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I had the pleasure of speaking with another developer today about their Linux sales, and this time it was Lurler from AtomicTorch Studio.

I asked the developer about how their sales have been going across different platforms:
image
VoidExpanse:
Windows: 94.4%
Mac: 4.2%
Linux: 1.4%

image
Dinocide:
Windows: 91.5%
Mac: 6.7%
Linux: 1.8%

Those figures seem pretty similar to what we have seen from other developers before here on GOL.

The developer had this to say about the figures:

QuoteLinux sales are more or less consistent across these two projects, the difference is within the range of standard deviation. But mac sales are a bit bigger for Dinocide since it is a bit more casual game. I think this is because Mac has a higher percentage of casual users.

But as you can see it isn't really worth financially to support any platforms other than Windows, especially considering how broken the support for these platforms on most of the cross platform engines. Never the less, we felt it is important.


Q: How hard was it for you to support Linux?

QuoteSupporting Linux was a very difficult task. Even though Unity is supposed to be cross-platform solution, yet there are hundreds of problems related to compatibility and performance. Not to mention critical bugs in the Unity itself when running on Linux. And you can't always find workarounds to these problems and bugs... We are hoping that the situation improves, but for us the conclusion is that we will never use Unity for our future games. However seeing as Unity is one of the most used engines in the indie scene it is a serious problem for everyone...

We also had to rewrite many of our custom plugins and contact third party developers whose solutions we were using in order to improve their products in relation to Linux and Mac support. Unfortunately I must say that the Linux is the least stable platform when it comes to these kind of third party software and libraries. Obviously not the Linux itself, but the software tools that are available for that platform.

Another thing I want to mention, our game required Mono, but most of the users didn't have it installed or had an incomplete version and many actually had a corrupted installation. We solved that problem by providing a special bundled-mono with the game. But that was one hell of a task to overcome. Which again, doesn't make supporting Linux easy. However, there might be some improvements in this regards after merge between Microsoft and Xamarin.


Q: Do you feel you made any profit on the Linux version?

QuoteThe game was released simultaneously for Win, Mac and Linux. As you can see from the stats I provided above the sales of Linux version turned out to be minuscule. I would say with the amount of effort we had to put into making this support available we ended up losing money.
This is obviously only true for VoidExpanse. Some simpler games might actually be a very straightforward to port. In fact our second game - Dinocide, which is a classic platformer, was indeed a relatively easy port without any serious issues and we did make some extra income from this port.
And I would say, again. If you are using Unity and your game is a complex piece of software with many third party modules - porting isn't a good idea. But if you are making something simple and only using native Unity tools, making a port is definitely a good idea. As I mentioned above, for us the conclusion is simple - we are writing our custom engine (Renkei Engine:
http://wiki.atomictorch.com/Renkei_Engine) for our future projects to ensure total compatibility with all three platforms.


Q: What would you say to developers wanting to release a Linux version?

QuoteStay away from closed-source code where you have no control over things. You won't be able to fix the problems that might arise when porting. And waiting for fixes from the developers of these solutions may take months if it will be available at all. Not to mention that quite often the support for platforms other than Windows is sub-par.


Q: How do you feel about supporting Linux in future games?

QuoteTaking everything that I wrote above into consideration and the fact that we are a very small team with tiny budgets - all of our _big_ future projects will be released for Window only initially. At least for the Early Access phase. This will allow us to focus on developing the game itself, rather than spending significant amount of time for cross platform support early on. And when the game is more or less complete we will make the ports for other platforms available. We feel it is better to make a good product first, and then take care of porting, rather than allocating a significant portion of the time towards cross platform support during the initial development phase. However, if our custom engine proves to be stable enough to release for all platforms at the same time we will obviously do that. Never the less, it is still very important to us to make our games available on all platforms, including Linux. Hopefully the situation will only improve in the future :)


I would like to thank Lurler for the honesty, and wish the studio all the best!

You can find Dinocide here and VoidExpanse here. You can also buy them directly to get them from the developer + a Steam key. If you want to have a chat with me about your games, send me a message.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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flesk Mar 8, 2016
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Quoting: GuestI can confirm that many recent Unity games have issues on my system: crashes at startup or no working sound. Some also have no text (missing font?). And none of the devs I reported it to have fixed anything (whatever the reason is… but the result is I can’t play their games and had to have them refunded.)

