Puppy Games Aren't Impressed With Linux Sales (UPDATED)

Quoting: princecAfter 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 :)

That is an interesting connection. I've played with the LWJGL in a game engine of mine before.

Quoting: CheesenessI get a kick out of Ultratron and RoTT is a super cool game.

Nice to see someone else liked Ultratron. Many people seem to only mention Revenge of the Titans. RotT has excellent music and art, but, of the four, Ultratron is my favorite, at least gameplay-wise. Avenging humanity is pretty fun :).

@cheeseness I didn't realise you gave me user numbers not revenue in my earlier comment.

In reality Puppy Games have made far more from Linux then in that case.

The $12K from Steam, plus the $14K from the Humble Weekly then. So, with Humble Weekly and Steam that puts our figure much closer to the point around $26,000 from Linux gamers.

That's not even counting the two Humble Indie Bundles.

I think the net Linux share was $8k in the Weekly.

Interesting. Plus looking into it your games have only been on Steam/Linux for a year not two years.

So with Steam + the weekly it's more like $20,000 then. not $12,000 and that's quite the difference in total.

That still isn't counting HIB2/3. Although they were some time ago now.

What sort of revenue were you expecting from Linux?

In future I do wish you would be a little more clear in tweets :)

Thing is, Caspian has stated that he's hoping for 10 times that. The difference between $12k and $20k is negligible in that context.

Even if you multiply the figure by two to make up for the missing year, it's still only halfway there.

Well as previously stated the Linux market is still small, so smaller earnings are to be expected of course.

Just a little odd to say that $12,000 figure was to date, but not taking into account quite a few other sources from Linux gamers that push it a fair bit higher than that.

The trouble with tweets is they're only 140 characters and people like to read in all sorts of stuff that isn't there. The tweet was actually about Steam sales only, and it was a lighthearted dig at the Linux community (of whom I am a part, I may add!) which casts a wry look at the vociferous nature of some members of the community versus the actual rewards a developer might really see ;) Even the 10x figure was facetious! (Remember, Mac revenues are only twice what Linux has!) A doubling would be just great.

On a slightly more serious note... we're pretty lucky being in Humble Bundles. Well sort of lucky. I spent years and years networking with other indies and being poor learning to make games and so on and in that time I "met" a whole bunch of interesting people (eg. namedropping, but Markus Persson, Jeffrey Rosen, Cliffski, Jim Rossignol, Dan Marshall, etc) and made friends with them. I also managed to piss off quite a few of the most primadonna ones as well but that's just how I roll.

So anyway, I got to know Jeffrey Rosen and he just sort of liked me, and back when the Humble Bundle was a Brand New Thing he wanted to stick Droid Assault in HIB#2, and I said, no wait! We've got this new game, Revenge of the Titans, which is nearly done, how about we release it on the HIB#2? And so we did, and we've had a great relationship since then. However for the other 99% of developers it's all about begging and grovelling and spamming emails at Humble and hoping they take pity, and so Humble Bundles really aren't the way to make money in general. Indeed we're wondering about the sense in ever sticking a game in a Humble Bundle again, not because of the intense devaluation of the games that end up in the bundle, but because of its overall effect on the perceived value of games in the entire gaming ecosystem.

So there's that.

Quoting: princecThe trouble with tweets is they're only 140 characters and people like to read in all sorts of stuff that isn't there.

Part of what wasn't there was the lightheartedness that you mentioned. You can't expect people to pick up on that if you're not providing indicators of it (and as I said earlier, Linux users are likely to take this stuff more personally than they should).

"lifetime" sales was there, but not detail on that being Steam only, and perhaps covering a longer period of time than Linux builds were available on Steam.

"incredibly unprofitable" was there, but I find it hard to believe that you've spent $20k on Linux support alone, which would mean that it had to have at least been a tiny bit profitable.

I'd be wary of suggesting that people have read stuff into your words when they're taking them at face value.

We're working hard to help developers understand that supporting Linux isn't a waste of money. Stuff like that makes it harder.

IMO, the best thing to do when you've stepped on a nerve unintentionally with facetiousness is to apologise (I hope we'll see that in the blog post you mentioned).

Quoting: princecSo there's that.

Well, it's a tradeoff. Userbase for profit margin. That's not necessarily a bad proposition, but it has to make sense within the bigger picture of where you are financially and where you want to be with regards to player count.

Devaluing of games is a super tricky issue, but I believe there are ways to participate in pay-what-you-want models without killing the mean perceived value of a game. it'd be great if promotion organisers like Humble put more effort into highlighting these events as opportunities to support developers rather than opportunities to get cheap games.

When you do a blog post, I'd love to hear details of how your per platform Steam sales figures compare to the platforms that Steam says people are playing on.


Dan's an absolute hoot <3

Maybe it's a generational thing or a cultural thing but if you know Dan at all then you should probably know that "This will not do!" is clearly a joke... but then maybe only if you're English.

