Yeah. It's bad enough with Steamcommunity downtime, but when you're actually trying to administer your product, it must be super inconvenient.

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Ha ha, it's always the way isn't it? Thanks Valve! >_<

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Quoting: princecMaybe it's a generational thing or a cultural thing but if you know Dan at all then you should probably know that "This will not do!" is clearly a joke... but then maybe only if you're English.

Yeah, might be a cultural thing. I'm pulling a general vibe across all of the stuff I've read though, not just that first tweet.

Super sad to see apologising being viewed as bowing to bullying. Real apologies definitely aren't that.

Quoting: princecit's a very fine line between simply making a loss versus even just breaking even once you add in support. So that's the problem we're dealing with.

For sure, but that's still a very different picture to "immensely unprofitable".

Quoting: princecFWIW you don't get to talk to many developers privately about this stuff but I can tell you now, opinions are the same across the board, and most of them are pretty unhappy about it.

Thankfully I do get to talk to developers about it, and the majority of those I've come into contact with (ignoring those using stuff like Unity or other cross platform engines) feel that whilst Linux hasn't given them outstanding revenue, it's more than paid for its porting costs and has resulted in a net gain. I've even spoken to some who've had unpleasant experiences (which is super disappointing) but aren't willing to consider dropping Linux because of the revenue loss they'd suffer.

I'm totally happy to take what you're saying onboard, but I'm not comfortable taking your word for more than your own experiences, not when it contradicts what I'm hearing from multiple other sources.

It definitely is a much larger unknown and bigger risk for developers who aren't familiar with Linux and there's a lot of learning involved.

Quoting: princecRight now, also, there are only three reasons developers are supporting Linux for gaming. The first one is sheer stubborn bloodymindedness (the camp that we fall in to).

<3

Quoting: princecThe second is a fairly cynical marketing ploy (I know developers who literally despise Linux but who port to Linux simply because it'll make them look cooler in the eyes of geeks).

I've come across these as well. I wish they'd go away. Nobody needs support from people who aren't supportive.

Quoting: princecThe third is access to Unexpectedly Massive Platforms: that's the Humble Bundle for some, but for almost all of the rest, they're banking on SteamBoxes being the Next Big Thing.

You're definitely missing the fourth category of people who feel that they get something worthwhile beyond geek cred (financial return, community growth, more portable/versatile tech) out of supporting Linux.

Quoting: princecSo honestly... there's not really any more evangelising needs to be done at this point.

I don't agree. Given the positive experiences that others have had, there's value in helping to demystify and uncloud the investment and return associated with supporting Linux so that developers curious about supporting Linux can make informed decisions, have appropriate expectations and above all else, positive experiences.

Quoting: princecps. not sure if I can get actual useful figures for steam sales versus systems played from my dashboard

I've spoken to other developers with stuff on Steam who say that that's visible to them. I wish I had something published on Steam so that I could get a clearer picture of what is and isn't available (and help point people in the right direction when they might have missed something).

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Quoting: princecThe trouble with tweets is they're only 140 characters and people like to read in all sorts of stuff that isn't there.

Part of what wasn't there was the lightheartedness that you mentioned. You can't expect people to pick up on that if you're not providing indicators of it (and as I said earlier, Linux users are likely to take this stuff more personally than they should).

"lifetime" sales was there, but not detail on that being Steam only, and perhaps covering a longer period of time than Linux builds were available on Steam.

"incredibly unprofitable" was there, but I find it hard to believe that you've spent $20k on Linux support alone, which would mean that it had to have at least been a tiny bit profitable.

I'd be wary of suggesting that people have read stuff into your words when they're taking them at face value.

We're working hard to help developers understand that supporting Linux isn't a waste of money. Stuff like that makes it harder.

IMO, the best thing to do when you've stepped on a nerve unintentionally with facetiousness is to apologise (I hope we'll see that in the blog post you mentioned).

Quoting: princecSo there's that.

Well, it's a tradeoff. Userbase for profit margin. That's not necessarily a bad proposition, but it has to make sense within the bigger picture of where you are financially and where you want to be with regards to player count.

Devaluing of games is a super tricky issue, but I believe there are ways to participate in pay-what-you-want models without killing the mean perceived value of a game. it'd be great if promotion organisers like Humble put more effort into highlighting these events as opportunities to support developers rather than opportunities to get cheap games.

When you do a blog post, I'd love to hear details of how your per platform Steam sales figures compare to the platforms that Steam says people are playing on.

Dan's an absolute hoot <3

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Thing is, Caspian has stated that he's hoping for 10 times that. The difference between $12k and $20k is negligible in that context.

Even if you multiply the figure by two to make up for the missing year, it's still only halfway there.

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Quoting: sevenspacebase DF9 runs very choppy on fedora 20, kinda broken but it probably will be fixed soon, its still early access.

I'm running F20 as well. I stand by what I said in my post :)

Quoting: sevenSo we need those big titles bad, really really bad.

