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?
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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?
Well, Cas, you're good at calling the facts out but you don't seem as eager to hear a few read back to you. The games just aren't worth £7 today.
That's not a 'bad' assessment of the game, it's just how the market has shaped up. There are better ways to spend that kind of money.
As I said earlier, I liked your view point and I loved RotT. I hope it works out for you.
And if you ditch Linux, well that's a hard choice only you can make. But I only use Linux and I want to play your next game. You know, unless it's a Joust remake. :)
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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"
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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You tell people the facts
*eyeroll*
Yes, yes, I read your whining in the RPS article a month ago as well.
While Hyeron here is an entitled idiot, so are you. You deserve each other.
You told people the "facts". Yes, right, the facts and figures that leave out Humble Bundle and regardless don't add up no matter how you look at them. And really, "10x the amount" is obviously a ridiculous expectation, especially since the money you put into the port and GNU/Linux support is so miniscule in your case.
I get that you have to pay your devs, have to eat and pay rent and other bills. That you don't get by with your game is sad, but you're not alone in that. A lot of indie devs are in the same boat, and it sucks. Have you, for example, read the break-down of the Unrest devs? That is devestating and sobering.
Now blaming Linux users on not dropping enough money on your games is quite silly. And I personally feel a bit miffed too, since you did get my money a few times through bundles (and no, I didn't just pay $1), even though I don't really have any interesting in your games. I never installed them, even, they're not my cup of tea. I didn't cost you any support, either. I'm basically your ideal customer: I gave you money for nothing.
Even if it was true, that doesn’t change the fact that client is king.
No. Client is client, until they proof themselves unreasonable and then you fire them.
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Well, 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!
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!
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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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Well, tweets are notorious for lacking context. I'm glad you clarified.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.
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!
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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(giant rant)The whole thing is just completely over your head isn't it?
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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.
And as I say, why would it grow? I doubt Linux users as a base is growing hugely, but even if they were, sorry man, but your games have massive competition now. Massive.
And while I loved RotT, I just couldn't recommend it to a mate when games like Tales of Maj'Eyal are cheaper and offer more hours of game play. I've sunk 100 hours into that and hardly scratched the surface. It costs a fiver. No idea how the dev is doing right enough...
And finally, regarding Worthless, and it's disgusting, shocking reaction, it probably doesn't help that you're deliberately stirring the pot with those tweets.
It's been educational. I'll say that.
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You know what I find hilarious is that they don't take variables into account, like are people interested, the fact that if you recently converted to Linux but had windows games that are now on Linux guess what steam automatically gives you the same game on Linux or let's also not forget that so many better games are coming out soon and near a steam Sale too. You don't think gamers are going to save for the better games, too naive.
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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!)
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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The phenomenon you're describing is not the tragedy of the commons. To the contrary, it's a purely market-driven problem. People imagine that "free markets" produce efficient outcomes and "clear" because of the relentless propaganda to that effect, but it isn't the case. All copyright-oriented industries at this point are suffering from serious market failure problems of one sort or another. In most of them the problems are aggravated by the ease and near-free nature of digital copying. At this point, it would probably be better for both artists and consumers if we scrapped the whole model of selling this kind of stuff, in favour of a public system of subsidies to creators combined with free access to all content via portals which tracked popularity. Subsidies ideally would be a declining function of popularity, so that an artist with at least modest popularity could make a modest living, and an extremely popular one would be pretty well off but not buying islands.
On the other hand, while the troubles of hypercompetition are noted, it's silly to talk about the "actual" worth of something that you put in a set amount of work to create in the first place, but derive a potentially endless stream of free revenue from. Since copyrighted material can be copied and sold effectively for free, the relationship between effort and reward is completely dependent on total sales. At a given price, sell too few and you're in penury; sell three times as many and you're upper middle class; sell twenty times as many and you're rolling in dough with a reward far beyond the effort you put in. And it all could depend on the right person making a tweet at the right time as much as on all the effort you put in making the game. What then was the "actual" worth, the proper price? Of course personally, I derive much of my entertainment from paper-and-pencil roleplaying games. Totting up money spent on rulebooks (much more than I needed to spend) divided by time gaming on those, I come up with about 12 cents an hour. Most of the people I play with, however, bought far fewer rulebooks than I; I doubt they've spent more than 5 cents an hour. Should I consider the "fair" price of computer games to be that much? Of course not, but it's as defensible as your "actual worth" notions.
