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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

#341

Post by the_trapper »

ajvs wrote: post #301
NicoJuicy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, my point is though that it's only in the past few months when Proton was released that the compatibility was good enough it actually mattered to game developers and players. By making Linux compatible with Windows games it gets rid of that objection "I'd move to Linux if it weren't for my games" which was the remaining objection for a LOT of people. Because Steam tracks WINE that's a very good thing, so they ca…

I'm not sure that this does encourage native Linux game development. Why bother putting in the porting work for 0.1% of potential users when someone else might do the work for me via Wine/Proton.

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

#342

Post by CJefferson »

yellowapple wrote: post #311
michaelmrose wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because you will earn way way more money by making your game cross platform given the 3 consoles and 3 pc platforms that exist and once you have committed to such linux support might only take 1% of your effort.

Correct. If your game can't cope with Linux "fragmentation" (most of which is already abstracted away by Steam, so the remaining "fragmentation" is with hardware, which is the same problem you have with Windows), then you're in for a world of hurt if you try to port to a console with its far-from-ordinary hardware and programming APIs and such.

Porting to consoles is much easier than Linux, as each console is a very fixed platform. In my (limited) experience, middleware like Unity works better on consoles than it does on Linux.

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

#343

Post by CJefferson »

michaelmrose wrote: post #270
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.

Try this is an exercise instead pick a random dell. Attempt to install OSX on it. Post about how huge a hassle this was and how the end result was a non functioning brick and OSX still isn't ready. If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model. Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is…

I've installed Ubuntu 18.10 on an XPS 13, which everyone tells me is well supported by Linux, Dell even sell it with Ubuntu. It won't come out of sleep. Googling suggests other have this problem.

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

#344

Post by zeroname »

rightbyte wrote: post #333
zeroname wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same outcome. How am I going to convince those cat owners that I totally fixed the dogs-eating-the-cats problem? Cats don't even need to be walked really, certainly not alongside the dogs. Putting the cats into the equation was a questionable business decision to begin with.

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

#345

Post by pjmlp »

derefr wrote: post #320
zmw wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games is vastly outnumbered by people who own a Windows desktop at hone and just want to play a few games. Probably at least 100 to 1. And the former group, with the “almost works” compatibility, will be a much bigger maintenance burden per customer. Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered b…

"People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games" make up a disproportionately large amount of the developer-base for pretty much any software, though, including games. It doesn't matter if none of your users care about a particular feature, if a fair number of your own devs do.

There are lots of developers pretty happy with macOS and Windows at home.

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

#346

Post by milesvp »

wtracy wrote: post #183
madez wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reas…

This advice is only strictly true for AAA games. From what I've read from the more indie side of the games industry, there seems to be a common thread where the more time spent working on features for a game, the fatter the long tail became, and the spikier the stegosaurus tail tended to become. There seems to be advice that simply adding support for random steam features lead to sales (think things like trading cards, achievements, badges...). Language support can be a really unexpected big one as well. What's also counter intuitive is that porting games to other systems tends to increase existing sales channels.

Now, it's not entirely clear from what I've read, if working on all these extended features for a game have the highest expected value, since it really is a hit driven industry, but they seem to be lower effort work, and are definitely worth it from a lowered risk payout point of view, particularly for a small dev shop that can't risk too many failures.

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

#347

Post by zanny »

izacus wrote: post #336
zanny wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any modern game should be using Vulkan for just that reason.

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

#348

Post by zanny »

pantalaimon wrote: post #265
klodolph wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's Debian, because Debian tends to have compatibility packages for old versions too. For libcurl there's libcurl3. It depends on the package, of course.

Only for so long - try installing qt3 on a recent Debian or Ubuntu.

I don't have a Debian machine to test it on but a casual search finds qt1-3 in the AUR on Arch. Of course building the whole GUI suite would be a bit annoying but its better than nothing if you have some really old software that depends on it.

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

#349

Post by jcelerier »

vortico wrote: post #250
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 ver…

> 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.

I personnally compile with latest GCC or LLVM on centos 7, this way I can use the very latest C++ standards with a venerable glibc

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

#350

Post by jcelerier »

_wmd wrote: post #300
kentonv wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

glibc is pretty good at ABI backwards-compatibility. The right thing to do would be to statically link libstdc++, libgcc, and extras like libcurl, but dynamically link libc, libX11, and libGL. Luckily libX11 and libGL are pure-C so you can get away with static-linking libstdc++, which means you can use whatever C++ version you like.

It's definitely technically possible to find a hacky combination that works today, but only by shouldering the cost of understanding all the possible deps and symbols and the structure of their underlying objects used by all possible e.g. graphics drivers and X11 libraries now and into the future. You can hack around it today, but it's a fool's game and absolutely not something that can be relied on to continue worki…

> I wanted to check whether the official Nvidia driver uses C++,

I don't know for nvidia, but I had a problem two years ago on a machine with a radeon card: I was developing a GUI software which used LLVM at some point. Insta-crash at runtime on this computer whenever I'd oepn a window. The reason ? the radeon driver linked and initialized LLVM which didn't support being initialized twice...

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