package), but you need to know that you need it, and then figure out how to get it. 2. (For laptops) You need to install optimus/primus/bumblebee, s.t. the system isn't using the integrated GPU. This is another package that you need to know you need, and install. Ubuntu here is particularly bad: it apparently installs the drivers in the wrong spot, so even with everything correctly installed, you have to find a config in /etc, edit it to what a couple of comment on a GitHub issue that you found after Googling the error indicate. (Other distros, in particular Arch, do not have this issue.) 3. (For laptops) You need to configure the game in Steam to take advantage of primusrun. Steam does not do this automatically.
60654 8y ago
This is a pretty well-known effect in gamedev. The specific numbers change, but Linux sales are only a small percentage of total, while generating much more development and support work. At least dev work can be drastically simplified with middleware like Unity, which is how small studios can even consider Linux. But support difficulties are real. Players have so many possible distros, configurations, and drivers - actually supporting all of them would require a level of Linux expertise that gamedevs simply don't have (being typically Windows or OSX based themselves). Limiting yourself to something like Ubuntu LTS helps a bit, but there are still plenty of gotchas. So it becomes a simple matter of numbers: given relatively small amount of extra sales, is it worth the extra work, and spending the time to learn Linux development and administration in sufficient depth? Sadly usually it is not.
- huhtenberg 8y ago
  But for a game that is built on Unity, wouldn't these support issues be Unity's responsibility? Assuming the issues are triggered by their glue layer. What's the arrangement there, does anyone know?
  - kevingadd 8y ago
    Unity does not do your customer service for you. Also, bug fixes might only go into a future release of Unity (months out) and updating to the new release to get the bug fixes might break your game. Unity games that spend a few years in development often ship on a very old version of Unity.
StreamBright 8y ago
And these number are flipped for Mac users.
rkido 8y ago
Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making Linux/Mac support first class, by making a purely OpenGL engine for the game. But it seems they weren't aware of some other best practices.
- zeroname 8y ago
  I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux, but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.
  - dejaime 8y ago
    I agree with you that it is definitely not commercially worth it. But I guess you missed his point. He is not saying that "it was worth it for this game if well implemented", but that this game is actually a really bad example of how gaming on Linux is. It is like analyzing PC gaming by looking at Devil May Cry 3 or Resident Evil 4...
  - wheelerwj 8y ago
    100% this. source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything. I tried linux gaming for years, and Steam really really gave it a strong push. But the truth is, gaming on linux is complicated and doesn't offer the same experience as on Windows or even macos. I'd rather my favorite studios and developers dedicate its linux resources to customers that pay instead.
    - 8y ago
bluescarni 8y ago
> We started working on the game in 2012 > Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform. So this is essentially a rant about linux graphics drivers circa 2012?
- izacus 8y ago
  Are they any better in 2019? Last I checked the anything beyond desktop compositing features is still a tyre fire of lying capabilities, broken functionality and wishful thinking. nVidia being by far the most stable while lacking integration with modern Linux APIs.
  - bwat49 8y ago
    "Are they any better in 2019" ..Yes. Not to say they don't still have issues, but the linux gpu driver situation is vastly better than it was in 2012. AMD drivers especially has improved massively since then.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluescarni 8y ago
    As a full-time linux user and occasional gamer, I have been using the AMD open drivers since circa 2010. The improvements have been massive, both in stability and performance. Since the availability of steam, I have been doing all my gaming exclusively on linux, logging a probably unhealthy number of hours on various games (Dota, various iterations of Civilization, City Skylines, Stellaris, etc.). Not to say the situation is perfect by any means, but the difference from 2012/2014 is night and day.
FigBug 8y ago
I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old versions then the entire project is held back from using latest C++. And distos aren't backwards compatible. ie when libcurl4 is released, they remove libcurl3. So you can't have one binary for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04. So it means for every product, have a build for every distro / version combination you want to support. So now the solution is AppImages where you bundle up your app with all dependencies like a container. Haven't investigated this yet, not sure it will work for plugins.
- chme 8y ago
  Proprietary software on Linux is a bit of an alien there. But there is always static linking, is it not? (And now flatpak+snap+...)
- mitgraduate 8y ago
  Why use not Electron? Take a look at vscode it has plugins and it seems to work everywhere.
  - loa-in-backup 8y ago
    Unfortunately DAW and VST plugins are not something you can make in Electron
    - mitgraduate 8y ago
      Can you please explain why?
      - noselasd 8y ago
        Because the plugins embeds into existing native applications and uses existing native SDKs.
dejaime 8y ago
I was one of those who for every problem I had I would go out of my way to reliably reproduce the problem, then I would create a detailed description of it, with full system specs, terminal output (on both Windows and Linux) and all log files I could find. Today, I still do that on Linux. But if it excludes Linux as a platform, it must be rock solid on windows, right? If it isn't, all it gets is a negative review going about the "crashes all the time", "glitchy" and "is unplayable". That saved me a lot of time. Being an indie GameDev myself, I personally love well written tickets. But the passive aggressive responses I often receive from big devs makes me wonder if I'm actually the only one.
kuon 8y ago
While I am a Linux user, I boot my workstation under windows for gaming. So I would not even be accounted as a linux gamer by the stats. While rebooting is a bit cumbersome, I don't really mind now. I also wouldn't trust all the games I play to run as my user on my workstation. And it would take a bit of efforts to properly sandbox them.
linuxlizard 8y ago
Developing software for Linux is like painting a moving train.
- doubleunplussed 8y ago
  I really, really don't get it. Just bundle all your dependencies, what is so hard?
- zanny 8y ago
  SDL is binary compatible on its major release (2.0) and will probably be forever at this point. libc++ only broke its ABI once when C++11 required it. What else do you need to make games for Linux? If you are using Unity or Unreal its going to statically link all its dependencies anyway. Don't use libraries that break semver.
  - izacus 8y ago
    SDL is a 2D library. Any modern game will use 3D APIs and there you'll quickly hit the insane minefield of OpenGL bugs that are graphics drivers on Linux. Those are pretty much optimized for driving the desktop compositors with everything else being a stroke of luck if it works as defined in the spec.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Any modern game should be using Vulkan for just that reason.
vectorEQ 8y ago
it would be nice if companies could ship to linux and just say ' yeah good luck on that' and do some fixes where they feel the time is well spent. but unfortunately that's also not acceptable in the market, so it's either full on or nothing for many.
antoineMoPa 8y ago
I almost stopped playing games when I switched to Linux and I think it contributed to free time in my life for learning, side projects, sports, etc. I can always go back to OpenTTD if I crave gaming.
madez 8y ago
I'll take the step and say that most developers do the mistake to treat linux like any other proprietary system which they can target with stable interfaces and call it a day. Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible. If game developers opened up, and here I don't demand the optimum, which would be open sourcing their game[0], but just to get people involved that actually are active in both their code and the free software community, they could deal with the eco system much better and make their code actually work even on most of the many configurations that exist. Of course, the usual argument is that game developers don't have to care about this on other systems, but in fact they did have to gather experience and training on the other platforms, and with free systems, once you are involved in it, you can deal with it much more efficiently than what it seems at the start. There is nothing magic about filing a bug against mesa. I am one of the persons that contacted Uber about PA not working on my linux system. It was a recent Debian stable without modifications. They didn't offer meaningful support. I just asked them to install a debian stable with free mesa drivers on a computer with a recent AMD gpu, and try to build and run PA, and see why it doesn't work (there were obvious, easy to reproduce issues). That is not a lot of engineering time, and I bet solving those problem would have solved many problems in linux systems. [0] This starts to become a cultural problem that seems to need laws to deal with. As a society, we shouldn't accept to never have our cultural heritage, which games are part of, in the public domain in a usable form (source code and documentation). Edit 1: Writing closed programs for a free software community is difficult. I think that it should be difficult. That pain is a constant reminder that you're doing it wrong. Edit 2: Steam counts unsuccessful launches of a game where the game is laughibly broken as playing time, so after some extenstive testing, you can't even refund a game on Steam because it says you've played more than 2 hours -.-
