GOG.com Don't Plan On Introducing Linux Support In The Foreseeable Future UPDATED

Well of course we are users not businessmen (most of us). We are trying to show you ways you can support us and trying to get you to see you can and will earn money from us.

You rely on dosbox and ScummVM for some games don't you? Aren't those community run projects? How is that different than using another one? What if no one maintains those projects for a while and updates in say Windows and Mac break them and no one is around to update those projects for GOG?

The linux support vote here: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/add_linux_versions_of_games has nearly 12,000 votes on it, are those masses of people not a big enough percentage of your userbase to work with and earn money from?

The point is you don't need to support every game on GOG under Linux, hell you sure don't for Mac. Why not even for now to dip your toes in use the dosbox and ScummVM games? What is the problem with them? As you surely can't think you would have more issues with those projects on Linux than you would on Windows or Mac?

For DOSBox and SCUMMVM, we have points of contact who are decision-makers in the project and who we established relationships with prior to launch. Also, those projects are substantially smaller-scope than creating an entire OS and maintaining it, so there's less likelihood that we'll see a catastrophic breakdown of the team maintaining it.

And you're right: we could just port our DOSBox games to Linux. The problem enters when we begin to look at cost-accounting. Let's talk about market share: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems.

We've already publicly stated that we receive 30% of the revenue of a game's sale (http://www.gog.com/indie). Out of that comes costs, VAT, processing fees, and whatever the hell else goes on. I'm not gonna keep track of all of those, because it makes the math a pain in the butt. Let's stick with 30%, even though you should realize that our income is actually less than that for any given game sold. When we're looking at adding a cost associated with Windows OS for a game's release, that means that for a cost of x, we should assume that we will sell at least (x*3)/.9 worth of copies for it to work out. For $1,000 of expenses, we assume we'll need to sell about $3,333 worth of games. That's not hard to do at all.

For MacOS, this is tougher. The math there is (x*3)/.08 (using the math from wikipeida; I'm not gonna share internal revenue splits from GOG. :)). For $1,000 of Mac-related costs, we need to project that we expect to see a game sell about $37,500 for the Mac portion of the costs to recoup. That's challenging, but not impossible. 

Linux, though? That's a bastard. For $1,000 in costs, we need to assume that the game will sell about $200,000 worth of games (x*3)/.015 before we've probably recouped the cost of the Linux effort. That's a whole lot of profit that we need to earn from a game--before we even know how well it will sell--before we can assume that we will make back the money invested in.

Now, of course the math isn't quite that simple--Linux-specific fixes tend to drive Linux-specific revenue, after all. So let's just look at the math required to take an already released game and get it ready for Linux. As a completely wild guess, I'd estimate it takes about 100 - 150 hours of labor from "Hey, we would like to sell this classic game on GOG.com" to "released". This is true of DOSBox games, SCUMMVM, or any other classic release. We test every classic game we release, remaster it, jigger with the settings, and generally invest time in the games. This number isn't reduced substantially for adding a new OS to already-existing signed classic titles: we don't have rights to sell on that OS, we have done no testing, we haven't made any masters... it's not as simple as turning on a switch. So now consider: let's assume we want to launch with 60 games on Linux (that's the same number we had on Mac). 60 games * 150 hours * cost of labor....that's not cheap. Even if I assume US minimum wage for all of the labor employed, that's 60 * 150 * 8.75 * 3 = $236,250 USD games sold--Linux copies only, mind you--before it looks like this is a break-even point. The usual basis for "successful operation" is 300% revenue over costs, which means we'd need to believe that we will sell nearly a million dollars worth of Linux copies of those games for the effort to be considered "fiscally prudent." Keep in mind that none of the above numbers account for the costs associated with the fact that we would need to spend a lot of time and money learning how to actually handle releasing a game on Linux, hiring new staff, and et cetera. 

Now, others have mentioned that we sell games that right now support Linux and we don't sell Linux versions of those games. Part of that is because, again, we support our games. So many of the staffing costs associated with "adding Linux games" to GOG.com will be present whether we're re-mastering games ourselves or not. In either case, due to the fact that we're fundamentally a different business model than Steam or Desura, we must take a different approach to Linux support than they are. They can pawn you off on a developer and say, "This is not my problem." On GOG.com, it is our problem. 

All of this leads to a single point: the processes are not as simple as you think they are, and the risks are higher than you believe they are. We did not make the decision to move into the MacOS lightly, and it was something that took a lot of time and work to do. If we ever move into the Linux space, it will be because it looks like we have figured out how to add Linux support in a manner that is consistent with our core values, and something that we believe we can be proud of and you can enjoy.

Reading all this I know one thing for sure:
We have to look at this from both sides of the coin...

We are looking at it exactly like that.

