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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

#221

Post by doubleunplussed »

tshannon wrote: post #132
NelsonMinar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In terms of numbers of users, I thought it was interesting that the first Humble Indie Bundle had about 16% of downloads being Linux downloads, whereas the newer releases are like All these numbers are way higher than 0.1 % though. I admit I just don't believe the OP that Linux sales were 0.1 %. I would believe 1%.

Also my first interpretation of the headline was "Linux users provide valuable feedback!", which matches my experience. I report so many bugs against everything all the time as a Linux user, if a game had a bugtracker I would definitely use it if I encountered a bug. Whether the issues were Linux-specific or not, I don't know.

Finally, my experience with cross-platform development is just not nearly as bad as I keep hearing. I do it. Bundle, and use an already cross-platform library for your GUI or graphics. I admit I don't make 3D games, but I'm super perplexed as to what is supposedly so hard about the cross-platform aspect of it. For my (non 3D) graphics I don't even use electron, just Qt (also perplexed by those thinking electron is the only way to do cross-platform). I've never tried to freeze my code so it will work on future systems (it is open-source and maintained to stay up to date), but I know exactly what I would do if I had to - I would bundle literally everything except glibc and the kernel and call it a day. Would anything trip me up if I were to do that? Am I naive and waiting to be burned by something I don't understand? Maybe - but it seems like the devs complaining about cross-platform development being hard aren't even doing this step.

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

#222

Post by EamonnMR »

kaybe wrote: post #191
halbritt wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I likewise run and prefer a Linux desktop and boot into Windows for the occasional gaming foray. Also, to run stuff like Fusion 360. I have to say that even on Windows, driver stability leaves much to be desired (for Nvidia in my case).

The thing is, if you only boot into Windows occasionally, you'll have to wait for updates about every time you use it. That's pretty annoying and has actually stopped me from doing it at some point.

I don't think I realized it until you mentioned it, but I think I'm in the same boat with my dual-boot box. Doubly so because it's a laptop and half of the time I only have phone-teathered internet.

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

#223

Post by jimmy1 »

bengarney wrote: post #154
jimmy1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 countle…

I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Generally there is a tremendous amount of commentary like this from Linux folks and the port neither gets meaningful (or profitable) publicity nor sales that outstrip support. This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post. When supporting a platform can mean debugging and s…

> This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post.

I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago)

> I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen.

Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.

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

#224

Post by _wmd »

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…

Your suggestion to ship glibc caused coffee to end up over my keyboard :) This is the road to hell, but you'd only know that if you had the slightest clue of the ABI interactions involved in swapping out a core library like that - starting with the reality that parts of the (probably binary-only) graphics stack must be linked and loaded in-process, and they naturally depend on at a minimum glibc. Your suggestion is to effectively ship the game in the form of its own Linux distro, which is of course complete nonsense.

Snap and Flatpack will hopefully help with the dependency aging problem, but they're brand new, and they both still suck one way or another.

To give you an idea of what swapping out glibc would involve, here is the list of shared libraries loaded by 'glxgears' on my machine, arguably the simplest possible OpenGL program:

    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0.9.1
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexpat.so.1.6.8
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnsl-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_compat-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_nis-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt-2.28.so
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.11
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_dri.so
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdrm_intel.so.1.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdrm_nouveau.so.2.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdrm_radeon.so.1.0.1
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdrm.so.2.4.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglapi.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLdispatch.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.7.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLX_mesa.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLX.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpciaccess.so.0.11.1
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.25
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11-xcb.so.1.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-dri2.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-dri3.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-glx.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-present.so.0.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1.1.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-sync.so.1.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdamage.so.1.1.0  
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6.0.0 
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6.4.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXfixes.so.3.1.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxshmfence.so.1.0.0
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXxf86vm.so.1.0.0

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

#225

Post by tokai »

hannasanarion wrote: post #211
zanny wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really fragmented? You support Ubuntu (in either its flatpak runtime or the Steam runtime) and you let everyone else figure it out on their own. Distros like Arch have been very good about providing the Steam Native Runtime and Ubuntu flatpak runtime in its own package system for just that reason. The support burden for developers is proportional to the operating systems you officially say you support. If you s…

> You support Ubuntu (in either its flatpak runtime or the Steam runtime) and you let everyone else figure it out on their own. And isn't that already how it is? Pretty sure Steam only supports Ubuntu LTS, steam on every other OS else is an unsupported hack.

I think what is what zanny is saying. The fragmentation argument is fud.

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

#226

Post by EamonnMR »

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…

Music software's dependance on Windows is such a mess. Tons of cool plugins are stuck as windows-only VSTs! I was really hoping that Propellerheads would use the fact that it can ship on any platform to ship Reason and all associated REs on linux or in-browser, but instead they gave in and added VST support.

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

#227

Post by curt15 »

vetinari wrote: post #139
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.

How long are flatpak runtimes supported? What is their update policy?

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

#228

Post by admax88q »

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…

> In practice it doesn't really matter though

It does matter unless you just want linux to perfectly emulate windows APIs you will always have to do work to port to a different platform. Choosing the wrong tools for the job and then blaming the platform is just bad engineering.

I don't bitch about how hard it is to assembly my desk because it requires a socket wrench when my last piece of furniture only required a screwdriver and that's all I own.

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

#229

Post by madez »

jcastro wrote: post #214
madez wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I expected them to compile their game for the system and try to run it. If it didn't, it would be immediately obvious because the issues were so obvious. The next step would be to upgrade the system to Debian testing, and then check again. If it still doesn't work, upgrade to Debian Sid, and then check again. If it worked on any of those, report that and everybody knows in what version the issues will be fixed. I…

Nobody's going to do that, they'll just say "Use ubuntu" and close your ticket.

I _know_. That stone-walling is a reason why they have so many issues. I'd rethink that approach, and consider the cost of the ticket answers and marketing efforts to fight the flames vs that one day of a developer.

I don't understand why they wouldn't do it, though. I see no plausible explanation.

However, what if it doesn't work on Ubuntu either?

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

#230

Post by EamonnMR »

vectorEQ wrote: post #91
mrspeaker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DAW isn't Bitwig is it? (just because your username has the same amount of syllables ;) If so, then PLEASE keep up the great work supporting Linux. I was only able to ditch my Mac a year ago because I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig!

renoise is also available on linux, great product works like a charm on linux :D

I've been meaning to pick it up, would you recommend any tutorials for figuring out how to use the tracker interface to sequence?
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