- Kapura 8y ago
  > "Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible." This is akin to saying "When you're bleeding internally it's not that bad because all of your blood is still on the inside." Games are a hit-driven industry. In most cases, it is strictly better to be working on a new game than to improve incredibly niche support for existing products. It would be one thing if fixing Linux bugs effectively future-proofed it from more bugs down the line, but that does not seem to be the case for most of the devs I know who've shipped on Linux.
everyone 8y ago
2007s 'Supreme commander' is still by far the best game in that series, and the best RTS ever imo. It's still going strong, and has an awesome community-built matchmaking service, that effortlessly supports mods and maps, called 'Forged Alliance Forever' or 'FAF' https://www.faforever.com/ https://www.faforever.com/ Imo the idea of projecting an epic RTS onto a sphere is just, bafflingly bad. In supreme commander, you zoom out the view to get a strategic overview of the entire map.. You cant ever do that with a sphere. I am just bemused by this game.
stratosmacker 8y ago
Why don't we just support the Steam version of Debian and be done with it? Anyone running custom things should be ready to make their custom fixes... Oh well, this guys sounds full of hubris. Just because something isn't immediately profitable doesn't mean the community as a whole doesn't benefit from you ironing out bugs.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > Oh well, this guys sounds full of hubris. From a later tweet by the same person: Linux support was a passion for many on the project, and I was a proponent in favor of that support. If the Linux community is going to bite the hand that feeds them, don't be surprised when other developers aren't anxious to support Linux in the future.
schaefer 8y ago
The flip side of this is: I only game on Linux. If your game doesn't run well on Linux, chances are, I'll never play it. There's already a back-log of games on my wish list that I'll get to as soon as i find the time.
- tchaffee 8y ago
  What are your favorite games that run on Linux? I'm looking for new games and these days the few times I boot into Windows is when I can't easily get a game working in Linux.
- zanny 8y ago
  I've been Linux only since 2012, which coincidentally was when RadeonSI came out and I "took the bet" on AMD drivers getting good with a 7870 purchase. Its 100% no tux, no bux at this point. My last Windows title was Darksiders 2. Darksiders 3 came out in 2018, I was totally hype for it, but it was Windows / Xbox / PS4, so no deal there. Not like I have a shortage of dozens of other games to still get around to, my library is overflowing with titles I need to finish like Tomb Raider and Metro. The worst part was that Nordic was apparently intent to rerelease the remasters of Darksiders on Linux but just dropped it at some point. If they did the math and said it wasn't worth the time fine by them.
- cybersol 8y ago
  This! I've been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2009, though it was rough until 2013. I also quite a few Linux gamers are great at diagnosing their own problems. When we do report bugs, I bet the reports are more useful on average.
Glyptodon 8y ago
I don't think the Linux situation is good per se, but I haven't heard anything this negative from the devs of other multi-platform Kickstarter games, like Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity games. (Not that they were terribly positive about it.) To paraphrase the Obsidian take: Supporting Linux for the first time was much much more work than they expected, but it was mostly coming to grips with everything, learning all the gotchas, and integrating that into their build system and software dev practices. Once they got over that hump it was much easier/not so bad and worthwhile enough to continue. But at the same time, if they'd known what they were getting into the first time they think they'd probably not have promised Linux support. So first game it had a huge marginal cost to support, but once the tooling and experience was there that marginal cost to support was much much lower. Of course Pillars was a Unity game and probably not as demanding performance-wise as PA.
aidenn0 8y ago
Considering my graphics driver is buggy enough to cause the KDE panel to crash, I'm not at all surprised games on linux have issues.
qudat 8y ago
Anybody competent enough to use linux is competent enough to dual-boot into Windows. I would love first-class support for Linux gaming, but dual-booting is such an easy fix for me that I frankly don't care that much about linux support. I totally get there are other potential issues revolving around having to use windows, but for me at least, I don't really have any issue with using windows for games.
Deathcrow 8y ago
I'm sure those statistics are entirely real and not pulled out of his ass at all. Also didn't Planetary Annihilation have that awful chromium based UI?
CodeArtisan 8y ago
It may be better to solely target SteamOS, Valve's GNU+Linux distribution, and to not support the other distributions who shall adapt/follow SteamOS.
self_awareness 8y ago
Seems to me there is no sales on Linux because the game barely works on Linux? Maybe you'd have bigger sales ratio if you'd fix those 20%?
tokai 8y ago
As I recall the development of Planetary Annihilation was a clusterfunk of bugs and really bad performance. I kickstarted it, and remember getting it to work on linux. Put even though it ran, it did so 15 frames a second, even on a powerful machine. I actually just gave up on the game as the developers released it, even though it was still unplayable for me - and going by steam reviews - numerous others (mostly windows users I would guess). I guess it makes sense now that they 1.0'ed a barely working game, with such an animosity towards users reporting issues.
- politician 8y ago
  It barely worked on Windows. I don't know what he's trying to pin on Linux.
monksy 8y ago
Steam and the work that Valve has done on the linux side seems to show that's not the case. (They've managed to port quite a lot of linux games). This sounds like a case where a platform wasn't a priority for their business was showing that it had bugs.
gaurav2327 8y ago
Sites to download movies www.csgyaan.tk
thibran 8y ago
I was one of the PA Kickstarter supporters and played the game on Linux. It never worked flawlessly (graphical glitches). Today however I can play the latest DOOM (through Steam) on Linux using Vulkan without problems using an AMD card and open-source drivers. There is no reason not to build games for Linux, just use Vulkan and graphic problems are a thing of the past.
solidrake 8y ago
I'm aware that if you buy a game on Windows and play it on Linux, it might be tagged as a Windows game purchase. Wonder if this 0.1% truly tells the whole story.
zelon88 8y ago
I'd say us Linux folk are probably more likely to identify an issue and report it as well. It takes a special determination to run Linux, and I'd wager that Linux users have a keep eye for undefined behavior, feature requests, and wonky workarounds. Once time I updated a Linux box and the Nvidia drivers downloaded and started to build like usual, but there were tons of errors. After the graphics drivers failed GCC updated and rebuilt itself. Switching kernels fixed the problem. It took me a week to submit a ticket to Nvidia and then another 3 days of working with support before we realized that the Nvidia drivers were built with an outdated GCC and then GCC was updated afterwards. So when we checked GCC version it was the proper version, but the drivers were already built with the old version. If it was a Windows box I would have formatted it after 12 hours and called it a day.
throwaway2021 8y ago
> In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related). Would totally skip Linux. OK. So just another dumb developer being wrong. Nothing to see here move along.
mfoy_ 8y ago
Well if the game crashes a lot on Linux then those players would likely switch to an alternative platform. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where games don't run well on Linux and game developers don't see Linux gamers as a large demographic. If most games ran smoothly on Linux, you can expect the % of Linux sales to rise... no?
someguy1234567 8y ago
Pretty much every game runs fine on my linux box. You guys are just doing it wrong. ;)
axaxs 8y ago
Most of the people I've met over the years who are tech literate say they have some flavor of linux installed, love it, but keep windows around because 'gaming.' I would venture the number of folks who had linux installed but didn't buy it for that platform because of instability to be much higher than 0.1%. It's a chicken/egg problem.
Riverheart 8y ago
I game on Windows because of the momentum behind it but Linux support is a selling point that goes into every purchase, because the day I migrate I will still have my purchases.

