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The developers of Halfway recently celebrated a year of their game being released, and they threw up a nice little graphic showing information about what happened. Included in this are Linux sales statistics, and Linux support requests.
I hope they don't mind us uploading and linking to it, but I don't want us to strain their server:
Click it to make it bigger!
Source blog post
It's another case of Linux being obviously lower than Windows and Mac, but it's well in line with what other developers have been experiencing (2%).
I was most interested to see that Linux actually does have a rather high support request percentage, as opposed to other platforms.
How do you feel about these statistics?
I recommend giving Halfway a go, as it's quite a nice space strategy game, and reminds me of XCOM rather a lot. You can buy it from them directly, as it lists many stores. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I hope they don't mind us uploading and linking to it, but I don't want us to strain their server:
Click it to make it bigger!
Source blog post
It's another case of Linux being obviously lower than Windows and Mac, but it's well in line with what other developers have been experiencing (2%).
I was most interested to see that Linux actually does have a rather high support request percentage, as opposed to other platforms.
How do you feel about these statistics?
I recommend giving Halfway a go, as it's quite a nice space strategy game, and reminds me of XCOM rather a lot. You can buy it from them directly, as it lists many stores. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: NelQuoting: mr-eggQuoting: liamdaweErm, Risk of Rain is by a completely different developer.
http://blog.chucklefish.org/team/
risk of rain is on that published release list. Many grovels if im wrong, I went to the chucklefish website?
Chucklefish is the publisher. Reading your link, they developed games too : Starbound and Wayward Tide.
Risk of Rain has been developed by Hopoo games.
Halfway has been developed by Robotality
are they not responsible for the quality of published titles?
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Quoting: EikeQuoting: scaineQuick calculations, then - they sold 520'sh Linux versions, which generated 262 support requests.
No.
~524 Linux versions sold (26200 * 0.02)
~79 support requests for all platforms (26200 / 1000 * 3)
~24 support request for Linux (79 * 0.3)
So about every 20th Linux sale created a support request.
Ta. I thought that ratio seemed high. I think I entered the wrong figure when doing the support requests, as I'm way off on that.
Rethinking my earlier comment too - I think this game is definitely worth a purchase and I might have been simply distracted by the bigger AAA games arriving at the same time. If you see a 30% sale or better, this is definitely worth your while.
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Quoting: mr-eggare they not responsible for the quality of published titles?
Not really. I mean from the code point of view, they are not able to fix by themselves any bug or any poor performance.
Video game publisher / Video game development.
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Quoting: mr-eggThey published risk of rain :/ that's almost totally broken on Linux and windows.I've played it on both Windows and Linux, and it even works with an XBox 360 controller in Linux. What is it that's supposedly broken?
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Now -- I'm an experience linux user, so my experience is perhaps more smooth than most users... but I'm on an unsupported distro, Arch Linux. Arch makes no attempt to be compatible with any distro, although the steam runtime generally takes care of most of that. But even when it doesn't I've rarely had issues that were more than just a odd dependency. It seems to me though, that if you are running an unsupported distro you are giving up official support. Maybe others don't see it that way? I don't know.
But there are often a lot of issues I get on Linux that I just don't get on Windows. Say, for example, Guns of Icarus. I have dual monitors on my system (hardly uncommon!) but the game will not fullscreen correctly. I had to make script to disable and reenable the second monitor when I run the game. Most users wouldn't know how to do that, but then, if the game was done properly they wouldn't of had too. My understanding this is Unity's fault, but as the customer that's not MY fault. That's just an example where Linux gets treated poorly.
The end experience on Linux versions is very often just plain not as good as Windows, and I'd wager that's the result of a number of these support requests. If the user is running some kind of Ubuntu, and then running their games with the steam runtime, I can't imagine what sort of issues Linux users would be having that isn't related to the product itself in some way.
If you run something different like me, then you should understand the dev never said it would work for you in the first place and you should ask the community for help rather then the devs themselves. Dev's who have the time and energy may help you anyway though, and I've seen that a lot (Guns of Icarus devs DID reply to my posts I made on the community forums btw, I think they would of sorted out the issue if it were reasonably possible).
Short version is I guess is that if I'm running the supported setup I expect an experience like I would on windows and very often don't get that.
But there are often a lot of issues I get on Linux that I just don't get on Windows. Say, for example, Guns of Icarus. I have dual monitors on my system (hardly uncommon!) but the game will not fullscreen correctly. I had to make script to disable and reenable the second monitor when I run the game. Most users wouldn't know how to do that, but then, if the game was done properly they wouldn't of had too. My understanding this is Unity's fault, but as the customer that's not MY fault. That's just an example where Linux gets treated poorly.
The end experience on Linux versions is very often just plain not as good as Windows, and I'd wager that's the result of a number of these support requests. If the user is running some kind of Ubuntu, and then running their games with the steam runtime, I can't imagine what sort of issues Linux users would be having that isn't related to the product itself in some way.
If you run something different like me, then you should understand the dev never said it would work for you in the first place and you should ask the community for help rather then the devs themselves. Dev's who have the time and energy may help you anyway though, and I've seen that a lot (Guns of Icarus devs DID reply to my posts I made on the community forums btw, I think they would of sorted out the issue if it were reasonably possible).
Short version is I guess is that if I'm running the supported setup I expect an experience like I would on windows and very often don't get that.
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Quoting: salsadoomIf you run something different like me, then you should understand the dev never said it would work for you in the first place and you should ask the community for help rather then the devs themselves. Dev's who have the time and energy may help you anyway though, and I've seen that a lot (Guns of Icarus devs DID reply to my posts I made on the community forums btw, I think they would of sorted out the issue if it were reasonably possible).
Short version is I guess is that if I'm running the supported setup I expect an experience like I would on windows and very often don't get that.
@salsadoom - your voice is very reasonable and I wish this attitude was common.
Now, even on a sanitized setup like Ubuntu there are normally more moving parts than on Windows - for starters, imagine how many things would be broken if Windows users installed their own (or community-produced) drivers. Games break even with vendor drivers (e.g. when too old)! This is not to mention that Linux APIs (like OpenGL) allow several ways to do the same things; some outdated and some more modern ones - all this adds dimensions to the test matrix. If on Windows you have to test VideoCard * OSVersion combinations, on Linux you begin with VideoCard * VideoDriverVendor * DesktopEnvironment * OSVersion number of test cases.
The other reason for worse support is disproportion between the number of users. This is not limited to Linux - Windows users running less common setups (e.g. two GPUs from different vendors, or outdated version of the OS, or sometimes even a version of the OS in an exotic language) will also have more pain.
Developers, especially small, cannot afford extensive coverage - even if they get QA testing in form of Early Access on Steam, they often need to reproduce the problem locally in order to understand it - and this may be unfeasible, be it Windows or Linux. Not everyone can install Arabic version of Windows to understand what causes the text to render badly in right-to-left order. Same with Linux - even when the devs try, their unfamiliarity with Linux works against them (you would be surprised how many Windows coders don't ever touch command line tools these days, doing all their work via GUI).
TL;DR - two factors behind worse support: vastly different (order of magnitude more) number of test cases on Linux, plus relative obscurity of the platform - developers are unlikely to use it themselves, so don't test/know it that much.
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