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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

#331

Post by wheels »

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…

This doesn't work for things that are dynamically loaded into other applications (as VSTs are). In general, you need to be using the same version of the libraries as the rest of the application.

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

#332

Post by nybble41 »

wtracy wrote: post #321
nybble41 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe nVidia is the only major GPU manufacturer left without full-featured open-source drivers. nVidia was once the best GPU manufacturer for Linux on PCs but they proved unable to make the leap from proprietary drivers to OEM-supported open source; Nouveau exists as a community effort but remains well behind the AMD/Intel equivalents. IMHO, assuming you get to choose your GPU, the only reason to mess around with…

The thing to understand about Nvidia is that they use the same model as Apple: Produce really nice software, and use it to drive hardware sales. On the driver side, a lot of the features and performance advantages of Nvidia cards are rumored to be largely implemented in software. (Think of things like having a really good optimizing compiler for shaders.) Open sourcing that code would allow other brands to copy a lot…

> That said, my understanding is that you are committed to Linux, you still get a more robust OpenGL implementation (ATI used to be buggy as sin) and better shader performance with Nvidia hardware/software.

That's probably true, if your use case requires the absolute best GPU performance. For me, though, the Intel and AMD open source drivers have gotten good enough that the marginal improvements possible with proprietary drivers simply aren't worth the hassle. At least with AMD you are free to choose between Mesa and Catalyst, and can be assured of a decent experience either way. If you opt for nVidia hardware you're effectively locked in to their proprietary driver if you want to use even half of your GPU's capabilities.

It helps that Intel and AMD and all the non-PC Mesa drivers share common infrastructure, so improvements to one driver tend to enhance the entire ecosystem—except nVidia. As you noted, the situation is changing rapidly; I think it won't be much longer before nVidia's proprietary drivers forfeit whatever performance advantage they have left to the combined efforts of the open source community.

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

#333

Post by rightbyte »

zeroname wrote: post #92
rightbyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?

It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.

Maybe cat owners complain because their cats were eaten by the dogs, and you scared away other cat owners and lost profit.

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

#334

Post by izacus »

bluescarni wrote: post #56

> We started working on the game in 2012 > Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform. So this is essentially a rant about linux graphics drivers circa 2012?

Are they any better in 2019? Last I checked the anything beyond desktop compositing features is still a tyre fire of lying capabilities, broken functionality and wishful thinking. nVidia being by far the most stable while lacking integration with modern Linux APIs.

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

#335

Post by rightbyte »

noselasd wrote: post #115
rightbyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?

The conclusion here is stated in the article as "Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform." So somewhat similar to having 0.5% of your pet walking customers complaining about issues you can't do much about, or have to do extra work to make them happy - their doghouse at home is too small, their car has an issue so they can't come and pick up the cat - basically…

Ye, well I agree it's probably not worth the fuzz support Mac or Linux for gaming.

But I mean, without numbers on how much extra dev time the linux port demanded it's hard to reason about what a 0.1% revenue increase means. 0.1% is still 0.1% and could have been more if it didn't crash at that rate and discouraged buyers.

Since they released for Mac the game must have been programmed with cross platform functionality in mind.

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

#336

Post by izacus »

zanny wrote: post #195
linuxlizard wrote: post #83

Developing software for Linux is like painting a moving train.

SDL is binary compatible on its major release (2.0) and will probably be forever at this point. libc++ only broke its ABI once when C++11 required it. What else do you need to make games for Linux? If you are using Unity or Unreal its going to statically link all its dependencies anyway. Don't use libraries that break semver.

SDL is a 2D library. Any modern game will use 3D APIs and there you'll quickly hit the insane minefield of OpenGL bugs that are graphics drivers on Linux. Those are pretty much optimized for driving the desktop compositors with everything else being a stroke of luck if it works as defined in the spec.

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

#337

Post by p0nce »

johnchristopher wrote: post #299
p0nce wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not true. Invisible demand is a potential market and a bunch of prospects in waiting. However that niche is way too small to be worth it.

For all the prophets out there: no one stops you to build a business for that "invisible demand". Let's see how you can predict the market.

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

#338

Post by axaxs »

Most of the people I've met over the years who are tech literate say they have some flavor of linux installed, love it, but keep windows around because 'gaming.' I would venture the number of folks who had linux installed but didn't buy it for that platform because of instability to be much higher than 0.1%. It's a chicken/egg problem.

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

#339

Post by reitanqild »

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…

FWIW I've been doing all my pc gaming from Linux the last few months. (Before that there was a bit back and forth - sometimes CSGO on my machine was best on Linux, other times on Windows bit now I haven't booted Windows for gaming since lste summer or something. And for me the convenience of KDE makes me stay for work as well.)

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

#340

Post by brann0 »

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…

But it's very relevant. Steam provides a runtime so developers have a stable foundation across several distros.

If you fail to use their runtime properly, you're doomed to suffer from Linux fragmentation problems.

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