OpenGL Core is broken in most versions of Unity 5. In my experience, running the games with -force-opengl, which forces OpenGL 2 (which Unity 4 uses on Linux), will usually enable you to run them. I haven't experienced crashes on Nvidia graphics, but I've experienced all sorts of other strange behaviors, like the screen being filled with mostly a single color or extreme flickering.
muntdefems Mar 8, 2016
Quoting: flesk
Quoting: GuestI can confirm that many recent Unity games have issues on my system: crashes at startup or no working sound. Some also have no text (missing font?). And none of the devs I reported it to have fixed anything (whatever the reason is… but the result is I can’t play their games and had to have them refunded.)

OpenGL Core is broken in most versions of Unity 5. In my experience, running the games with -force-opengl, which forces OpenGL 2 (which Unity 4 uses on Linux), will usually enable you to run them. I haven't experienced crashes on Nvidia graphics, but I've experienced all sorts of other strange behaviors, like the screen being filled with mostly a single color or extreme flickering.

Dunno if it's the same bug or not, but I've been recently experiencing core dumps with Unity 5 games. It is apparently due to a bug in the engine that can't get PulseAudio to start properly. Manually starting it myself usually fixes the problem:

$ pulseaudio -k
$ pulseaudio -D


(The first line kills any PulseAudio instance that might be already running, and the second line just starts a new PulseAudio daemon)
flesk Mar 9, 2016
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I have the same issue with flickering on Nvidia graphics in else Heart.Break(), but I think that's a separate issue with the same symptoms, since it uses Unity 4 and works without issues for me on Intel and Mesa. I'm guessing Unity 4 doesn't know what to do with that option, since it's new on Linux, and was still undocumented last time I checked.

I think I've read about sound issues and crashes with Unity games on Gentoo before, but I don't remember where, and it might have been your posts. Do you have the same issues if you try to run the games from the command line? (Remember to create a steam_appid.txt file with the correct app Id in the game directory if it tries to launch through Steam.)
Pecisk Mar 9, 2016
More of such articles, thanks to both to developers for supporting SteamOS/Linux platform and to GoL to make this interview happen.
adolson Mar 10, 2016
QuoteStay away from closed-source code where you have no control over things.

Control is one of the main reasons I avoided even trying to pick up an engine until Godot arrived on the scene. It sure simplifies things, rather than trying to make everything from scratch in C++, that's for sure.

I do hope Unity improves the situation, though. That, or games I care to play stop being made with it lest they run into these issues (Her Story comes instantly to mind).
flesk Mar 11, 2016
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Quoting: GuestI can confirm that changing the launch options to “LD_LIBRARY_PATH="" %command%” fixes the sound issue on Adventure Capitalist, and the crash at startup of Among the Sleep (running the game from the terminal also works)…

Thanks for the steam_appid.txt trick, I thought some games forced the launch through Steam for some sort of DRM measure.

I've seen similar issues reported on Steam, and I think the problem might be that the Steam runtime uses very old versions of OpenAL. What happens if you locate and rename/move libopenal.so.1 from the Steam runtime?

Yeah, it's a pleasantly weak form of DRM that some games use. A few Unity games try to work around it by removing that file though, but I can't remember any that do off the top of my head.
ezra-s Mar 14, 2016
Played voidexpanse under Linux on Steam and certainly enjoyed it. Hope next game they release finds a less harder path to be released on linux than what I read in the enterview. Kind of surprised/sad by the low figures on Linux sales :(
neowiz73 Mar 14, 2016
VoidExpanse has been one of my favorite games of the past year. There were some forum exchanges with myself and one of the devs to help fix the mono issues regarding Linux. I didn't realize they had this many issues. I hope in time they are able to get a profit though. because at least with steam the game really never goes away, plus they have their own store so people can purchase DRM Free.

It does work spectacularly well on Linux, I found adjusting the mods or customizing my own mods was very easy. everything was in a very easy to read script language (java?). I haven't played in awhile, I just might though here soon now that I'm thinking about it again :P

edit: I wanted to jump back into this game for another run but it looks like the newest version is having some crazy issues as described by the rep/dev in this thread earlier. I had to do some searching to find out what's going on, but there is an option to revert to the 1.6.0 version in the "beta" tab on steam. which loaded up the main screen fine but when playing the screen is black but when I press the escape key to get a menu I can see everything just fine. kind of a bummer I was wanting to play another run through :/
Hopefully things get worked out with unity.


Last edited by neowiz73 on 21 March 2016 at 4:31 am UTC
ai_enabled Mar 31, 2016
Hi guys,
The Linux compatibility issues should be fixed now with VoidExpanse v1.6.9.
If you have any problems please let me know here or on Official Forums http://forums.atomictorch.com
Regards!
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