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> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any

by jimmy1 8y ago

> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countless tech related subreddits, twitter hacker-verse would take off. The “maker culture” would adopt it as its son or daughter. Sounds like a tremendous opportunity. We are not representative of the culture but we are hackers and developers and eventually one spark is all you need to start a fire. I have the perception that gamers are dying to get off of Windows, but I could be wrong, I certainly was when I was a gamer.

tcd 8y ago
> would buy tremendous free publicity. That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for. See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".
- JAlexoid 8y ago
  Choosing beggars literally think that publicity is payment enough. Linux gamers PAY. Really a big difference.
dtech 8y ago
> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity It does not. Take a look at the Steam games supporting Linux. There's thousands of them, it's not special.
mscasts 8y ago
I have seen this claim many times, but wonder about it's validity. It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then. I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux. Searching on algolia just proves my point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byP... I simply do not buy the story that just because you release it on Linux, have good linux support etc it will spread like wildfire. S2Games, which made HoN, made a superior MOBA imo but none of my friends play it anymore. They play Dota2 tho. I think the reality of the situation is that no one cares about if a game run on linux or not except extreme nerds that would never use Windows and go through the daily struggle that is desktop Linux. I used to be one of them, nowadays I only use Windows.
- WAthrowaway 8y ago
  >daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points
  - taway_1212 8y ago
    Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.
    - rconti 8y ago
      Why not use OS X on an MBP, or Linux on a generic x86 machine? I'm not clear on why this is the only route to get you off of Windows.
      - TheDauthi 8y ago
        Macs have good hardware. Or you might also want to dual boot. Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.
    - pantalaimon 8y ago
      Running Linux on new hardware is usually a bad idea, due to the nature of the process you have to expect at least a year before divers for new hardware have settled into distributions. Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.
      - freeone3000 8y ago
        THIS is the problem. Windows drivers start working on day 1 and continue working. The breaks are when we went to 32-bit drivers in NT and when we disabled real-time hardware interrupts in Vista. Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.
bengarney 8y ago
I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Generally there is a tremendous amount of commentary like this from Linux folks and the port neither gets meaningful (or profitable) publicity nor sales that outstrip support. This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post. When supporting a platform can mean debugging and submitting patches for a users graphics drivers in exchange for a shockingly low conversion rate, it's an easy no for me. PS I built and maintain an Enterprise AWS GPU app on Ubuntu and the platform is great. But it was very non trivial to get working. PPS if you spend less than $150/yr combined on all software purchases (including mobile/console) please don't make a case for Linux gaming. TuxRacer is your apotheosis.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post. I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago) > I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.
y4mi 8y ago
You're either underestimating revenue from Windows purchases or overvaluing that publicity bonus. There are already a lot of indie games with Linux support, and triple A developments already sell millions of copies. If that added publicity made another 1000 people buy the game, it still won't be a financially sounds decision. Heck, I'm mostly on Linux but boot into Windows for gaming... I'd probably continue to do so, even if the games were released for Linux just for that extra performance and significantly less chance too run into an obscure issue with my setup.
astrodust 8y ago
Literally nobody cares about Linux gaming. It's not even press-worthy because of SteamOS. Anyone who games on Linux does it for the adventure of the process, not because it's convenient. If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.
- taeric 8y ago
  Rhetoric like this is less than effective. Some of us do game in Linux because we don't want a Windows box. So, literally is demonstrably false. Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    You've got to recognize you're an outlier. In practical terms nobody plays games on Linux unless they're using something like SteamOS or, technically, Android. Given how ridiculously hard it is to get a simple application to run across all the various distributions of Linux that exist, expecting something as complicated as a game to run at all is asking way too much. Windows is ridiculously hard to support, but at least it has sales volume to justify the work necessary to get a game launched. Linux doesn't.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I used to reboot into Windows to run games. Thanks to Proton I don't bother anymore. In fact I dread booting into Windows now because I know it's going to spend 30 minutes patching itself and then reboot on me.
- isugimpy 8y ago
  There's nothing adventurous about using your preferred operating system and enjoying being able to have a working game experience. I've spent significant time in all 3 major OS options over the last few decades, and came to the conclusion that Linux is the one I prefer. A few years ago, I resigned myself to either rebooting to Windows or running Windows in a VM when I wanted to do any modern gaming. The significant advancements over the last year in terms of video driver functionality (both on Nvidia and AMD sides), binary compatibility (WINE/Proton), and more developers releasing native games have been a huge boon and very welcomed. I use Linux full time because it's what I enjoy and feel comfortable with as a primary OS, and I absolutely care about the gaming landscape improving. I'm only one person, but many others won't speak up.
ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  They later admitted they overstated this issue and that their problems were self caused.
flagbait 8y ago
win10 really messed things up with the SAAS and telemetry, and integrated update rollups. the thing is microsoft really painted themselves into a corner. ya see windows was made for all sorts of skullduggery to occur , this was supposed to be a boon for MS but they punched so many holes in W32 that it was secure as a sieve, I know this first hand as i have spent a major amount of time decompiling and snooping through the binaries. the file structures in a windows OS has big voids of zeros for padding, leaves lots of room to insert malcode and fix the file headers, Thread Local Storage is neat, a thread can move data packets through its kernel objects to other objects or static files on swap. And the alternate data paging that win executable files may have is just mindblowing. a file {any W32/W64 file} that every one expects to do one thing can be trojaned by the system as a feature using alternate data streams in a file! IT GOES ON AND ON this and win10 is why i left windows and gave linux a serious try and never looked back. Linux runs games and keeps getting better at it with no cat and mouse game of you modding system files so things work and having MS updates demodd them and then prevent you from making thing workable without major klugeing around.

by jimmy1 8y ago

tcd 8y ago

> would buy tremendous free publicity. That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for. See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".

