At a Steam Dev Days event I hit up a dev from a popular flight sim that ran on Win/Mac/Linux and asked him to rank the support costs for different platforms. I

At a Steam Dev Days event I hit up a dev from a popular flight sim that ran on Win/Mac/Linux and asked him to rank the support costs for different platforms. I was surprised by his answer. He said: Mac users were effectively the most expensive because his team was (then) spending a lot of time porting their graphics code to Metal. Linux users were the least expensive because they tended to be sophisticated users who were accustomed to solving their own problems. He cited a particular customer who he said had a solid track record of finding graphical glitches in the game, then opening bugs against Intel GPU drivers and getting them fixed. Windows users were somewhere in between. Of course we didn't discuss the opportunity cost of supporting Linux (financially probably not worth it), I'm not sure how much his view was a function of (maybe) not having to personally answer support requests, or whether his experience could be generalized beyond his particular customer demographic, but I learned quite a bit from his response. ========== If I ever ship my own game I hope to support Linux not because I think it's the right financial move, but because I think offering cross-platform compatibility is just part of being a good digital citizen. A lot of us lived through a time where Windows was about the only game in town, and I don't want to ever go back there. (Plus there's a selfish element: I develop on Linux, so I want to play on Linux!)