414 points by belltaco 8y ago

So, free beta testing?

Please mark it with (2014): https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080380532108619776 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080380532108619776 > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro.

dcbadacd 8y ago

This sounds like complaining about users being able to report bugs.

brianwawok 8y ago
Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?
- bluGill 8y ago
  Depends. Sometimes the complainers are telling you about issues that everyone else doesn't like about you, so you better fix those issues, otherwise the other customers will leave to someone else. Other times those complainers are just complainers who will never be satisfied and I'd fire those customers. Generally it is a mix so you need to read and consider every complaint.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  It depends on how much the .1% cost, how much they provide, and how ok it is to ignore them.
- chme 8y ago
  That depends on the complaints. If those complaints are valid and lead to a better service for everyone, then I would rather have them instead of not having any feedback.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- code_duck 8y ago
  If that .1% was using a specific version, I’d conclude the quality of that version was far lower than the mainstream offering.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?
  - zeroname 8y ago
    It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Maybe cat owners complain because their cats were eaten by the dogs, and you scared away other cat owners and lost profit.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        Same outcome. How am I going to convince those cat owners that I totally fixed the dogs-eating-the-cats problem? Cats don't even need to be walked really, certainly not alongside the dogs. Putting the cats into the equation was a questionable business decision to begin with.
  - noselasd 8y ago
    The conclusion here is stated in the article as "Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform." So somewhat similar to having 0.5% of your pet walking customers complaining about issues you can't do much about, or have to do extra work to make them happy - their doghouse at home is too small, their car has an issue so they can't come and pick up the cat - basically a subset of your customers giving you a whole lot of extra work for very little gain.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Ye, well I agree it's probably not worth the fuzz support Mac or Linux for gaming. But I mean, without numbers on how much extra dev time the linux port demanded it's hard to reason about what a 0.1% revenue increase means. 0.1% is still 0.1% and could have been more if it didn't crash at that rate and discouraged buyers. Since they released for Mac the game must have been programmed with cross platform functionality in mind.
- dejaime 8y ago
  Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review. Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones: > "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this game to its full extent" > "Constant crashing. When it wasent crashing there were so many bugs involved it wasent funny. The classic one was way better and im happy I still have it so I can play. I will change my review if they fix the game and get it so people can play it, but fornow its just contant crashes. Beware! "
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    They are bugs, due to issues with linux drivers. Not helpful things to improve.
Ajedi32 8y ago
In this case it sounds like the bugs were mostly Linux-specific ("gfx driver related").
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019, they don't seem to exist. Anecdotal experience but I think things have improved and it wouldn't be this hard any longer.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    In particular, AMD released the open source graphics drivers (AMDGPU) in 2016. There are still problems with nVidia/nouveau, but that's easily solved by not buying their hardware. The Intel iGPU drivers have also been solid for a long time, though the hardware may not be fast enough depending on the game.
    - zanny 8y ago
      AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux. The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.
TremendousJudge 8y ago
what?
boomlinde 8y ago
I read it more as an admission that they underestimated how hard it is to a game to work consistently across Linux graphics drivers. The user reports are used as a metric, not to damn the users.
ergo14 8y ago
Well as he mentioned those were autogenerated reports. That being said... I tried Planetary Annihilation and it worked without issues for me on Linux.

