Quoting: hardpenguin

Fair enough, that all sounds quite normal in the business world.

No, it is not. Letting go a significant group of (often experienced and long-term) employees without any further notice is never ok.

"OK" and "normal" are two quite different concepts.

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Dang. If Epic arriving ends up squeezing GOG to the wall that's a lousy trade.

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I dunno. I just can't trust a game studio owned by the Living Planet. :wink:

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: PJso it seems Linux percentage sucks on Asian markets, while on other it seems higher than I'd though. Interesting.

Asian? No, we got the numbers for Russia, China and Japan, it doesn't make the most of Asia; there are indian people, iranian people, thai people and many other ethnic populations. Having said that... what's wrong with these people? What japanese and chinese have against Linux to use it so sparingly? That makes me really curious. Curiously enough, even though for this game the russian percentage is the same as the japanese percentage, I see russians contributing with open-source software a lot more often.

I think you're looking at the figures wrong. The percentage column seems to just mean that country represented that percent of total sales. The Linux percentage can only be derived by dividing the number of Linux units by total units for that country. In the case of Russia it's 22/220, 10%. In the case of Japan it's 1 measly Linux unit out of 214 total, less than half a percent. So your intuition and experience absolutely does match these figures.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: SpykerI think we need the equivalent of GamingOnLinux in French, to spread the word about Linux gaming here in France (u_u)

According to this, France is a total hotbed of Linux use--nearly 13% of sales! We're talking like double the level of the Anglosphere.
Also to a lesser extent Brazil and Russia. Although of course this is a pretty small sample.

Linux is quite vibrant in France (they even had their own distribution, Mandrake, back in the day)

I used to use it. In its heyday, it was the best desktop Linux there was, hands down.

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You know, this is wandering off topic but a couple things people have said about native Linux games made me think, you know, we may be missing something important about the nature of native Linux game support.

We always point out how few AAA games we have, commenting, often disparagingly, how it's all indies. But there's a flip side to that: Linux games are mostly real indies. As I understand it, Steam overall is supposed to be littered with shovelware, cheap crap put together to do something rudimentary with stock art and tempt a few rubes into buying it. But as far as I can tell, and as I would expect, nobody bothers to port much of that crap to Linux--after all, the name of that game is absolutely minimal effort. A sizable portion of the games Linux is missing are probably in that bottom-feeder category. Which means it's stuff we really don't miss. Subtract them from the Steam total, and the proportion of native real games on Linux may be higher than we think. Or to look at it a different way, the average quality level of games available on Linux may actually be higher than on Windows.

Meanwhile, if Proton, with the help of DXVK, can get us access to a lot of those AAA games, which tend to get effort put into making them work in proportion to how popular they are . . . why, if we get really lucky the complete lack of effort put into making shovelware games work or bothering to whitelist them if they do happen to could leave us in a "best of both worlds" situation where we can still ignore a lot of the worst crap but all the good indies are native and all the AAAs work whether they're native or not. Here's hoping!

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Quoting: mylkaDX11 will die with win7 (i know win7 will die slowly)

Thinking about that, and counting back . . . I guess I'm pretty out of the loop on Windows stuff. So OK, we're currently on Windows 10. Windows 7 is the closest thing Microsoft ever got to solid and reliable, and lots of people don't want to give it up. Windows 8 was kind of a disaster, marginally shored up by 8.1 if I recall.
And, uh . . . hang on a minute, was there a Windows 9? I don't even remember.

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Quoting: riusma

Quoting: Purple Library GuyNot sure I get you.

Difference in quantity of games available on Windows vs Linux doesn't matter that much in this case because the offer vastly exceed demand: I have about 150 games on my Steam library, which is less than 3% of the games currently available on Linux, and you will find a few users with about 1500 games on their Steam library... but 90% 99% of Steam users have less than 15 100 games on their library (I have the "right" numbers from 2015 somewhere on an old post, I have to find it * edit : got it *). So, when median demand is about two a few games a year to buy it doesn't matter that much that offer is about 5000, 10 000 or 20 000 games available (I may be wrong, I'm not a specialist in economy). :)

Edit: my memory is not as great as it was, we know (via Steamspy, end of 2015 or beginning of 2016) that only 1% of Steam "active" accounts have more than 100 games in their library (which should not have changed that much), median demand for an "average" Steam user is probably not that far from a few games to buy a year.

Edit(2): note that the growth of the offer, even in the case of Linux market, is probably higher than the growth of the demand for more than 99% of Steam active users.

I don't think it's nearly as mysterious as any of that. There are over a million Linux users on Steam. The number of games total is only in the tens of thousands, the number of Linux games rather fewer tens of thousands. So even if the average Linux user on Steam only had one game in their library, that would still be enough for us to be, overall, buying multiple copies of all the games (except the ones Liam totally warns us off :D ).
But those purchases are going to be divided among the available games. The math is simple: Divide the purchase among fewer games and there will be more $$$ per game on average. There is nothing arcane or even economic going on here, it's just arithmetic. And, supply and demand is a totally different thing, it's about suppliers being able to gouge more for something you need if there isn't enough of it--as seen during disasters when they start charging a mint for bottled water--or not being able to if there's a lot of suppliers actually competing on price--as not seen in the various different companies' gas stations.

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Hurrah!

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Yes, this looks cool. Think I'll stuff it on the ol' wishlist.

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