This whole topic is not about *we* as a small community against them as businessmen. Being pissed at their decision won't get us anywhere. We are the ones who want something from them, while they are making their decisions, after all. We want more support from them, so we, as gamers, can enjoy what we want to enjoy the most: Games.

If that is what you think then please read the comments again. Especially the wall of text ones that tend to explain where the GoG people get it wrong and why. Yes, some people called their reasons BS because, frankly, they are and it's well explained why in the comments that you probably missed.
 

Therefore neither a flamewar nor a counter to every argument will get us anywhere. TheEnigmatic came to us after all, even though he knew something like that was coming up. Wouldn't it be wiser to analyze what was said? Actio et Reatio...

What TeT does is called damage control, in my opinion. He is the PR person after all. I was not angry at GoG for not supporting Linux. It's their choice, their money. What really grinds my gears are the reasons they gave, which for newbies seem like good reasons but for the more seasoned of us are bullshit.

Example:
For them, this decision obviously NEEDS to be about money. It simply is their job after all. But there is much more to this: Even IF we have the necessary amount of interest in games AND the necessary amount of money to make them interested, the whole process of support OBVIOUSLY is the actual issue here.

There's also the issue of who  the people that assess what needs to be done in order to provide proper support are. The way TeT describes the process was to throw PupEEE Linux and Mint on some machines and something something until something else broke. When it broke the conclusion was drawn that it sucks and does not warrant effort. The ones doing the assessments were people that don't seem to know much about how things are or can be done on Linux machines. A weekend (please tell me you did not waste a month banging your head against the wall) project like the one TeT describes does not make it market / technology research. It's entertainment.

Linux, though? That's a bastard. For $1,000 in costs, we need to assume that the game will sell about $200,000 worth of games (x*3)/.015 before we've probably recouped the cost of the Linux effort. That's a whole lot of profit that we need to earn from a game--before we even know how well it will sell--before we can assume that we will make back the money invested in.

Sorry but now you have completely lost me.

I honestly don't get your math at all or your reasoning for why $1,000 of costs for a Linux version means you need to get $200,000 in sales?
I mean seriously come on, that's just a joke. If it costs you $1,000 you need to get $1,000 to break even, anything above that is revenue, revenue you wouldn't have gotten without it.

There's also the issue of who  the people that assess what needs to be done in order to provide proper support are. The way TeT describes the process was to throw PupEEE Linux and Mint on some machines and something something until something else broke. When it broke the conclusion was drawn that it sucks and does not warrant effort. The ones doing the assessments were people that don't seem to know much about how things are or can be done on Linux machines. A weekend (please tell me you did not waste a month banging your head against the all) project like the one TeT describes does not make it market / technology research. It's entertainment.

You're literally making stuff up.

For personal use, I use PupEEE Linux and Mint. For institutional research--as mentioned in the above--we evaluated Mint, Debian, and ChromeOS, and did do in depth. I don't know what you consider a sufficient audit, but I consider four people working for two weeks on researching build frequency, library deprecation, market share, bugs, immediate portability, etc. and etc. is sufficient for us to reach conclusions. I'm sorry that they're not the conclusions that you want, but please don't assume that our QA, IT, and dev teams are incompetent. We went about this seriously, we investigated it fully, and we continue to be evaluating this rationally and reasonably. As soon as this is a good move for us--whether because of something that we do on our end or some new technology that gets conceived--we will certainly be happy to add Linux support.

Linux, though? That's a bastard. For $1,000 in costs, we need to assume that the game will sell about $200,000 worth of games (x*3)/.015 before we've probably recouped the cost of the Linux effort. That's a whole lot of profit that we need to earn from a game--before we even know how well it will sell--before we can assume that we will make back the money invested in.

Sorry but now you have completely lost me.

I honestly don't get your math at all or your reasoning for why $1,000 of costs for a Linux version means you need to get $200,000 in sales?
I mean seriously come on, that's just a joke. If it costs you $1,000 you need to get $1,000 to break even, anything above that is revenue, revenue you wouldn't have gotten without it.

I may not have explained that fully. If I'm adding a cost for a specific project, I want to make sure that the costs from that project are worth it. So, given the size of the market share of Linux, if I'm spending $1,000 to fix a Linux issue, then I'd generally assume that the game will need to sell a heck of a lot of copies for it to actually recoup the Linux-specific costs.

EDIT: And, as a really rough back-of-the-envelope statistic, that means you need to sell enough copies of the game that, given the small market share, you assume that the percentage of people who bought it equated to your costs. In that case, my rough math was (1,000*3)/.015. 

On the other hand, I'm working on this in between other spreadsheets. I may have gotten the maths wrong?

Linux, though? That's a bastard. For $1,000 in costs, we need to assume that the game will sell about $200,000 worth of games (x*3)/.015 before we've probably recouped the cost of the Linux effort. That's a whole lot of profit that we need to earn from a game--before we even know how well it will sell--before we can assume that we will make back the money invested in.