SteveNuts 8y ago

Gaming is the #1 reason I haven't fully switched to Linux on the desktop at home (at work I exclusively run Linux). A lot of my Steam games work flawlessly with Linux but others will just silently fail to launch and it takes hours to properly diagnose and fix, which isn't what I'm after when I get some time to play games.

jenscow 8y ago
Your comment is the perfect example of how there's an "invisible" demand demand for gaming on Linux. Nobody can see it, because those who want it will mostly make do with Windows.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  +1. Personally, I spend 98% of my time in Linux, but I dual-boot just for the sake of the few games I like that need Windows to run. If not for that, I'd have dropped Windows years ago.
  - basilgohar 8y ago
    I haven't logged my hours, but substitute 98% above with whatever my number is (90+%). I don't even have Windows installed on my main, but older, desktop. I just have it on my newer laptop, which is where I do any gaming of significance (when I have time nowadays).
- p0nce 8y ago
  Invisible demand is undistinguishable from no demand, as far as B2C is concerned.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    I agree that they can't distinguish it but there was no visible demand for an iPhone before the iPhone.
    - 8y ago

bryanlarsen 8y ago

How do they measure the 0.1%? Many times I've purchased games because of the promised Linux support, and played it on Windows until the promised Linux support arrives.

anonymfus 8y ago
Judging by its Wikipedia article this game had Linux support since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation#Release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation#Release
jermaustin1 8y ago
I'm sure it is measured by number of installs or downloads. Either way the statistic is still very telling. If 0.1% of installs/downloads/purchases created 20% of the bug reports, I can understand the developer's frustration.
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  The stats might be measured differently: Steam might not report a Linux user as such if they played on Windows at first (or something like that), while the tickets might be correctly labeled as Linux-specific by the user.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    For sure, it's harder to understand what platform people WANT to play it on based on an action they performed at checkout. I know personally, when it comes to purchases on Steam, I've bought ~200 games/applications, and I've probably only installed a third of them.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    The original release was online only, so I imagine they have some fairly accurate idea on the number of clients connected. Even when the same user is using multiple different clients.

diffeomorphism 8y ago

https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384 Follow-up tweet by the same author: > As a follow up to this, I've been told by those actually involved with Linux stuff that this wasn't true. I probably just stopped paying attention to Linux issues at a time when everything was broken. Just so the discussion does not overly focus on the (apparently wrong?) numbers.

TremendousJudge 8y ago
This is a follow up to another tweet though

sz4kerto 8y ago

"I didn't want to touch on Mac support in the original post, but Mac support also cost way more than it made in sales."

tpush 8y ago

The situation seems to be similar for Mac: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080327518983315457 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080327518983315457 > Yeah, I didn't want to touch on Mac support in the original post, but Mac support also cost way more than it made in sales.

andai 8y ago
Innumerate person here, does that mean that supporting Mac is a net loss for a business?
- backpropaganda 8y ago
  For this particular business. I don't think he's representative. Using tools like Unity makes it much easier to deploy on Mac and Linux.
- ken 8y ago
  It's impossible to say for sure, without knowing people's behavior and motivations. In the past, I've certainly been more likely to buy software if I see it's cross-platform, even if I know I'll never use it on those other platforms. Or it might be a corporate requirement. There are many possible reasons. For example, if a restaurant serves only steak, is it a net loss for them to put a pasta option on the menu, if they know they'll never sell enough to make up the cost of ingredients and preparation? Maybe not -- it could mean a party of 10 (with 1 vegetarian) is willing to eat there, when they otherwise wouldn't have been.
  - jenscow 8y ago
    A "loss leader"

ShakataGaNai 8y ago

While I love Linux, I think this is a totally fair "state of the union". At the end of the day, gaming or kickstarters or similar... are a business. You need to figure out your ROI (Return On Investment). It doesn't many any logical sense to spend a huge amount of time on a platform that nets you tiny amounts of sales (and gains you a huge amount of support costs). This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting to be a real thing. Not a decade or so ago, there were still relatively small numbers of people using a Mac. It cost a lot to develop for a new platform and didn't make much money. Now it makes more sense. Of course Linux fragmentation will probably hold it back for significantly longer.