On the other hand, while the troubles of hypercompetition are noted, it's silly to talk about the "actual" worth of something that you put in a set amount of work to create in the first place, but derive a potentially endless stream of free revenue from. Since copyrighted material can be copied and sold effectively for free, the relationship between effort and reward is completely dependent on total sales. At a given price, sell too few and you're in penury; sell three times as many and you're upper middle class; sell twenty times as many and you're rolling in dough with a reward far beyond the effort you put in. And it all could depend on the right person making a tweet at the right time as much as on all the effort you put in making the game. What then was the "actual" worth, the proper price? Of course personally, I derive much of my entertainment from paper-and-pencil roleplaying games. Totting up money spent on rulebooks (much more than I needed to spend) divided by time gaming on those, I come up with about 12 cents an hour. Most of the people I play with, however, bought far fewer rulebooks than I; I doubt they've spent more than 5 cents an hour. Should I consider the "fair" price of computer games to be that much? Of course not, but it's as defensible as your "actual worth" notions.
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http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humble/weekly/?bundle=Puppy%20Games This has the weekly info on it. Looks about 15k-18k from Linux.
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http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humble/weekly/?bundle=Puppy%20Games This has the weekly info on it. Looks about 15k-18k from Linux.
Actually they got about $3,897.86, I just spoke to Cheeseness to clarify that.
So, with Steam + their weekly sale they got what, around $15.8K from Linux in the last two years. That isn't a lot.
That's still not counting Desura which I believe was so low they never got a payout from, so they don't sell there any more.
Humble Store which is slow low they don't include it either.
The only two missing links are sales from the Humble Indie Bundle 2 which it was in wasn't it? I think it was also included in a later HIB 3 as an added game too, so are you counting them all?
Steam alone for you right now seems like an unfair way to gauge the market that probably had your games for a long time.
Also @puppygames didn't you do direct sales from your website for quite some time too? How do you count that?
Linux is a small market, and it is growing, but like others have plainly stated RotT for one has massive competition that it didn't have in the past, as the tower defence market has so many games now it's unreal.
There will be masses of Linux gamers who owned your games before Steam came to Linux, and I am one of them and again I'm sure it was from a HIB.
So, with that in mind and the weekly bundle why would you expect Steam sales to continue to grow for a small market that has had ample time to get your games outside of Steam?
That's not even taking into account steamplay where Linux gamers picked it up before they moved from Windows to Linux, but I imagine that's a small percentage, but still one to take into account regardless.
RotT is your only game that interested me and the others just don't look enticing to me personally, but that's not to say they are bad. They just aren't games I go for.
Like you said you have supported Linux for how many years? How many years of that was before Steam? A long time for a small market to already have your games one way or another.
> Edited a couple times to be clearer.
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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 :)
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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The PC market isn't dying out, but people would have you believe that, and those people are usually certain PC sellers that aren't doing so well. Then the tabloids pick up on it and put their spin on it and suddenly omg the PC is dying. Not it's really not, and if you go by Steam alone it's growing all the time when they keep smashing their records.
Windows and Mac are both growing. I didn't even think to look at it that way either if I'm honest. That's actually an interesting point and another reason I wish Steam would track 100% of their user-base so that we could see.
The problem is no matter what community you engage with (Linux, Mac, Windows) you will always get replies of "your games suck" or the like.
Such is the way with the internet, and I haven't read all comment here, but I hope no one has said that. I try to keep it friendly here and I hope people report such pointless comments. Some people just tend to forget they are talking to a human at the end of the screen.
I will always support your work and got more hours out of RotT than I would care to admit (purchased it more than once too). Sadly your others games as I mentioned don't entice me, but I'm not saying they are good or bad due to not playing them.
Windows and Mac are both growing. I didn't even think to look at it that way either if I'm honest. That's actually an interesting point and another reason I wish Steam would track 100% of their user-base so that we could see.
The problem is no matter what community you engage with (Linux, Mac, Windows) you will always get replies of "your games suck" or the like.
Such is the way with the internet, and I haven't read all comment here, but I hope no one has said that. I try to keep it friendly here and I hope people report such pointless comments. Some people just tend to forget they are talking to a human at the end of the screen.
