It seems Puppy Games the developers behind fun games like Revenge of the Titans have expressed their concern about Linux sales.
They took to twitter to say this:
LINUX GAMERS! To date we've made just **$12,000** from Linux games in total for all time for all four of our games! This will not do!
— Puppygames (@puppygames) September 8, 2014
Linux is a small, but growing market we know that, but some developers aren't in it for fun and only see the numbers. They said in another tweet that a factor of 10 would make it more attractive.
Personally I doubt any single developer has made a figure of $120,000 (factor of 10 on their lifetime Linux sales) from a Linux game alone yet, and hell the vast majority of indie games coming out probably won't make that in their entire lifetime.
They have four games and three employees to maintain, so I can understand where they are coming from, but with a market that's still small developers shouldn't expect too much from it yet.
UPDATE
@gamingonlinux just Steam over the last 2 years. We only otherwise sell through Humble these days but that's so little money it's irrelevant
— Puppygames (@puppygames) September 8, 2014
It seems they are only counting Steam, so their original tweet seems a little baiting to get a reaction and more sales. Not a bad thing to try to get more sales, but maybe they should actively engage with the Linux community like some other developers do?
Take it with a grain of salt too, as tweets are hard to get the message across and it's probably more friendly than it seems at first glance.
They aren't counting their own Humble Weekly Bundle which actually gave them revenue from Linux gamers at a mark around $14,000 (not counting charity) which is more than Steam, so they actually made a fair bit more from Linux than they have mentioned it seems.
They confirmed in a comment later it's around the $8,000 mark. That nearly doubled the figure in their original tweet.
They were in a Humble Bundle as well which they aren't counting, and to quote someone from reddit on the matter:
QuoteI'm curious what the breakdown by platforms was from them in the Humble Bundles. Based on this site HiB2 made $361214.76 from Linux users.
Assuming that all of them gave half to charity (leaving $180607.38) and split the non-charitable potion evenly 12 way between the 5 HiB2 games, the 6 HiB games that got pulled in and the tip for Wolfire, they should have gotten $15050.
I would also be interested to know how much they say they got from that Humble Bundle. I am pretty sure they used to do direct sales at one point too, so again a fair bit they don't seem to be counting.
Puppy Games have noted they aren't about to stop supporting Linux, but they see it as unprofitable:
@shadowrabbit64 @fdgonthier we've supported Linux for 11 years, not about to stop now. Just remarking that it is incredibly unprofitable
Puppygames (@puppygames) September 9, 2014
What do you make of all this? It's interesting to see.
If you want to support them consider buying their games on Steam. Looks like they could do with some more love from Linux gamers don't you think?
Quoting: NyamiouAlso, this : http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574. They actually tell to every buyer on Steam that they are just a piece of s**t (I'm not exaggerating). Read it and tell me they do not deserve this.
I read more of that blog than I care to admit.. it's sad really. Someone who has a financial interest in puppy games needs to keep this guy from speaking to the public on the companies behalf. He is digging his own hole. Steam may have brought the price of his games down to $10. Simply being available on steam has givin them a broader audience than they had before. If not enough people are willing to buy your game at $10 and wait for sales or 90% off coupons.. then that should tell you something. The truth hurts sometimes.. and it seems the truth here is that not many people like your games. I just checked on the total users playing their Revenge of the Titans game on steam.. 11. yep 11 people out of 4.5 million currently logged in.
yep.. the linux platform is the problem. smh. I wish it showed how many of those 11 were playing it on linux right now.
oldrocker99 Sep 9, 2014
But their biggest problem, at least from my perspective, is this:
I have Revenge of the Titans. I bought it before I got slightly burnt out on tower defense games, and loved it. Thought it was great. But up until this moment, I had never really thought of Puppy Games. If you were to run up to me tomorrow and tell me they're releasing a new game, I'd be like "who?". You'd have to tell me they're the Revenge of the Titans people before I'd be like "oh, yeah. That was a fun game. I'll bet their next game will be fun, too". Hell, I didn't know they made anything besides Revenge of the Titans up until now.
And that's their problem. They're not doing enough to make themselves a well known brand. They've got the talent, but they're not playing the media game nearly enough. Tasteless though it can be sometimes, it's a dirty necessity if you want your brand to become well know.
So Star Citizen has raised over $50 million, and I'd be willing to wager that 1% of the backers use Linux. (Linux support is confirmed. Especially from the nature of kickstarter/crowdfunding population using Linux more than usual in the larger population.
So thats almost 6k backers using Linux with an average of 1% of 50 million ($500k). This is from a prediction of 1% of funding and 1% of backers as Linux sources (different people pledge different amounts). Build a game that everyone would like/love and is great, and I'm sure you'll succeed financially from Linux gamers (and gamers in general). Kind of like that Bastion game. ;P
I, too, acquired the games in the bundle, and, as usual, I payed more than I needed to. I haven't bought recent Humble bundles, but when I do, I always try to give what I feel is fair price (after all, some of the money goes to charity).
I found their games to be overall ok. They use an arcade-style and implement it quite well. Though, between the games, the mechanics do seem a bit too similar at times. The thing they really could use is better user difficulty controls. I have some trouble enjoying the games because of their difficulty curves. For example, in Revenge of the Titans I would have loved options for increasing the time you get before aliens arrive, or an option for making the economy a bit less constraining. Also the registration prompts with in-game rewards feels a bit off (makes me think of web games).
Looking at the technical side of things, their games, so far, have been written in Java and make use of cross-platform libraries. This makes it rather trivial to port to Linux or even a more exotic platform like BSD. They have fixed it in later releases, but it is still worth mentioning that their earlier Humble Bundle releases had broken shell scripts that just exited immediately ( "if [ false ] then (do the wrong thing) elif ..." << why?). It may also be worth mention that they decided to leave the highly compressible assets uncompressed. I will say that the start time is slightly better uncompressed (I tested it), but it can make a big difference in space usage. All four games compressed take up less space than Ultratron uncompressed and just slightly more space than an uncompressed Revenge of the Titans. (On a side note, these games are what prompted me to think about on-demand decompression for games, similar to what emulators do with ROMs in zip files.)
So I let each game idle to drop the cards and uninstalled them for good.
Also 12k just from linux games on steam, is probably pretty damn good. There are better games
on steam for linux for free.
Hint: Make games that are 10x better, and you will get 10x more sales.
greasedkeen Sep 9, 2014
Revenge of the Titans is even one of the only linux games I've played before Steam on linux. They've shown awesome linux support so far. It's too bad they find the sales disappointing.
From what I've understood, the linux versions aren't their only problem since it seems that their games aren't profitable overall. As I've said, it's a shame...
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