rusk 8y ago
> This is why gaming on the Mac is only now starting to be a real thing. Is it? I mean, there's a good amount of support for gaming on the Mac, but I think it's always been so ... I wouldn't call it "a thing" though ... not in comparison to PC or Console ...
- antris 8y ago
  I remember when major games being launched on Mac was worth a mention, or even a full feature in an Apple Keynote. Nowadays games are being released on the Mac constantly and nobody bats an eye. It's a better time to be a Mac gamer than ever before.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    It would be even better if they had decent GPU's available without spending $1000+ on an external setup.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      Or if they went with Vulkan instead of rolling yet another half-baked graphics API while also deprecating OpenGL because reasons.
  - 8y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform. Just want to point this out before this discussion starts blaming the devs for 'not writing with portability in mind' or other such nonsense like the twitter thread did.

mrspeaker 8y ago

This is just an out-of-context tweet (well, the context is there - it's a reply to another tweet, which is out of context)... so perhaps it was just auto-crash reports, but I wonder if you get more tickets from Linux users, because Linux users are more likely to file tickets? When something crashes on my partner's computer she yells at it and restarts it. When something crashes on my computer I spend an hour trying to figure out WHY. If I can't figure it out, I log a ticket thinking I'm being a good citizen!

kosievdmerwe 8y ago
They still represent a vastly disproportionate amount of work for how much extra money they get you. They get you 0.1% extra sales, but they cost you 25% (= 20/80*100) extra support work. And this is nevermind the extra time spent during development. Your point would hold if the issues reported by Linux users would also fix issues on Windows. Some issues would occur on both systems, but I bet the vast majority is weird Linux and setup specific bugs.
- rusk 8y ago
  > I bet the vast majority This is the crux of your assertion and requires substantiation. On the other hands, all these Linux user might be doing you "a favour" taking the time to log these tickets that less conscientious users on other systems would. Of course that does depend on the classification of the tickets but coming from that community I wouldn't expect them to be trivial issues ...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Jach 8y ago
    It's even more of a favor if the bugs aren't just linux-only. But if they're in gfx drivers like the tweet implies and auto-reported, the only thing you'd really care about is "newest drivers?" Same as the parade of crashes in Windows for the same reason, you want to just tell people to update.

Ologn 8y ago

I should note Android runs with a Linux kernel. It has been estimated that games like Pokemon Go have made over $1 billion on revenue from Android devices - larger than its revenue from iOS. Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Dragon Ball Z etc. do well on Android as well. So the "would totally skip Linux" advice is not heeded by every company for every platform.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Linux in the thread specifically refers to the Linux Desktop, and even more specifically to the only two supported distros: Ubuntu and Mint. Citing the success of an Android game does not in any way invalidate the advice.
rootlocus 8y ago
Pokemon Go sold because it had the "Pokemon" IP. This is a very bad example to generalise from.
pjmlp 8y ago
This comes up all the time by people that usually lack Android developer experience, specially with the NDK. Nothing on the Android app stack exposes the underlying Linux kernel to app developers. Yes it is possible to access certain paths or syscalls, however none of them are part of the public API nor guarantee to work across devices. Only OEMs have direct contact with the underlying Linux kernel, which could be replaced tomorrow without any issues for app developers, e.g. Fuchsia.

projectramo 8y ago

The conclusion I draw is that we should raise linux game prices by 200x

NelsonMinar 8y ago
Except Linux users want all their software to be free.
- code_duck 8y ago
  It sounds like they just want it to not crash
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  Maybe the game devs should do like RedHat and release the Linux version for free but charge for support.
- Phenix88be 8y ago
  Many Linux user would pay for games, and they would pay more for a Linux version than a windows version.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    Maybe, but many Linux users would also complain that the Linux version is more expensive.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  There are Linux users who buy MS Windows just to enable them to play games. Win10 is £120. I'm building a PC now, that's going to be about 20% added to the cost; I'd rather spend that on games.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  I'm a Linux user and supporter of free software and I certainly want source code for my software. I'm quite happy to pay for it, though (and I do believe it or not). Not a lot of games offer source code, though, which is a shame. I've bought several games simply because they offer source code and I want to encourage it. I've bought a few games that don't offer source code as well (the only such software on my computer). It's a bit frustrating seeing facile comments like these both conflating the "free as in beer" vs "free as in freedom" as well as implying that those who care about "free as in freedom" are just a bunch of deadbeat freeloaders. You can imagine how insulting it must feel to be tarred with such a brush when it is completely untrue (at least in your specific case). If you want to make a statement about a population, at least back it up with some evidence. Do you have access to any studies showing that people using free operating systems are unwilling to pay for software?

warmwaffles 8y ago

Also I wonder how many of those crashes would have happened in windows or mac. I suspect the code is shared and would have happened.

swish_bob 8y ago
"gfx driver related" code is unlikely to be shared between Windows, Linux and OSX ...
- chme 8y ago
  Then redirecting those issues to the right mailing list could still be very welcome by someone. IMO issues does not need to be fixed by the game developers and drv developers might be happy to have them and some code that reproduces them. Not sure why the game dev complains here.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Because dealing with the users who experience the problems costs more than they make in sales? If every additional Linux sale costs you more than it makes? There's being a good citizen. There's wanting to offer support to a small set of customers. Then there's losing money. At some point, you just can't afford to service the long tail.
    - chme 8y ago
      If the issue the user has found is in the driver, then redirecting them there or maybe sending an automatic email for each unique issue to the driver mailing list might help fix the issue without much effort on the game dev side.
- fooker 8y ago
  Nvidia shares a huge chunk of it's (proprietary) driver code across operating systems. I suspect the crashes are coming from bad OpenGL usage since he mentions the same thing happens with Mac.

HugoDaniel 8y ago

But wasn't this supposed to be the year of linux on the desktop ?