I will always support your work and got more hours out of RotT than I would care to admit (purchased it more than once too). Sadly your others games as I mentioned don't entice me, but I'm not saying they are good or bad due to not playing them.
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If you're interested in what we're up to and other strange and weird funding ideas... take a look at our Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/puppygames
Basically we're looking for a small monthly donation so we can carry on making odd games that no-one else wants to make, and this one in particular is interesting because we want it to be free and supported only by fans.
Basically we're looking for a small monthly donation so we can carry on making odd games that no-one else wants to make, and this one in particular is interesting because we want it to be free and supported only by fans.
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It's actually an RTS. To date I don't think there's a single other game quite like it. This is one of the things about video games... there are usually so many real differences between one title and the next in any genre that it really is quite churlish of someone to describe them, say, as "clones".
Interesting tidbit: how many "Space Invaders" games are there on Steam? By my reckoning it's about 3 or 4. There is virtually no competition. Likewise our other three games... there's virtually no competition. You're spoiled for choice if you like shooting people in the face though :)
Interesting tidbit: how many "Space Invaders" games are there on Steam? By my reckoning it's about 3 or 4. There is virtually no competition. Likewise our other three games... there's virtually no competition. You're spoiled for choice if you like shooting people in the face though :)
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Linux is a small market, and it is growing, but like others have plainly stated RotT for one has massive competition that it didn't have in the past, as the tower defence market has so many games now it's unreal.As a TD fan I have to disagree :). For one thing, Revenge of the Titans is not really a tower defence game (because the enemies come from everywhere and don’t follow a path). And then there are not a lot of TD games for Linux ! Fieldrunners 1 & 2, Kingdom Rush… That’s about it? (I know about OTTTD and Sentinel but they aren’t proper TD games either.)
I'd argue your comments that "RotT isn't Tower Defence". You have a base to defend, and a budget to place towers. That's pretty much what it boils down to - the rest is detail. But fair enough. I see Cas himself calls it Strategy, but as he himself states, it's a bit churlish to put stuff in a box like that. I suppose the (infuriating and near-game breaking) "ghosts" in RotT breaks up the notion of "true" Tower Defence, because you have to click like mad when your regular towers ignore them. I hated that aspect personally and it stopped me playing in the end, but I can see how it breaks the mold.
So... whatever.
More importantly, you seem to be missing out on some serious Linux TD love. There's a few titles here and these are only the ones I know about on Steam.
You've already mentioned Fieldrunners, Sentinel and the excellent Kingdom Rush. There's also:
Classic
iBomber Defense
Defense Zone 1 & 2
War in a Box : Paper Tanks
PixelJunk Monsters
Infectionator (Early Access)
Cubemen 1 & 2
Strategy or RPG or "weird"
Rymdkapsel
Defender's Quest
Bad Hotel
Anomoly Defenders (or in reverse, the original Anomoly games)
CreeperWorld3
First Person
Sanctum 2
Dungeon Defenders (& Eternity)
McDroid
Heldric: Legend of the Shoemaker
So, plenty to choose from. I'd personally love to see Sentinel 3 come to Linux, but apparently it's not to be. Shame - I gave up playing it on Android when Origin8 confirmed via email that they had no plans to support Android Play for cloud saves. It meant that the 20 hours I'd poured into the game on my now defunct Transformer tablet was wasted and had to be reproduced on my new Nexus 7. Wasn't gonna happen, and the lack of cloud save on Android is pretty much the primary reason I don't play games on that platform any more.
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Heh, ghosts are easy to deal with - research Xrays :) Or just drop cheapass turrets in their way. And use decoys to lure them off elsewhere. Lots of options!
The reason we don't describe it as TD is because a defining characteristic of TD is that the enemies follow a set path to the goal and don't attack your defences. Because the enemies have no set path and use AI to try and get to you, constantly adapting to the danger they face, the strategy changes throughout each level and subtly over course of the game as new gidrahs appear and you have new tech to experiment with. In this respect it's got far more in common with RTS games than any TD game.
The reason we don't describe it as TD is because a defining characteristic of TD is that the enemies follow a set path to the goal and don't attack your defences. Because the enemies have no set path and use AI to try and get to you, constantly adapting to the danger they face, the strategy changes throughout each level and subtly over course of the game as new gidrahs appear and you have new tech to experiment with. In this respect it's got far more in common with RTS games than any TD game.
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Cheeseness 
Sep 11, 2014
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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