JAlexoid 8y ago
Choosing beggars literally think that publicity is payment enough. Linux gamers PAY. Really a big difference.

dtech 8y ago

> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity It does not. Take a look at the Steam games supporting Linux. There's thousands of them, it's not special.

mscasts 8y ago

I have seen this claim many times, but wonder about it's validity. It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then. I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux. Searching on algolia just proves my point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byP... I simply do not buy the story that just because you release it on Linux, have good linux support etc it will spread like wildfire. S2Games, which made HoN, made a superior MOBA imo but none of my friends play it anymore. They play Dota2 tho. I think the reality of the situation is that no one cares about if a game run on linux or not except extreme nerds that would never use Windows and go through the daily struggle that is desktop Linux. I used to be one of them, nowadays I only use Windows.

WAthrowaway 8y ago
>daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points
- taway_1212 8y ago
  Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Why not use OS X on an MBP, or Linux on a generic x86 machine? I'm not clear on why this is the only route to get you off of Windows.
    - TheDauthi 8y ago
      Macs have good hardware. Or you might also want to dual boot. Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    Running Linux on new hardware is usually a bad idea, due to the nature of the process you have to expect at least a year before divers for new hardware have settled into distributions. Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.
    - freeone3000 8y ago
      THIS is the problem. Windows drivers start working on day 1 and continue working. The breaks are when we went to 32-bit drivers in NT and when we disabled real-time hardware interrupts in Vista. Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.

bengarney 8y ago

I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Generally there is a tremendous amount of commentary like this from Linux folks and the port neither gets meaningful (or profitable) publicity nor sales that outstrip support. This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post. When supporting a platform can mean debugging and submitting patches for a users graphics drivers in exchange for a shockingly low conversion rate, it's an easy no for me. PS I built and maintain an Enterprise AWS GPU app on Ubuntu and the platform is great. But it was very non trivial to get working. PPS if you spend less than $150/yr combined on all software purchases (including mobile/console) please don't make a case for Linux gaming. TuxRacer is your apotheosis.

jimmy1 8y ago
> This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post. I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago) > I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.

y4mi 8y ago

You're either underestimating revenue from Windows purchases or overvaluing that publicity bonus. There are already a lot of indie games with Linux support, and triple A developments already sell millions of copies. If that added publicity made another 1000 people buy the game, it still won't be a financially sounds decision. Heck, I'm mostly on Linux but boot into Windows for gaming... I'd probably continue to do so, even if the games were released for Linux just for that extra performance and significantly less chance too run into an obscure issue with my setup.

astrodust 8y ago

Literally nobody cares about Linux gaming. It's not even press-worthy because of SteamOS. Anyone who games on Linux does it for the adventure of the process, not because it's convenient. If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.

taeric 8y ago
Rhetoric like this is less than effective. Some of us do game in Linux because we don't want a Windows box. So, literally is demonstrably false. Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.
- astrodust 8y ago
  You've got to recognize you're an outlier. In practical terms nobody plays games on Linux unless they're using something like SteamOS or, technically, Android. Given how ridiculously hard it is to get a simple application to run across all the various distributions of Linux that exist, expecting something as complicated as a game to run at all is asking way too much. Windows is ridiculously hard to support, but at least it has sales volume to justify the work necessary to get a game launched. Linux doesn't.
jandrese 8y ago
I used to reboot into Windows to run games. Thanks to Proton I don't bother anymore. In fact I dread booting into Windows now because I know it's going to spend 30 minutes patching itself and then reboot on me.
isugimpy 8y ago
There's nothing adventurous about using your preferred operating system and enjoying being able to have a working game experience. I've spent significant time in all 3 major OS options over the last few decades, and came to the conclusion that Linux is the one I prefer. A few years ago, I resigned myself to either rebooting to Windows or running Windows in a VM when I wanted to do any modern gaming. The significant advancements over the last year in terms of video driver functionality (both on Nvidia and AMD sides), binary compatibility (WINE/Proton), and more developers releasing native games have been a huge boon and very welcomed. I use Linux full time because it's what I enjoy and feel comfortable with as a primary OS, and I absolutely care about the gaming landscape improving. I'm only one person, but many others won't speak up.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago

> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.

michaelmrose 8y ago
They later admitted they overstated this issue and that their problems were self caused.

flagbait 8y ago

win10 really messed things up with the SAAS and telemetry, and integrated update rollups. the thing is microsoft really painted themselves into a corner. ya see windows was made for all sorts of skullduggery to occur , this was supposed to be a boon for MS but they punched so many holes in W32 that it was secure as a sieve, I know this first hand as i have spent a major amount of time decompiling and snooping through the binaries. the file structures in a windows OS has big voids of zeros for padding, leaves lots of room to insert malcode and fix the file headers, Thread Local Storage is neat, a thread can move data packets through its kernel objects to other objects or static files on swap. And the alternate data paging that win executable files may have is just mindblowing. a file {any W32/W64 file} that every one expects to do one thing can be trojaned by the system as a feature using alternate data streams in a file! IT GOES ON AND ON this and win10 is why i left windows and gave linux a serious try and never looked back. Linux runs games and keeps getting better at it with no cat and mouse game of you modding system files so things work and having MS updates demodd them and then prevent you from making thing workable without major klugeing around.