Tehchops 8y ago

Too bad Planetary Annihilation was a poorly optimized, buggy, under-delivered piece of shit on Windows too.

wil421 8y ago

>There is no denying that there are plenty of issues with some parts of Linux, but still I believe it will become predominant gaming platform, especially in the more "appliance" space. It is worth investing in the know-how early. Bold claim to make. I doubt Linux will ever be a predominant gaming platform.

antris 8y ago
Umm... Phone games? All Android devices are based on Linux. Android is a major player in the mobile gaming industry.
- detaro 8y ago
  What skills/tech you use for Android games is "Linux" specific and would transfer from/to a desktop Linux system or other Linux platform? (instead of being Android-specific, or specific to an engine etc)
  - antris 8y ago
    Anything from Android can be forked into any number of Linux distros you want to make. So none of it is Android-specific, really. For example Android software worked on Jolla's Sailfish OS.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      Sailfish has a crappy Android simulation layer. You don't really want that on the Desktop. Android and Desktop Linux are completely different platforms, except maybe for the graphics APIs (Vulkan/OpenGL).
      - antris 8y ago
        I'm not saying I would want that. My original point was that the person I was replying to said that they won't believe Linux gaming would ever be predominant. I'm saying it already is.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

Part of the problem in 2019 is that the vendor with the best drivers on Windows is the vendor with the worst drivers on Linux. (aka Nvidia).

wtracy 8y ago
Care to elaborate? Nvidia used to be the only discrete GPU manufacturer that had Linux support worth mentioning. I know that AMD/ATi has made a lot of progress, but is Nvidia really the worst at this point?
- gmueckl 8y ago
  I have perfectly working nVidia binary drivers that allow me to subject OpenGL to novel and creative abuses without problems. The rate at which I discover driver bugs has gone done a lot. Mesa, in contrast, had floating point texture formats blocked because of suspected patent issues until a few weeks ago. These are ste mandated formats in the OpenGL standard so Mesa was never technically compatible. And these formats do matter a lot in practice.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  I just went through the process of getting NVIDIA drivers working on my brother's dual-boot Ubuntu. Here's the issues we hit: 1. You don't don't get drivers out of the box. The NVIDIA driver is non-free, so Ubuntu's (and other Linux distros') hands are tied here: they're not permitted to distribute it. Getting it is relatively easy (check a box, install a package), but you need to know that you need it, and then figure out how to get it. 2. (For laptops) You need to install optimus/primus/bumblebee, s.t. the system isn't using the integrated GPU. This is another package that you need to know you need, and install. Ubuntu here is particularly bad: it apparently installs the drivers in the wrong spot, so even with everything correctly installed, you have to find a config in /etc, edit it to what a couple of comment on a GitHub issue that you found after Googling the error indicate. (Other distros, in particular Arch, do not have this issue.) 3. (For laptops) You need to configure the game in Steam to take advantage of primusrun. Steam does not do this automatically.

60654 8y ago

This is a pretty well-known effect in gamedev. The specific numbers change, but Linux sales are only a small percentage of total, while generating much more development and support work. At least dev work can be drastically simplified with middleware like Unity, which is how small studios can even consider Linux. But support difficulties are real. Players have so many possible distros, configurations, and drivers - actually supporting all of them would require a level of Linux expertise that gamedevs simply don't have (being typically Windows or OSX based themselves). Limiting yourself to something like Ubuntu LTS helps a bit, but there are still plenty of gotchas. So it becomes a simple matter of numbers: given relatively small amount of extra sales, is it worth the extra work, and spending the time to learn Linux development and administration in sufficient depth? Sadly usually it is not.

huhtenberg 8y ago
But for a game that is built on Unity, wouldn't these support issues be Unity's responsibility? Assuming the issues are triggered by their glue layer. What's the arrangement there, does anyone know?
- kevingadd 8y ago
  Unity does not do your customer service for you. Also, bug fixes might only go into a future release of Unity (months out) and updating to the new release to get the bug fixes might break your game. Unity games that spend a few years in development often ship on a very old version of Unity.

StreamBright 8y ago

And these number are flipped for Mac users.

rkido 8y ago

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making Linux/Mac support first class, by making a purely OpenGL engine for the game. But it seems they weren't aware of some other best practices.

zeroname 8y ago
I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux, but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.
- dejaime 8y ago
  I agree with you that it is definitely not commercially worth it. But I guess you missed his point. He is not saying that "it was worth it for this game if well implemented", but that this game is actually a really bad example of how gaming on Linux is. It is like analyzing PC gaming by looking at Devil May Cry 3 or Resident Evil 4...
- wheelerwj 8y ago
  100% this. source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything. I tried linux gaming for years, and Steam really really gave it a strong push. But the truth is, gaming on linux is complicated and doesn't offer the same experience as on Windows or even macos. I'd rather my favorite studios and developers dedicate its linux resources to customers that pay instead.
  - 8y ago

bluescarni 8y ago

> We started working on the game in 2012 > Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform. So this is essentially a rant about linux graphics drivers circa 2012?

izacus 8y ago
Are they any better in 2019? Last I checked the anything beyond desktop compositing features is still a tyre fire of lying capabilities, broken functionality and wishful thinking. nVidia being by far the most stable while lacking integration with modern Linux APIs.
- bwat49 8y ago
  "Are they any better in 2019" ..Yes. Not to say they don't still have issues, but the linux gpu driver situation is vastly better than it was in 2012. AMD drivers especially has improved massively since then.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bluescarni 8y ago
  As a full-time linux user and occasional gamer, I have been using the AMD open drivers since circa 2010. The improvements have been massive, both in stability and performance. Since the availability of steam, I have been doing all my gaming exclusively on linux, logging a probably unhealthy number of hours on various games (Dota, various iterations of Civilization, City Skylines, Stellaris, etc.). Not to say the situation is perfect by any means, but the difference from 2012/2014 is night and day.

