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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

#181

Post by taeric »

rusk wrote: post #172
ido wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had the iMac G4 about 10-15 years ago and I had a slew of good games for it. Nowhere near the amount available on other platforms but I was kept busy. These days when I look on Steam for instance yeah there's perhaps a larger proportion but still most games are Windows only ... The Mac never was nor will it ever be a serious gaming platform.

The same claim can be made for Linux today. I have a large number of games I can play. I would still say it is a smaller market.

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

#182

Post by ajvs »

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…

Have you not seen Steam Play these last few months? Because of Proton the majority of the top 250 highest rated games now run fine on Linux.

I've been playing Skyrim, Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3, Castle Crashers, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, etc all of which are Windows-only but now WINE is so good it runs like it's native.

Linux gaming doesn't suck anymore and it's coming to eat Windows lunch. Check out ProtonDB to see compatibility with your favourite games and the Linux gaming subreddit for more news.

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

#183

Post by wtracy »

madez wrote: post #140
Kapura wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

AAA games rely on a single purchase fee for revenue. Once sales taper off because the game isn't hot and new anymore, there's nothing to be gained from further investment. (Ever notice how games steadily decrease in price the first few years after release?)

Uber gets recurring revenue from their app, so expecting them to provide updates is like expecting a rental property owner to maintain the property--entirely reasonable. Expecting a game developer to release patches years later is like a homeowner calling up the original real estate developer and demanding improvements. Not gonna happen.

(With the obvious caveat that homeowners are allowed to do the work themselves without the original developer's permission, but this about economics, not the absurdities of software licensing.)

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

#184

Post by andai »

tpush wrote: post #10

The situation seems to be similar for Mac: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080327518983315457 > Yeah, I didn't want to touch on Mac support in the original post, but Mac support also cost way more than it made in sales.

Innumerate person here, does that mean that supporting Mac is a net loss for a business?

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

#185

Post by ergo14 »

dcbadacd wrote: post #2

This sounds like complaining about users being able to report bugs.

Well as he mentioned those were autogenerated reports. That being said... I tried Planetary Annihilation and it worked without issues for me on Linux.

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

#187

Post by rusk »

taeric wrote: post #181
rusk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the iMac G4 about 10-15 years ago and I had a slew of good games for it. Nowhere near the amount available on other platforms but I was kept busy. These days when I look on Steam for instance yeah there's perhaps a larger proportion but still most games are Windows only ... The Mac never was nor will it ever be a serious gaming platform.

The same claim can be made for Linux today. I have a large number of games I can play. I would still say it is a smaller market.

Not disagreeing ... it makes little sense to develop commercially for Linux and never has. That doesn't mean that Mac isn't still a niche platform though, and banging on about number of tickets raised isn't really an appropriate way to quantify the value of a particular segment, or not.

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

#188

Post by pfranz »

gnufied wrote: post #141
FigBug wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can a installer prompt user to download missing libraries if needed? For example - Dota2 on Windows downloads bunch of C++ runtime libraries on first launch. Sharpkeys and bunch of other software do that (certain version of .net runtime). libcurl may or may not be a good example but surely all software has dependencies that isn't shipped with OS. In Linux case the special pain is, library that is shipped with OS migh…

On Windows, I often get prompted to install C++ runtime dependencies when installing. One big thing Steam did was manage multiple installs of DirectX for each game. It's just a matter of Linux being cost/benefit to overcome these things, like they have on Windows.

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

#189

Post by r3bl »

bluedino wrote: post #113
Jach wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They didn't pull the support at all.

They've added another driver to a long list of blocklisted drivers that cause issues with the hardware acceleration. Nothing about that list is Linux-specific, as it includes a bunch of macOS and Windows drivers as well: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/gpu/config/...

Firefox does that too: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...

Between a crashy browser thanks to a crappy driver and a stable browser without hardware acceleration, browsers will always just take the latter route. Don't like it? Run it with a flag and expect it to be a little less stable. That's it. You absolutely can't blame neither the browser nor the platform for that, only the vendor of the driver (or in this specific case NVidia, since it's actively hostile to the vendor).

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

#190

Post by zanny »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #30
dcbadacd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019…

In particular, AMD released the open source graphics drivers (AMDGPU) in 2016. There are still problems with nVidia/nouveau, but that's easily solved by not buying their hardware. The Intel iGPU drivers have also been solid for a long time, though the hardware may not be fast enough depending on the game.

AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
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