Sorry but now you have completely lost me.

I honestly don't get your math at all or your reasoning for why $1,000 of costs for a Linux version means you need to get $200,000 in sales?
I mean seriously come on, that's just a joke. If it costs you $1,000 you need to get $1,000 to break even, anything above that is revenue, revenue you wouldn't have gotten without it.

I may not have explained that fully. If I'm adding a cost for a specific project, I want to make sure that the costs from that project are worth it. So, given the size of the market share of Linux, if I'm spending $1,000 to fix a Linux issue, then I'd generally assume that the game will need to sell a heck of a lot of copies for it to actually recoup the Linux-specific costs.

Still lost me sadly, I am not a businessman which is why unlike some other people I won't be calling you colourful names but if I spent $1,000 in time to fix a Linux issue on a game and made $2,000 from it, that's $1,000 in revenue.

I can see how you are shying away from the Linux support if that is how you are doing your math though, you can't just divide it by market share and say that's how much you need to get.

Edit > Like I said business isn't my strong point so I won't comment on that anymore.

Still lost me sadly, I am not a businessman which is why unlike some other people I won't be calling you colourful names but if I spent $1,000 in time to fix a Linux issue on a game and made $2,000 from it, that's $1,000 in revenue.

Ah. Easy enough then. Let's say I am cost accounting--that is to say, trying to make sure that the things I spend money on are things that actually earn me money back. I spend $1,000 fixing a Linux bug.  Since Wikipedia suggests that Linux is 1.5% of the market, that means that for every $1,000 I sell, I assume that 1.5% of it is earned from Linux users. So for every $1,000 earned, I'm actually earning $15 from Linux users.  

Now, GOG.com receives 30% of the gross price of a game. So if I want to earn back the $1,000 of expenses, I need to gross $3,333 in sales. But I want to see if my expenditure of fixing this Linux bus is worth the money, so I want to project the overall revenue from the game to get a feeling if it is worth the money to fix. To have Linux gaming bring in $3,333, the percentages suggest I need to gross $3,333/.015. Which is $222,200. So to earn back a $1,000 expense on a Linux-specific bug fix, a (very) rough projection is that the overall gross revenue from the game should be assumed to be about $200,000.  Otherwise, the cost required to fix that Linux bug will, presumably, not recouped and, instead, I would have been better off putting that $1,000 elsewhere, regardless of whether or not the game itself was a success.

Does that make any more sense?

Desktop market share doesn't correlate directly to game sales, especially when it comes to Linux as we have a much higher proportion of tech-savvy users inclined to do gaming for what ever small market share we have.

Looking at the stats on crossplatform Humble Indie Bundles, you'll find the total number of Linux purchases is at least half that of Mac purchases.

From my point of view I see the following:

As was said before the Linux Distros are missing one thing, both Windows and OSX have. Standards on industrial Level. Standards any Developer follows, any Developer knows about, any Developer trusts in to be static and supported. Something thats not whimsical and dynamic. As TheEnigmatic said before they fear that support stops the moment a Design decision splits the Developers. From my Point of View the Bunch of Linux Distros in general are like a Cluster of Cells that constantly evolves through survival of the fittest. Thats why Linux biggest strength (and (from my point of view) advantage towards Windows (and OSX?)) lies in chaos, evolution and flexibility. Yet still the Linux Distros in general, just like a Cell, need an Interface on the outer side that won't change that much, so they still get information and nutrition. Something that secures stability while the inner parts evolve as they see fit. Isn't that the purpose of Programming Interfaces in general? As I said before I might be missing something here...

Even though I still am not at a Level to say something like this (by far :D):
Are they at fault for wanting what is established in every Industry to reduce the costs?
Or are we at fault for not providing something like that?

Bundleing is nice approach but would need support by the distros... who hate it with passion as such distro agnostic approaches questions their role as central control instance.

What the? Since when do I need to ask anyone anything about bundling libs in my tarballs/installers? Seriously, WTF? Nobody needs to ask distros for anything. That is the whole point of a bundle.

You are right this is the vision on bundleing... but if the distros give a fuck about minimal inter-distro and backward compatibility, they are creative/careless enough to break things (see how the loki packages were broken). That was one reason why autopackage failed because the distros gave a shit on compatiblity and autopackage had to introduce more and more fragile distro dependent shim code.

Since Wikipedia suggests that Linux is 1.5% of the market, that means that for every $1,000 I sell, I assume that 1.5% of it is earned from Linux users. So for every $1,000 earned, I'm actually earning $15 from Linux users. 

Market share is a bad basis for your calculations.

Looking at the stats on crossplatform Humble Indie Bundles, you'll find the total number of Linux purchases is at least half that of Mac purchases.

