We did pretty well out of HIB#2 but that was a looong time ago and Linux % shares have dwindled even for Humble Bundle since.

One 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.

Thanks for your candid appraisal of our particular games - I 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.

Before 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 :)

After all the whole reason we exist is because we made that crossplatform graphics library LWJGL so we could have Linux games. Y'know, the one we gave away and open sourced and that Minecraft is built on :)

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Consumers are bound by the tragedy of the commons... with everyone discovering the best route to visibility is to charge next-to-nothing for a game we have educated customers that games can and should be had for next-to-nothing.

What consumer is going to be daft enough to buy a game at its actual worth? I realise that "worth" is a subjective value but objectively it's cost in dollars divided by hours of entertainment, and right now, we can have anoter fascinating look at some real stats: Revenge for example... in the last month, the mean gross price paid was $2.73 and the mean playtime per user is 6 hours 23 minutes. Or about $0.42 for an entire hour of entertainment. According to Steam, Revenge is played for approximately the same amount of time as nearly all other games on Steam.

Fascinating statistics, no?

(edit for maths!)

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Quoting: Hyeron(giant rant)

The whole thing is just completely over your head isn't it?

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Quoting: scaineWell, tweets are notorious for lacking context. I'm glad you clarified.

As for not growing, that doesn't sound fair. You don't have anything on Steam that's been launched on day 1 for all three right? So most gamers either already own your IP from other sources, or there was no Steam for Linux at the time. We'll know one when the next game comes along.

And keep writing the blog. Very entertaining. Maybe there really is no such thing as bad press after all. A few thousand people now know the name Puppy Games. I just hope they read Aftermath... Or you're screwed!

Not really our fault Steam only released on linux a short while back - we've been there since 2002! The context of the tweet was me looking at the last 12 months and wondering why Linux sales make up such a pitiful % of revenue now rather than growing. I'm looking forward to seeing how Basingstoke does.

Shame people have to read Aftermath to understand the Worthless post but I suppose not a lot of people actually try and read anything and comprehend it any more.

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@DrMcCoy Dude, if you bought our games, what gave you even the vaguest notion that I'm "whining" to you, about you?

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They still sell at £7, and, well, surprisingly... they still don't have any real competition. There are no other games that play just like them.

No, what the tweet was all about is why Linux sales aren't growing. They may be written in Java which makes them a bit easier to port but unfortunately Linux users are about 50% of the support effort when they arrive en masse (because Linux is, well, you know).

I'm not seriously going to stop supporting Linux - we've supported it since 2002 and always released for Linux on day 1 alongside Windows and Mac. It's just still, after 12 years, not financially sensible, and I wonder just how many other developers are wondering why they bother too.

I say this in a climate of extremely tight margins and necessary cost cutting. As consumers have driven prices down to unrealistically low and unsustainable levels (seriously - can you expect games to continue to be made if they have to be sold for less than a cup of coffee?) we have to properly examine ways of cutting out unprofitable ventures in order to scrape a living.

Btw anyone here still failing to understand "Your Worthless" had probably best read the followup post "Aftermath". And if you still think you're being personally insulted, I have a brilliant message for you, yes, you, just for you! "Fuck off and don't come back xxx"

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Same old crap hmm. I get to read this every day - lucky me. You tell people the facts and you get rewarded with vitriol, dismissal, insult, rudeness, genius business insights, and almost pathologically deliberate misunderstanding.

Perhaps we'll stop bothering with Linux support after all; it seems that the financials are backed up by general opinion, no?

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