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Oh man, yet another Windows only game! I haven't owned or used a Windows system. I would love to play/pay for this game or Anno-1800 and few others. Is the Mac

Oh man, yet another Windows only game! I haven't owned or used a Windows system. I would love to play/pay for this game or Anno-1800 and few others. Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it? I'd think with all the noise & competition for Windows gamers, surely there's an untapped market of other OS gamers! The reason I love a similar style game, Factorio, is that it runs on Mac and other platforms!

Dachande663 4y ago
According to Steam hardware survey, MacOS and Linux account for 2.55% and 1.14% respectively. Anecdotally a lot of game devs report a higher percentage of error reports from these users too. So no, not worth it yet but Proton May be changing that. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- baq 4y ago
  Steam deck is the game changer here.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yeah, hopefully will work out better than the SteamOS consoles...
- ivolimmen 4y ago
  That higher report of errors from Linux users is most likely to be because we are more used to reporting errors not because the game is often buggier under Linux
- shagie 4y ago
  While the hardware is as the survey says... what is the likelihood that a MacOS customer will buy a MacOS game? Likewise for linux. As a Mac gamer, I find I buy a good number of the "new release" games that show up for my platform if for no other reason that there aren't other games out.
paxys 4y ago
> Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it Yes
fulafel 4y ago
For games it seems the trend is toward Windows emulation (Wine, Proton, etc). I onder if and how much games test and cater for those, to validate on emulation platforms. On one hand it's good thing in the big picture because it's a step in geting games to run sandboxed. For ARM Macs it might be not so good.
- riidom 4y ago
  As far as I know, you get no support usually, when you run it with proton/wine. I'm not interested in paying full price and then having the risk all myself. Of course there is the return before two hours thing, but then I also don't wanna create all that hassle. But if a developer makes some guarantees about proton support, that'd be something else, actually.
  - meibo 4y ago
    Valve has very active community support for Steam games on GitHub. If something doesn't work, you usually just have to report it, it will run through their QA queue to be confirmed, and then handed off to Codeweavers devs they contracted to work on Wine/Proton to fix the bug. It's a bigger hassle than just playing on Windows, but most games run out of the box now. Native Linux versions of games basically don't happen anymore as they often end up unmaintained, lacking features or are hard to support with a small userbase on often arcane setups.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      It's kind of weird to see this posted in a thread for a game so similar to Factorio ? https://www.factorio.com/download https://www.factorio.com/download
  - 0des 4y ago
    Takes me longer than 2 hours just to download it :(
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
Meowringer 4y ago
Something like supporting multiply operating systems also would cost a team of 2 a lot of time due to basic things. You would need to test on all platforms, regularly. You would need to be able to debug on all platforms (setting up your ide multiply times). Your bug report has to be more precise. You also need to either fully use an technology which in theory supports all platforms out of the box OR you would need to develop everything with either multiplatfrom libs or abstract it away and use different implementations underneath. Alone accessing a file is different on all three OSes. The best way for a very small team is to make it on Windows and just pay someone to migrate it later if it is already successful enough.
CaptainJustin 4y ago
> Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it? I'm battling to find it now... but I read previously that a game studio found 1. they received a lot more variety in support tickets from people on nix (lots of interesting window managers, distros, etc) 2. A huge portion of their support tickets were from the tiny portion of customers running nix. This was interesting for me to read at the time because I had played with Unity and Unreal Engine. I found developing for a number of platforms to be relatively trivial - but then again I wasn't trying anything particularly impressive or distributing builds etc.
Arelius 4y ago
As an engineer finding my self often advocating for a cross-platform release on the teams I'm on. I'm often informed that the answer is yes, the community is still so small that it's very much not worth the cost of maintenance of the additional platform. This has been true even on games that already have Windows/Console/Mobile ports already, the Mac and/or Linux ports don't pay for themselves sadly except in certain rare cases for certain rare types of games.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
godshatter 4y ago
It's rated platinum on protondb.com already. Can't wait to fire it up at home and play it on my Kubuntu box.

Dachande663 4y ago

According to Steam hardware survey, MacOS and Linux account for 2.55% and 1.14% respectively. Anecdotally a lot of game devs report a higher percentage of error reports from these users too. So no, not worth it yet but Proton May be changing that. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

baq 4y ago
Steam deck is the game changer here.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yeah, hopefully will work out better than the SteamOS consoles...
ivolimmen 4y ago
That higher report of errors from Linux users is most likely to be because we are more used to reporting errors not because the game is often buggier under Linux
shagie 4y ago
While the hardware is as the survey says... what is the likelihood that a MacOS customer will buy a MacOS game? Likewise for linux. As a Mac gamer, I find I buy a good number of the "new release" games that show up for my platform if for no other reason that there aren't other games out.

paxys 4y ago

> Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it Yes

fulafel 4y ago

For games it seems the trend is toward Windows emulation (Wine, Proton, etc). I onder if and how much games test and cater for those, to validate on emulation platforms. On one hand it's good thing in the big picture because it's a step in geting games to run sandboxed. For ARM Macs it might be not so good.

riidom 4y ago
As far as I know, you get no support usually, when you run it with proton/wine. I'm not interested in paying full price and then having the risk all myself. Of course there is the return before two hours thing, but then I also don't wanna create all that hassle. But if a developer makes some guarantees about proton support, that'd be something else, actually.
- meibo 4y ago
  Valve has very active community support for Steam games on GitHub. If something doesn't work, you usually just have to report it, it will run through their QA queue to be confirmed, and then handed off to Codeweavers devs they contracted to work on Wine/Proton to fix the bug. It's a bigger hassle than just playing on Windows, but most games run out of the box now. Native Linux versions of games basically don't happen anymore as they often end up unmaintained, lacking features or are hard to support with a small userbase on often arcane setups.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    It's kind of weird to see this posted in a thread for a game so similar to Factorio ? https://www.factorio.com/download https://www.factorio.com/download
- 0des 4y ago
  Takes me longer than 2 hours just to download it :(
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

Meowringer 4y ago

Something like supporting multiply operating systems also would cost a team of 2 a lot of time due to basic things. You would need to test on all platforms, regularly. You would need to be able to debug on all platforms (setting up your ide multiply times). Your bug report has to be more precise. You also need to either fully use an technology which in theory supports all platforms out of the box OR you would need to develop everything with either multiplatfrom libs or abstract it away and use different implementations underneath. Alone accessing a file is different on all three OSes. The best way for a very small team is to make it on Windows and just pay someone to migrate it later if it is already successful enough.

CaptainJustin 4y ago

> Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it? I'm battling to find it now... but I read previously that a game studio found 1. they received a lot more variety in support tickets from people on nix (lots of interesting window managers, distros, etc) 2. A huge portion of their support tickets were from the tiny portion of customers running nix. This was interesting for me to read at the time because I had played with Unity and Unreal Engine. I found developing for a number of platforms to be relatively trivial - but then again I wasn't trying anything particularly impressive or distributing builds etc.

Arelius 4y ago

As an engineer finding my self often advocating for a cross-platform release on the teams I'm on. I'm often informed that the answer is yes, the community is still so small that it's very much not worth the cost of maintenance of the additional platform. This has been true even on games that already have Windows/Console/Mobile ports already, the Mac and/or Linux ports don't pay for themselves sadly except in certain rare cases for certain rare types of games.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

godshatter 4y ago

It's rated platinum on protondb.com already. Can't wait to fire it up at home and play it on my Kubuntu box.