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

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use not Electron? Take a look at vscode it has plugins and it seems to work everywhere.

Electron is basically Node+Chrome. There’s no way in hell it’s appropriate for writing VSTs.

In about ten years someone will post one to HN. Written in Javascript.

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

#112
post #51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ...

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.

It would be even better if they had decent GPU's available without spending $1000+ on an external setup.

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

#113
post #102
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ...

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.

Which is why chromium pulled support for certain drivers on linux

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

#114
post #62

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 vers…

> So now the solution is AppImages where you bundle up your app with all dependencies like a container. But isn't this what you're doing with Windows? No version of Windows comes with libcurl (as far as I know) so you put the DLL in your application directory. It's no different.

On Windows, I use the Windows API for downloading files. I don't need to worry about curl.

On Linux, I could have statically linked curl, but didn't realize it was going to become an issue. Ubuntu 18.04 was released and curl3 was removed, so that means our software that was working was either automatically removed by the package manager or it started crashing.

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

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.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 fo…

I keep a dualboot system because of the current situation.

Linux for "real work"

Windows for gaming (no-frills setup) and music production (much easier and less clunky low latency setup, way more availability of free synths etc)

I absolutely adore Linux for everything it has done to my career but I cannot drop my Windows system yet.

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

#118

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 t…

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 wei…

You'd thinking having another build target would help find bugs on existing platforms. Kind of like the BSD's.

Didn't ID software outsource the Linux ports to someone in the community and just provide it as free?

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

#119
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio software has strict buffer/latency demands which usually cannot be guaranteed on interpreted language platforms. Doing audio synthesis with JS or any other interpreted language really is totally possible and has been done in a more or less serious way in several implementations and webtoys etc. But if you need extremely low latency and guarantees you cannot go that route, sadly.

You can always write native extension in c++/rust/c.

so then why use electron as well if the majority of your code is going to be native anyway?

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

#120

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

Except Linux users want all their software to be free.

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?

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