That's another topic for another thread.

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Quoting: princecOne thought I've had - perhaps Windows and Mac are actually growing at a faster rate than Linux adoption. I'd originally discounted this possibility because all I've read in the last 5 years is about saturation and maturation of the PC desktop markets. Perhaps it's not as stagnant as they're making out.

I think it's a fairly complex situation which has many intertwined threads that must play a role in what you're seeing. There are also a few things which could mask market size/growth.

Awareness of games seems to spread differently on Linux (news travels faster in a smaller community) compared to other platforms. It's possible that significant increases over time in Windows and Mac market penetration could give a false impression that the Linux market is stagnating (although this would point to a smaller Linux market than first assumed).

Some portion of Linux market growth (I'd speculate the majority of it) has to come from people switching operating systems. They're going to bring their existing game libraries across with them and won't provide visible Linux sales for titles that were released before they switched.

I'd highlight the player base vs revenue exchange that participating in pay-what-you-want bundles brings, but ~30,000 potential Linux users (3.9k from the weekly sale and 24.3k from the HIB2, assuming that the HIB3 Linux puchasers who received RoTT mapped 1:1 to HIB2 Linux purchasers) is, I suspect, a fairly insignificant number compared to the growth that you're looking for.

I should also note that the figures I gave Liam were actually the user count, and the data I've scraped from Humble suggests that the Humble Weekly Sale grossed $14,007.88 from Linux users. I don't recall what the charity distribution defaults were for that one, but it's still nice to see that that Linux users could pull together more money in a week for that than across the year and a half that Steam has been out of beta for Linux (although a cursory glance at SteamDB suggests that RoTT has only had Linux depots on Steam for 8 months).

Humble's Linux figures dropping are no surprise. It seems like they've been progressively alienating those who came onboard to champion the early bundles' ideals, and enthusiasm from Linux users has been a casualty of that (even though the number of Linux debuts that Humble are in part responsible for has tended upwards, the dominant sentiment in the communities I'm involved with is that having cross-platform support shift from something that could be taken for granted to something that's sporadic means that we're not being "looked after" as much anymore).

Quoting: princecI do wish that when I expose these little tidbits of information the discussion didn't always descend into a "your games are shit and not worth a dollah" from loads of people we've only being trying to support for years. It ain't fun. If only the internet in general were polite enough to say, "Well done you, they look good, just not my kind of games, I only play CoD" etc.

I don't believe that you've warranted any of the hate that you've received, but I can see the viewpoint of Linux users who might feel attacked by some of your statements.

Until recently, Linux has been more or less ignored by the industry following the crash around 2005 when Loki, LGP, Epic and id all seemed to wind down a bit. We've been the subject of ridicule and dismissiveness. When you're used to that sort of treatment, it can sometimes be easy to see it when it's not there :(

There's a lot of passion tied up in the Linux community, and some of that leads to people taking things personally that they probably shouldn't. That includes feeling like a developer who regularly supports Linux has their backs, you know. If somebody does have that kind of sentiment, it's easy to feel slighted.

Some of the comments I've seen from you have seemed a little abrasive (most likely unintentionally), and whilst I don't advocate treating Linux users like delicate flowers and hiding these sorts of numbers, I do think that there's stuff you've said that doesn't help the situation.

It's totally OK to feel disappointed by Linux sales figures. There's definitely worthwhile discussion to be had about Linux market sizes and how to maximise profitability.

Quoting: princecBefore Steam our Linux sales were so pitiful as to be almost unmeasurably small - I think we made a couple of hundred bucks a year from supporting Linux. But we still did it anyway :)

I, for one am glad you did. I get a kick out of Ultratron and RoTT is a super cool game.

Do you feel that those numbers vary significantly from the sorts of pre-Steam figures that Frictional have talked about [External Link]?

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Quoting: sevenit runs choppy on fedora, and didnt mean that double fine is a one trick pony, i mean all indie games in general are one trick ponies

Ah. Such generalisations aren't really going to contribute much to a discussion about a specific title's release. That might be best reserved for a forum thread.

Performance is a known issue (effecting all platforms so far as I'm aware). Optimisation is something they're looking at resolving in future updates. It's definitely an issue that makes it harder to enjoy larger bases at the moment (smaller ones seem to have fewer problems), but so long as they're planning to address that before release, I'm comfortable.

So, that Hack 'n' Slash. Has anybody managed to pass through the Wizard's lock for a second time? Has anybody spotted the hacking puzzles (like the Amnesia Fortnight prototype had) that are undoubtedly littered throughout the game's code and assets?

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Sweet. This is one of the few crowdfunded projects that I backed but haven't had time to keep up to date with. Glad to hear they're on track :)

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With the diversity of stuff that Double Fine offers, calling them a "one trick pony" doesn't hold much water at all.

What sort of problems are you experiencing with Spacebase?

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