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One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

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Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#3

Post by ryandrake »

If I had a time traveling magic wand, the one Software Thing I would wish for would be that native, cross platform toolkits had won the war rather than the whole industry punting and declaring The Web Browser to be the target platform, or these super-high-level Game Engines. For decades, I always hopelessly thought the OS and hardware gaps would eventually be bridged by something like Qt or SDL or wxWidgets, and we'd all one day be happily programming cross platform apps using plain old native languages and SDKs instead of Electron or the HTML/CSS/JS triad of pain. As the years go on, and OS vendors move even more towards their own proprietary incompatible native APIs, this dream seems less and less likely.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#4

Post by Aardwolf »

> Linux accounts for less than 1% of the total players

I think some types of games (think factory building, zachtronics style puzzle games, ...) might have a bigger percentage, though that's only a feeling I have, I don't have numbers myself, I just see such games more often have a Linux release on Steam that seems appreciated.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#7

Post by Iulioh »

Aardwolf wrote: post #4

> Linux accounts for less than 1% of the total players I think some types of games (think factory building, zachtronics style puzzle games, ...) might have a bigger percentage, though that's only a feeling I have, I don't have numbers myself, I just see such games more often have a Linux release on Steam that seems appreciated.

"100% more linux users than the average!"

1%->2%

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#8

Post by schemescape »

One issue with publishing a browser-based game that this article glosses over is: managing save data.

The browser provides Local Storage, but that isn't reliable as a "source of truth" since browsers (mostly on iOS, I think) may delete the data periodically (thanks, iOS, for deleting my Wordle history!) or when clearing browser history. Aside: the worst situation is when publishing on itch.io and playing on an iPad--your data appears to get saved to Local Storage but is actually wiped immediately to prevent cross-site tracking (itch.io hosts HTML5 games in a frame with a different domain).

Publishing on Steam, on the other hand, gives you durable file system storage and you can add cross-device syncing via Steam Cloud very easily. I'm holding out hope that something like remoteStorage will eventually catch on for browsers, but for now I don't really see a convenient solution.

If anyone has ideas for managing save data in a browser game that don't involve hosting user data myself (and dealing with account recovery, GDPR, etc.), let me know!

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#9

Post by npunt »

Great read, very eye opening.

> Similar to developing for macOS, a Mac is pretty much required for developing for iOS and there’s the $100 per year developer membership fee. I think the combined income of both iOS and macOS (95% of which comes from iOS) barely covers the cost of the membership fee and the cheapest Mac Mini.

I think this contextualizes the post well, seems like overall revenues might be in the <$10k or even <$5k range. That's extremely hobby territory (/buying lottery ticket territory). Feels like at that scale a 'build whatever makes you happiest' heuristic is healthier for the individual and cross-platform support works against you.

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