FigBug 8y ago

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old versions then the entire project is held back from using latest C++. And distos aren't backwards compatible. ie when libcurl4 is released, they remove libcurl3. So you can't have one binary for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04. So it means for every product, have a build for every distro / version combination you want to support. So now the solution is AppImages where you bundle up your app with all dependencies like a container. Haven't investigated this yet, not sure it will work for plugins.

chme 8y ago
Proprietary software on Linux is a bit of an alien there. But there is always static linking, is it not? (And now flatpak+snap+...)
mitgraduate 8y ago
Why use not Electron? Take a look at vscode it has plugins and it seems to work everywhere.
- loa-in-backup 8y ago
  Unfortunately DAW and VST plugins are not something you can make in Electron
  - mitgraduate 8y ago
    Can you please explain why?
    - noselasd 8y ago
      Because the plugins embeds into existing native applications and uses existing native SDKs.

dejaime 8y ago

I was one of those who for every problem I had I would go out of my way to reliably reproduce the problem, then I would create a detailed description of it, with full system specs, terminal output (on both Windows and Linux) and all log files I could find. Today, I still do that on Linux. But if it excludes Linux as a platform, it must be rock solid on windows, right? If it isn't, all it gets is a negative review going about the "crashes all the time", "glitchy" and "is unplayable". That saved me a lot of time. Being an indie GameDev myself, I personally love well written tickets. But the passive aggressive responses I often receive from big devs makes me wonder if I'm actually the only one.

kuon 8y ago

While I am a Linux user, I boot my workstation under windows for gaming. So I would not even be accounted as a linux gamer by the stats. While rebooting is a bit cumbersome, I don't really mind now. I also wouldn't trust all the games I play to run as my user on my workstation. And it would take a bit of efforts to properly sandbox them.

linuxlizard 8y ago

Developing software for Linux is like painting a moving train.

doubleunplussed 8y ago
I really, really don't get it. Just bundle all your dependencies, what is so hard?
zanny 8y ago
SDL is binary compatible on its major release (2.0) and will probably be forever at this point. libc++ only broke its ABI once when C++11 required it. What else do you need to make games for Linux? If you are using Unity or Unreal its going to statically link all its dependencies anyway. Don't use libraries that break semver.
- izacus 8y ago
  SDL is a 2D library. Any modern game will use 3D APIs and there you'll quickly hit the insane minefield of OpenGL bugs that are graphics drivers on Linux. Those are pretty much optimized for driving the desktop compositors with everything else being a stroke of luck if it works as defined in the spec.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Any modern game should be using Vulkan for just that reason.

vectorEQ 8y ago

it would be nice if companies could ship to linux and just say ' yeah good luck on that' and do some fixes where they feel the time is well spent. but unfortunately that's also not acceptable in the market, so it's either full on or nothing for many.

antoineMoPa 8y ago

I almost stopped playing games when I switched to Linux and I think it contributed to free time in my life for learning, side projects, sports, etc. I can always go back to OpenTTD if I crave gaming.

madez 8y ago

I'll take the step and say that most developers do the mistake to treat linux like any other proprietary system which they can target with stable interfaces and call it a day. Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible. If game developers opened up, and here I don't demand the optimum, which would be open sourcing their game[0], but just to get people involved that actually are active in both their code and the free software community, they could deal with the eco system much better and make their code actually work even on most of the many configurations that exist. Of course, the usual argument is that game developers don't have to care about this on other systems, but in fact they did have to gather experience and training on the other platforms, and with free systems, once you are involved in it, you can deal with it much more efficiently than what it seems at the start. There is nothing magic about filing a bug against mesa. I am one of the persons that contacted Uber about PA not working on my linux system. It was a recent Debian stable without modifications. They didn't offer meaningful support. I just asked them to install a debian stable with free mesa drivers on a computer with a recent AMD gpu, and try to build and run PA, and see why it doesn't work (there were obvious, easy to reproduce issues). That is not a lot of engineering time, and I bet solving those problem would have solved many problems in linux systems. [0] This starts to become a cultural problem that seems to need laws to deal with. As a society, we shouldn't accept to never have our cultural heritage, which games are part of, in the public domain in a usable form (source code and documentation). Edit 1: Writing closed programs for a free software community is difficult. I think that it should be difficult. That pain is a constant reminder that you're doing it wrong. Edit 2: Steam counts unsuccessful launches of a game where the game is laughibly broken as playing time, so after some extenstive testing, you can't even refund a game on Steam because it says you've played more than 2 hours -.-

Kapura 8y ago
> "Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible." This is akin to saying "When you're bleeding internally it's not that bad because all of your blood is still on the inside." Games are a hit-driven industry. In most cases, it is strictly better to be working on a new game than to improve incredibly niche support for existing products. It would be one thing if fixing Linux bugs effectively future-proofed it from more bugs down the line, but that does not seem to be the case for most of the devs I know who've shipped on Linux.

everyone 8y ago

2007s 'Supreme commander' is still by far the best game in that series, and the best RTS ever imo. It's still going strong, and has an awesome community-built matchmaking service, that effortlessly supports mods and maps, called 'Forged Alliance Forever' or 'FAF' https://www.faforever.com/ https://www.faforever.com/ Imo the idea of projecting an epic RTS onto a sphere is just, bafflingly bad. In supreme commander, you zoom out the view to get a strategic overview of the entire map.. You cant ever do that with a sphere. I am just bemused by this game.

stratosmacker 8y ago

Why don't we just support the Steam version of Debian and be done with it? Anyone running custom things should be ready to make their custom fixes... Oh well, this guys sounds full of hubris. Just because something isn't immediately profitable doesn't mean the community as a whole doesn't benefit from you ironing out bugs.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> Oh well, this guys sounds full of hubris. From a later tweet by the same person: Linux support was a passion for many on the project, and I was a proponent in favor of that support. If the Linux community is going to bite the hand that feeds them, don't be surprised when other developers aren't anxious to support Linux in the future.

