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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

#271

Post by freeone3000 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #257
taway_1212 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Running Linux on new hardware is usually a bad idea, due to the nature of the process you have to expect at least a year before divers for new hardware have settled into distributions. Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.

THIS is the problem. Windows drivers start working on day 1 and continue working. The breaks are when we went to 32-bit drivers in NT and when we disabled real-time hardware interrupts in Vista.

Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.

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

#272

Post by kevingadd »

huhtenberg wrote: post #262
60654 wrote: post #47

This is a pretty well-known effect in gamedev. The specific numbers change, but Linux sales are only a small percentage of total, while generating much more development and support work. At least dev work can be drastically simplified with middleware like Unity, which is how small studios can even consider Linux. But support difficulties are real. Players have so many possible distros, configurations, and drivers - a…

But for a game that is built on Unity, wouldn't these support issues be Unity's responsibility? Assuming the issues are triggered by their glue layer. What's the arrangement there, does anyone know?

Unity does not do your customer service for you. Also, bug fixes might only go into a future release of Unity (months out) and updating to the new release to get the bug fixes might break your game. Unity games that spend a few years in development often ship on a very old version of Unity.

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

#273

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zanny wrote: post #190
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012.

Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux.

The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.

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

#274

Post by fixermark »

icebraining wrote: post #201
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…

They said the problem wasn't fragmentation of distros, but the versions of graphic drivers, and it's not like Windows machines are all on the same version of the same driver.

Windows generally has less of an issue of heterogeneous graphics driver ecosystem, mostly for market reasons---Windows laptops and desktops are bought more often for the purpose of playing games than Linux machines, so a Windows machine hitting the market with a graphics driver that's too outside the norm tends to perform poorly in sales, and the market encourages driver homogeneity in basic functionality. I've seen some stinkers trying to write my own game engine (THANKS FOR LYING ABOUT THE OPENGL CAPABILITIES BY IMPLEMENTING IT IN SOFTWARE AT SECONDS-PER-FRAME PERFORMANCE, INTEL, YOU ARE A PEACH), but not as many as in Linux.

(in short, "What machine should I buy to play games" is a question that's easy to answer for Windows; there's reams of magazines dedicated to the question. It's a harder question to answer for Linux, which makes it a harder question to answer for developers trying to write games against a Linux-based OS).

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

#275

Post by ken »

andai wrote: post #184
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?

It's impossible to say for sure, without knowing people's behavior and motivations.

In the past, I've certainly been more likely to buy software if I see it's cross-platform, even if I know I'll never use it on those other platforms. Or it might be a corporate requirement. There are many possible reasons.

For example, if a restaurant serves only steak, is it a net loss for them to put a pasta option on the menu, if they know they'll never sell enough to make up the cost of ingredients and preparation? Maybe not -- it could mean a party of 10 (with 1 vegetarian) is willing to eat there, when they otherwise wouldn't have been.

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

#276

Post by stcredzero »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #269
stcredzero wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most games don't make these mistakes...it seems they weren't aware of some other best practices. I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform. The last time I was at a game jam, I found myself explaining generational garbage collection to a game dev. He…

> I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform. Members of this particular team worked on the highly acclaimed Total Annihilation (1997) and Supreme Commander (2007) so inexperience or lack of technical expertise seems unlikely to be the cause here.

So they have no excuse for missing out on those other best practices.

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

#277

Post by michaelmrose »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #166
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…

> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.

They later admitted they overstated this issue and that their problems were self caused.

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

#278

Post by michaelmrose »

zeroname wrote: post #64
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…

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.

In general you are actually looking at 2% of your potential user base not 0.1%.

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

#279

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

kurtisc wrote: post #256
pjmlp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How did the demand work out for Symbian, Psion, and Microsoft phones?

People forget that Windows Mobile 5 and 6 unseated Palm to become the sales leader in smartphones in the mid-2000s, shortly before the iPhone came along and blew them and everybody else out of the water.

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

#280

Post by bearforcenine »

madez wrote: post #229
jcastro wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Money seems like a good reason. If a tiny fraction of your sales and a large fraction of your bugs are from a particular subset of those users, you don't want those users. They are too expensive.

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