200-300 people is enough? Surprised it's that low even for a lone dev
Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#22Because if you don't then you can be sure that they will never sell. And Linux is the only game platform without garden walls.
Windows still lets you download and install software last I checked.
Not everything. Some things, Windows Defender will erroneously and (somewhat) silently remove, causing inexplicable errors or crashes while hiding its actual errors in a notifications center. It gets really annoying sometimes after doing updates of actually desired software.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#23How are stadia games packaged and shipped? Would it be possible for anyone to build a linux box to match the stadia hardware/drivers, and thereby make them run a stadia game?
If that's the case, then perhaps that's the way to go for anyone who wants to build a Linux AAA-gaming box.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#24I don't expect to play any big AAA titles but I also remember only having Nethack and tux racer. So I am over the moon being able to play these current titles on Linux. Caves of Qud, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Stellaris, Civ, Streets of Rogue, Pillars of Eternity and many more. Those are just my favorites so I hope others will list theirs.
Hey don't forget XBill, Linux game of the year 1994
Rings a faint bell. But one game I loved that I didn't mention was Konquest. It came with KDE on RedHat 6 or 7.
It was a turn based space strategy game. I absolutely loved it and spent a large part of my adult life looking for a modern alternative.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#25I really don't understand why anyone would waste the energy to target Linux beyond making sure that your Windows build also works on Wine.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#26Stadia changes the math a bit. If you’re already targeting Stadia, which uses a Linux variant under the hood, the time to make it widely available might be worth it.
Might be... but (I assume; I don't have any specific knowledge) that Stadia runs everything on a single known software stack, and quite possibly a single hardware stack. This would make it an easier platform to target than the wider range of general consumer hardware running Linux. Personally, I run Linux as my daily driver and I hope game developers see the success of Steam's Linux support and decide that targeting…
Valve seem to have been addressing that with their runtimes.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#27I regularly go through my Steam wishlist and remove any game which doesn't support Linux. I am probably the only one, but it is something I do.
Some do play with Proton though.
Check out the db https://www.protondb.com/ I have some games playing with proton and there are no issues at all.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#28Porting games to Linux is definitely not something you do for the money. Linux sales on Steam hover in the 1%-2% area of total sales, less than even MacOS.
On the plus side, if you use an engine like Unity, making a binary for Linux is no longer much of a problem (you don't have to wrangle xplatform libraries etc). On the minus side, actually testing and debugging things to make sure things work for customers who use a variety of distros and hardware is hard, especially since Steam tends to only officially support a single (usually outdated) version of Ubuntu at a time.
Larger teams will have the resources for this. But where it really hits hard, is the small indie team made up of Windows devs (as game devs tend to be), when the port is not completely turnkey (like, say, porting a Unity game to MacOS) and requires debugging in a completely foreign environment, when you know you might not get sales to pay for this work, and you're already under deadlines to fix a million other things.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#29Stadia changes the math a bit. If you’re already targeting Stadia, which uses a Linux variant under the hood, the time to make it widely available might be worth it.
When making a game for Stadia you can target a very small subset of hardware and test on those on one single linux distribution/software stack (at the moment all stadia servers are identical). When you make a game that anyone can download on their machine the amount of different hardware + os/driver combinations grows a lot and requires a lot more effort for a quality product.
The success of Stadia means more developers who are comfortable with Vulkan and linux as a platform. That should give us better ports and even more Vulkan first titles.
That could lead to better driver support (at least from Nvidia :| ) on 'nix, and so on and so forth.
Re: Why make games for Linux if they don't sell?
#30These two options can work well: 1. The Radiohead model: download and pay anything from 0$ to X$ as you wish. IIRC with the Radiohead release X == 100$. 2. Sell Merchandise. If your game features a character like Lara or Mario, this could go very well. There used to be a lot more of this in the early days of indy development. Postcardware for instance, were you would "pay" for the software by sending the author a nic…
Radiohead was not an "indie" until they were already huge from several traditional label-distributed albums. They're more of an Activision.