So assuming that you're going to use actual sales data instead of market share, that'd put Linux sales at being 4.7 times more than you're currently accounting for...

So assuming that you're going to use actual sales data instead of market share, that'd put Linux sales at being 4.7 times more than you're currently accounting for...

Whoops, miscalculation. 2.38 times more than you're account for...

There's also the issue of who  the people that assess what needs to be done in order to provide proper support are. The way TeT describes the process was to throw PupEEE Linux and Mint on some machines and something something until something else broke. When it broke the conclusion was drawn that it sucks and does not warrant effort. The ones doing the assessments were people that don't seem to know much about how things are or can be done on Linux machines. A weekend (please tell me you did not waste a month banging your head against the all) project like the one TeT describes does not make it market / technology research. It's entertainment.

You're literally making stuff up.

For personal use, I use PupEEE Linux and Mint. For institutional research--as mentioned in the above--we evaluated Mint, Debian, and ChromeOS, and did do in depth. I don't know what you consider a sufficient audit, but I consider four people working for two weeks on researching build frequency, library deprecation, market share, bugs, immediate portability, etc. and etc. is sufficient for us to reach conclusions. I'm sorry that they're not the conclusions that you want, but please don't assume that our QA, IT, and dev teams are incompetent. We went about this seriously, we investigated it fully, and we continue to be evaluating this rationally and reasonably. As soon as this is a good move for us--whether because of something that we do on our end or some new technology that gets conceived--we will certainly be happy to add Linux support.

Since no real insight was provided on the process and the conclusions that were drawn and which were debunked here it really looked to me like what I called it to be. I never said that what I described was the truth, just what I supposed the truth to be based on the info I had. Of course there was my subjectivism mixed in as well.

I also did not say that your IT ,QA teams are incompetent. GoG makes money so that would be dumb for me to suggest. What I said was that the people working on the Linux project do not seem to know what the heck they were doing since the conclusions that were drawn and which you exposed here have been proven wrong. 

The thing is that you people make money from me even if you don't have a Linux inventory. We will still buy stuff that works in  DOSbox and ScummVM but also in wine (and Crossover or PlayOnLinux). So when presented with a choice between spending money to make money or spending nothing and still make money I get why any sane person would choose the latter. It's only that people like me don't get counted as Linux users, so from a business pov we do not exist. That is what the sales numbers say after all.

Maths stuff

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

Maths stuff

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

Sure. Let me just add a coda here that, while I did not use any of our internal numbers for discussion here, we do know how many of our sales come from users who are on our website using Linux, and we were able to draw our own conclusions as to what expected growth we would see after we officially supported Linux--based on our own experience with MacOS--and while our numbers were quite different, the conclusions we reached are the ones I'm giving you.

Maths stuff

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

Sure. Let me just add a coda here that, while I did not use any of our internal numbers for discussion here, we do know how many of our sales come from users who are on our website using Linux, and we were able to draw our own conclusions as to what expected growth we would see after we officially supported Linux--based on our own experience with MacOS--and while our numbers were quite different, the conclusions we reached are the ones I'm giving you.

Now it's getting interesting ;)

I am glad to see you track Linux sales stats in some form.

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

I tend to agree. GOG addresses already a specific audience from the gaming community, which infact cares for DRM. As this specific audience cares for such abstract values the chance are good that the usage of a free and open source operation system is (significant?) higher than in general gaming audience. Therefore I think addressing linux is almost mandatory for GOG for the philosophical nearness of free and opensource and DRM-free. Especially if the competitors Desura and Steam without such high ideals like GOG already provide support.

As reasonable was explained, business-wise linux support might be a unsafe bet, therefore GOG should start with the most minimal support target possbile like "linux-approved dosbox packages" (plain tar-packages instead of wrapped windows installers). But please, start! Even if it is only for the buzz!

Can you ask them why they can't provide game data in a way that at least gives us the option of making it work for ourselves?

If I didn't have to jump through installshield/wine hoops to get the game data to play in DOSBOX, GoG would be a whole lot more viable for me. I don't need their support, but it would be nice to have them remove the artificial barriers that they've erected.

shaw we kickstart something about this gog linux thingy? huh?

Maths stuff

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

Sure. Let me just add a coda here that, while I did not use any of our internal numbers for discussion here, we do know how many of our sales come from users who are on our website using Linux, and we were able to draw our own conclusions as to what expected growth we would see after we officially supported Linux--based on our own experience with MacOS--and while our numbers were quite different, the conclusions we reached are the ones I'm giving you.

Now it's getting interesting ;)

I am glad to see you track Linux sales stats in some form.

True, but that doesn't track the sales they've lost since Steam and Desura have come to Linux. I know that I have seriously curtailed my purchases on GoG in the last year (considering that my collection on GoG runs into the triple digits...). I'd rather buy from a platform that supports my OS of choice, even if the title isn't yet available for my OS.