schaefer 8y ago

The flip side of this is: I only game on Linux. If your game doesn't run well on Linux, chances are, I'll never play it. There's already a back-log of games on my wish list that I'll get to as soon as i find the time.

tchaffee 8y ago
What are your favorite games that run on Linux? I'm looking for new games and these days the few times I boot into Windows is when I can't easily get a game working in Linux.
zanny 8y ago
I've been Linux only since 2012, which coincidentally was when RadeonSI came out and I "took the bet" on AMD drivers getting good with a 7870 purchase. Its 100% no tux, no bux at this point. My last Windows title was Darksiders 2. Darksiders 3 came out in 2018, I was totally hype for it, but it was Windows / Xbox / PS4, so no deal there. Not like I have a shortage of dozens of other games to still get around to, my library is overflowing with titles I need to finish like Tomb Raider and Metro. The worst part was that Nordic was apparently intent to rerelease the remasters of Darksiders on Linux but just dropped it at some point. If they did the math and said it wasn't worth the time fine by them.
cybersol 8y ago
This! I've been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2009, though it was rough until 2013. I also quite a few Linux gamers are great at diagnosing their own problems. When we do report bugs, I bet the reports are more useful on average.

Glyptodon 8y ago

I don't think the Linux situation is good per se, but I haven't heard anything this negative from the devs of other multi-platform Kickstarter games, like Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity games. (Not that they were terribly positive about it.) To paraphrase the Obsidian take: Supporting Linux for the first time was much much more work than they expected, but it was mostly coming to grips with everything, learning all the gotchas, and integrating that into their build system and software dev practices. Once they got over that hump it was much easier/not so bad and worthwhile enough to continue. But at the same time, if they'd known what they were getting into the first time they think they'd probably not have promised Linux support. So first game it had a huge marginal cost to support, but once the tooling and experience was there that marginal cost to support was much much lower. Of course Pillars was a Unity game and probably not as demanding performance-wise as PA.

aidenn0 8y ago

Considering my graphics driver is buggy enough to cause the KDE panel to crash, I'm not at all surprised games on linux have issues.

qudat 8y ago

Anybody competent enough to use linux is competent enough to dual-boot into Windows. I would love first-class support for Linux gaming, but dual-booting is such an easy fix for me that I frankly don't care that much about linux support. I totally get there are other potential issues revolving around having to use windows, but for me at least, I don't really have any issue with using windows for games.

Deathcrow 8y ago

I'm sure those statistics are entirely real and not pulled out of his ass at all. Also didn't Planetary Annihilation have that awful chromium based UI?

CodeArtisan 8y ago

It may be better to solely target SteamOS, Valve's GNU+Linux distribution, and to not support the other distributions who shall adapt/follow SteamOS.

self_awareness 8y ago

Seems to me there is no sales on Linux because the game barely works on Linux? Maybe you'd have bigger sales ratio if you'd fix those 20%?

tokai 8y ago

As I recall the development of Planetary Annihilation was a clusterfunk of bugs and really bad performance. I kickstarted it, and remember getting it to work on linux. Put even though it ran, it did so 15 frames a second, even on a powerful machine. I actually just gave up on the game as the developers released it, even though it was still unplayable for me - and going by steam reviews - numerous others (mostly windows users I would guess). I guess it makes sense now that they 1.0'ed a barely working game, with such an animosity towards users reporting issues.

politician 8y ago
It barely worked on Windows. I don't know what he's trying to pin on Linux.

monksy 8y ago

Steam and the work that Valve has done on the linux side seems to show that's not the case. (They've managed to port quite a lot of linux games). This sounds like a case where a platform wasn't a priority for their business was showing that it had bugs.

gaurav2327 8y ago

Sites to download movies www.csgyaan.tk

thibran 8y ago

I was one of the PA Kickstarter supporters and played the game on Linux. It never worked flawlessly (graphical glitches). Today however I can play the latest DOOM (through Steam) on Linux using Vulkan without problems using an AMD card and open-source drivers. There is no reason not to build games for Linux, just use Vulkan and graphic problems are a thing of the past.

solidrake 8y ago

I'm aware that if you buy a game on Windows and play it on Linux, it might be tagged as a Windows game purchase. Wonder if this 0.1% truly tells the whole story.

zelon88 8y ago

I'd say us Linux folk are probably more likely to identify an issue and report it as well. It takes a special determination to run Linux, and I'd wager that Linux users have a keep eye for undefined behavior, feature requests, and wonky workarounds. Once time I updated a Linux box and the Nvidia drivers downloaded and started to build like usual, but there were tons of errors. After the graphics drivers failed GCC updated and rebuilt itself. Switching kernels fixed the problem. It took me a week to submit a ticket to Nvidia and then another 3 days of working with support before we realized that the Nvidia drivers were built with an outdated GCC and then GCC was updated afterwards. So when we checked GCC version it was the proper version, but the drivers were already built with the old version. If it was a Windows box I would have formatted it after 12 hours and called it a day.

throwaway2021 8y ago

> In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related). Would totally skip Linux. OK. So just another dumb developer being wrong. Nothing to see here move along.

mfoy_ 8y ago

Well if the game crashes a lot on Linux then those players would likely switch to an alternative platform. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where games don't run well on Linux and game developers don't see Linux gamers as a large demographic. If most games ran smoothly on Linux, you can expect the % of Linux sales to rise... no?

someguy1234567 8y ago

Pretty much every game runs fine on my linux box. You guys are just doing it wrong. ;)

axaxs 8y ago

Most of the people I've met over the years who are tech literate say they have some flavor of linux installed, love it, but keep windows around because 'gaming.' I would venture the number of folks who had linux installed but didn't buy it for that platform because of instability to be much higher than 0.1%. It's a chicken/egg problem.

Riverheart 8y ago

I game on Windows because of the momentum behind it but Linux support is a selling point that goes into every purchase, because the day I migrate I will still have my purchases.