I always refuse to apologise when people simply don't understand though - as a matter of policy I explain rather than attempt to placate, which earns me a lot of hate but I find that it's best not to bow to bullying from mobs.

Unfortunately... $20k really is peanuts. We might not have spent $20k on actual email and forum support but you've got to remember all the other costs are still there too. There was the time spent building natives for Linux (had to work out how to do it from scratch - total beginner). There's the time spent figuring out bash scripts to run the games (again - total noob). The time spent working out the little foibles of Linux which need to be addressed in the game (Java doesn't do everything). The time spent making automated builds for Linux. The time spent testing on Linux. Then there's the ongoing repeated testing, building, uploading, verifying of the Linux builds - 8 of them - every time we make a patch to the core code to tweak something. It goes on and on. $20k is about 3 months' salary (60 days) here in the UK for someone who doesn't live in a cardboard box, and it's a very fine line between simply making a loss versus even just breaking even once you add in support. So that's the problem we're dealing with.

FWIW you don't get to talk to many developers privately about this stuff but I can tell you now, opinions are the same across the board, and most of them are pretty unhappy about it. We do it because it's pretty cheap for us because we've used Java; other devs with cross-plat engines like Unity similarly can manage it just about without making a loss. But still other developers who've written code to DirectX or Windows specifically have a much, much harder time of it, usually only amortised by a simultaneous but expensive port to OSX at the same time, and there the financial burden is genuinely a great risk to them: not only have they got all that other stuff but they've got (roughly) a $10-20k porting cost depending on the game complexity on top and then an ongoing maintenance budget.

Right now, also, there are only three reasons developers are supporting Linux for gaming. The first one is sheer stubborn bloodymindedness (the camp that we fall in to). The second is a fairly cynical marketing ploy (I know developers who literally despise Linux but who port to Linux simply because it'll make them look cooler in the eyes of geeks). The third is access to Unexpectedly Massive Platforms: that's the Humble Bundle for some, but for almost all of the rest, they're banking on SteamBoxes being the Next Big Thing.

So honestly... there's not really any more evangelising needs to be done at this point. I think SteamBoxes are the singularity everyone's waiting for.

ps. not sure if I can get actual useful figures for steam sales versus systems played from my dashboard

Quoting: princecMaybe it's a generational thing or a cultural thing but if you know Dan at all then you should probably know that "This will not do!" is clearly a joke... but then maybe only if you're English.

Yeah, might be a cultural thing. I'm pulling a general vibe across all of the stuff I've read though, not just that first tweet.

Super sad to see apologising being viewed as bowing to bullying. Real apologies definitely aren't that.

Quoting: princecit's a very fine line between simply making a loss versus even just breaking even once you add in support. So that's the problem we're dealing with.

For sure, but that's still a very different picture to "immensely unprofitable".

Quoting: princecFWIW you don't get to talk to many developers privately about this stuff but I can tell you now, opinions are the same across the board, and most of them are pretty unhappy about it.

Thankfully I do get to talk to developers about it, and the majority of those I've come into contact with (ignoring those using stuff like Unity or other cross platform engines) feel that whilst Linux hasn't given them outstanding revenue, it's more than paid for its porting costs and has resulted in a net gain. I've even spoken to some who've had unpleasant experiences (which is super disappointing) but aren't willing to consider dropping Linux because of the revenue loss they'd suffer.

I'm totally happy to take what you're saying onboard, but I'm not comfortable taking your word for more than your own experiences, not when it contradicts what I'm hearing from multiple other sources.

It definitely is a much larger unknown and bigger risk for developers who aren't familiar with Linux and there's a lot of learning involved.

Quoting: princecRight now, also, there are only three reasons developers are supporting Linux for gaming. The first one is sheer stubborn bloodymindedness (the camp that we fall in to).

<3

Quoting: princecThe second is a fairly cynical marketing ploy (I know developers who literally despise Linux but who port to Linux simply because it'll make them look cooler in the eyes of geeks).

I've come across these as well. I wish they'd go away. Nobody needs support from people who aren't supportive.

Quoting: princecThe third is access to Unexpectedly Massive Platforms: that's the Humble Bundle for some, but for almost all of the rest, they're banking on SteamBoxes being the Next Big Thing.

You're definitely missing the fourth category of people who feel that they get something worthwhile beyond geek cred (financial return, community growth, more portable/versatile tech) out of supporting Linux.

Quoting: princecSo honestly... there's not really any more evangelising needs to be done at this point.

I don't agree. Given the positive experiences that others have had, there's value in helping to demystify and uncloud the investment and return associated with supporting Linux so that developers curious about supporting Linux can make informed decisions, have appropriate expectations and above all else, positive experiences.

Quoting: princecps. not sure if I can get actual useful figures for steam sales versus systems played from my dashboard

I've spoken to other developers with stuff on Steam who say that that's visible to them. I wish I had something published on Steam so that I could get a clearer picture of what is and isn't available (and help point people in the right direction when they might have missed something).