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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

#131

Post by Kapura »

madez wrote: post #108

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…

> "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.

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

#132

Post by tshannon »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #34
projectramo wrote: post #22

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

Except Linux users want all their software to be free.

Nearly every Humble Bundle release of games shows that Linux users spent more than Windows or Mac.

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

#133

Post by jimmy1 »

simias wrote: post #128
rkido wrote: post #53

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 L…

Technically speaking I'm sure you're right. In practice it doesn't really matter though, if they did it that way it's either because it was easier or because that's the way they were used to doing it. The fact that "technically" it's not Linux's fault doesn't really matter, unless you're more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game. Why should they chan…

> 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.

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

#134

Post by ido »

rusk wrote: post #44
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #13

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 t…

> 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 ...

This was definitely not the case 10-15 years ago.

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

#135

Post by gdy »

plq wrote: post #127
FigBug wrote: 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…

> 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. If you don't want to depend on the libcurl provided by the OS, ship your own. If you don't want to depend on the glibc provided by the OS, ship your own, with your own dynamic linker. readelf -n will tell you the oldest kernel that will run your stuff. Put that in the…

Could someone explain why this is downvoted?

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

#137

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

madez wrote: post #108

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…

> 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.

Except for video drivers. And, as the tweet notes, the bulk of their issues on Linux were related to graphics.

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

#138

Post by angry_octet »

FigBug wrote: post #114
chrisseaton wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You don't have to statically link, you can use LD_PRELOAD to point to local versions of all libraries. It isn't optimal, from space/security perspectives, but it works. You can use the local libs first or last in the path.

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

#139

Post by vetinari »

FigBug wrote: 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…

Why not pick a "distribution" like org.freedesktop.Platform/18.08 (i.e. pick a flatpak runtime) and support that? It runs on all desktop distributions. Updating supported flatpak runtimes is then on your leisure, not on their release cadence.

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

#140

Post by madez »

Kapura wrote: post #131
madez wrote: post #108

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…

> "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 ne…

> it is strictly better to be working on a new game than to improve incredibly niche support for existing products

I'm not sure about this one. Compare Ferals and Ubers approach as two data points.

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