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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

#241

Post by rconti »

taway_1212 wrote: post #219
WAthrowaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Why not use OS X on an MBP, or Linux on a generic x86 machine? I'm not clear on why this is the only route to get you off of Windows.

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

#242

Post by pjmlp »

kurtisc wrote: post #205
p0nce wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invisible demand is undistinguishable from no demand, as far as B2C is concerned.

I agree that they can't distinguish it but there was no visible demand for an iPhone before the iPhone.

Only if we forget about the work done by Symbian, Psion, Microsoft, Compaq, Dell in portable Touch devices.

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

#243

Post by _wmd »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #171
angry_octet wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-important idea police?

That is completely ridiculous. Pointing out that statically compiling dependencies or shipping them with a game can solve many so called compatibility problems is directly related to games working on linux.

It's a wonderful idea - on paper, but all that's needed is for one of the many mandatory deps for running a GL program to link against the system libcurl or any other replaced dep and you're back in Crashville again, population 1 - cloth-eared developer

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

#244

Post by NicoJuicy »

ajvs wrote: post #182
simias wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

You know WINE exists 25 years though. During this time, Windows still has 95% market share ( https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey )

You could also think that, because of WINE, Windows is first class and then they check Linux with Wine.

Depends on the perspective.

PS. Yes, steam detects Wine

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

#245

Post by purplerabbit »

thecatspaw wrote: post #119
mitgraduate wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's probably a decent way to package your program. And you can use all the glammy JS you want.

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

#246

Post by wtracy »

madez wrote: post #210
wtracy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

If their one shot release isn't good enough, they deserve all the flak they are getting. I do have empathy with them getting frustrated, but the root cause is their approach.

The original post in the thread basically said that Linux support is easy if you just make a new release every time the libraries you depend on make a breaking change. (Or a GCC update breaks binary compatibility for everything.)

Even if an initial release of a Linux game is flawless, it tends to stop working with the next major distro release. (Unless it's statically linked to everything, or uses something like Flatpack to distribute all its own dependencies. Both options have their own disadvantages.)

You also have to understand that, from a business perspective, game companies have much more in common with a Hollywood studio than a normal software company.

Movies don't get patches. Occasionally they get re-releases for new formats, but at that point consumers are expected to go pay for it again.

None of that applies to today's slot machine^H^H mobile game companies that rely on in-app purchases, or MMOs that rely on monthly subscriptions. The former would never survive in the Linux world anyway, and the latter are often quite successful on Linux, even if it's only in the form of official support for Wine/Cedega.

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

#247

Post by munificent »

rusk wrote: post #46
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 ...

> requires substantiation.

From the linked series of tweets:

"In the end they accounted for 20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related)."

"So yes, fragmentation is still totally an issue."

"We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support."

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

#248

Post by zelon88 »

I'd say us Linux folk are probably more likely to identify an issue and report it as well. It takes a special determination to run Linux, and I'd wager that Linux users have a keep eye for undefined behavior, feature requests, and wonky workarounds.

Once time I updated a Linux box and the Nvidia drivers downloaded and started to build like usual, but there were tons of errors. After the graphics drivers failed GCC updated and rebuilt itself. Switching kernels fixed the problem. It took me a week to submit a ticket to Nvidia and then another 3 days of working with support before we realized that the Nvidia drivers were built with an outdated GCC and then GCC was updated afterwards. So when we checked GCC version it was the proper version, but the drivers were already built with the old version.

If it was a Windows box I would have formatted it after 12 hours and called it a day.

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

#250

Post by vortico »

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…

I work for VCV, which also ships for Linux. I don't find it an issue at all, since the build system is a Makefile supporting Mingw64/MSYS2 on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We statically link everything except glibc, which we've decided to dynamically link to glibc 2.23 (meaning that Ubuntu 16.04 is the oldest we support). We've had no problems with this approach, although the disadvantage is that we have to use an old version of GCC to compile the software, since I haven't figured out a way to make a new GCC version produce binaries which link to old glibc.

No need for containers or anything, just make a mostly-static-except-for-glibc binary.

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