Obsidian: Developing For Linux Was Not Worth It

I just noticed something that I don't think has been brought up earlier. The original Kickstarter asked for $ 200,000 extra to cover the cost of porting to Linux and Mac (as a stretch goal), so even without counting the Linux sales, Obsidian should already be in the clear and all Linux sales should be counted as pure profit.

Am I missing something? I would really love for them to come out with a bit more detail about this...

Well, in that case it makes Brandon Adler's statement even more ridiculous (no offence). Because someone made the calculations and reached the conclusion that porting not only for Linux but for Mac too that it would cost 200k. The goal was achieved... success?? So what is he even complaining?

Precisely. Unless he's saying that Linux brought the cost up to more than 200K, in which case I think we'd all really like to know what the issues where so we can try and fix them. I don't think that's the case though.

This is not hot kickstarter or funding works. Stretch goals do not mean "Everything from the last stretch goal to this one is for THIS thing," no, not at all. Most of the money enriches the product as a whole with that stretchgoal feature being part of it. Even if you want to discount that (despite it being a necessity) they could've done a different stretchgoal and still gotten the 200k.

Either way, no matter how you cut it, Linux support took money out of their overall budget for a feature that wasn't worth it.

And no, 200k doesn't justify a port on this level. What few seem to realize are the man-hours involved along with the possibility cost. Is it 'hard' to port a game? Not really, but it will take months of work from people costing the company 10k a month (conservatively, when you consider pay, benefits, and operating costs). All it would take to break 200k is two people regularly working on the port. Then you get into QA, additional fees, and then after-launch support. The latter most is a killer since Linux varies so much it's even more difficult to manage than Windows post launch.

Then it gets worse.

Obsidian is a very small studio in the scheme of things. Not only are they always tight on money (the kickstarter budget did not cover the full game, to be sure) but they don't have a 100+ people to throw at anything like EA. Every hour a good worker spends time on Linux he's not furthering other areas, areas that will improve the game for 99% of consumers and possibly give them a new feature to market.

All in all, it was a very costly choice. There was no profit just from man-hours alone, this is before you even get into the cost of the tools they used to make it. Obsidian promised to support the product through all of its expansions at the least, which deserves to be commended and the hatred they're getting is in bad taste.


Last edited by ManyFaced on 31 Aug 2015 at 3:50 pm UTC

This is not hot kickstarter or funding works. Stretch goals do not mean "Everything from the last stretch goal to this one is for THIS thing," no, not at all. Most of the money enriches the product as a whole with that stretchgoal feature being part of it. Even if you want to discount that (despite it being a necessity) they could've done a different stretchgoal and still gotten the 200k.

While it's indeed not clear if people added said $200k for -exactly- that stretchgoal, it's irrelevant as they asked for a budget of $200k to get the ports done and they got it. They -were- funded before work even started. If the core functions were underfunded and they would have actually needed the $200k for them, it means they didn't set up the KS right.

Also, I believe that $200k -should- be enough to cover the port, at least if the developed with cross-platform deploy in mind (and it would have been silly not to, as the ports were planned from the get-go). Icculus has ported games all by himself in as little as a few weeks if work, and I am not sure anyone would have paid him $100k for that.

Either way, no matter how you cut it, Linux support took money out of their overall budget for a feature that wasn't worth it.

If that's the truth I wonder what they have expected deploying on a platform having 1% of the market share. Actually with the 1.5% of sales we were -overrepresented- in sales figures.

And no, 200k doesn't justify a port on this level. What few seem to realize are the man-hours involved along with the possibility cost. Is it 'hard' to port a game? Not really, but it will take months of work from people costing the company 10k a month (conservatively, when you consider pay, benefits, and operating costs). All it would take to break 200k is two people regularly working on the port.

A port is -largely- a one-time affair.

Then you get into QA, additional fees, and then after-launch support. The latter most is a killer since Linux varies so much it's even more difficult to manage than Windows post launch.

That's the only of your points actually having some merit, but really, that's why pretty much all publishers limit official support to one distro (Ubuntu). In which case it's around the same complexity as Windows. Yes, it's true that Linux creates a disproportional amount of support tickets, but they started with a paid port and got around $500k in additional revenue from Linux sales. Assuming that the usual 30% go to Steam etc, that's still a LOT of revenue and I highly doubt that the 5000 Linux users created $350k worth of support tickets and Linux related bug fixes.

Obsidian is a very small studio in the scheme of things. Not only are they always tight on money (the kickstarter budget did not cover the full game, to be sure) but they don't have a 100+ people to throw at anything like EA. Every hour a good worker spends time on Linux he's not furthering other areas, areas that will improve the game for 99% of consumers and possibly give them a new feature to market.

Again, that's why they asked for a $200k budget for that. The port was paid for. If they didn't have enough in-house capacity, they could/should have taken said $200k to hire additional devs.

All in all, it was a very costly choice. There was no profit just from man-hours alone, this is before you even get into the cost of the tools they used to make it. Obsidian promised to support the product through all of its expansions at the least, which deserves to be commended and the hatred they're getting is in bad taste.

I don't think anyone is spitting hatred on them. We just don't agree with their assessment.

They really should reach out to their backers and ask how many of them use Linux. Looks like they are talking about sales, and forgot what enabled their development without publishers. This "2%" talk sounds very much like backwards thinking publishers' PR.

It's like a never ending cycle

developers: "there are not enough linux users so we wont develop for it"
users: "Linux doesn't have enough games. I won't switch to it."
developers: "there are not enough linux users so we wont develop for it"
users: "Linux doesn't have enough games. I won't switch to it."
developers: "there are not enough linux users so we wont develop for it"
users: "Linux doesn't have enough games. I won't switch to it."
developers: "there are not enough linux users so we wont develop for it"
users: "Linux doesn't have enough games. I won't switch to it."


rinse and repeat forever....

I'm with Kimyrielle.

They asked for funding (streach goal) in order to make mac/linux versions. If they got funded there's no reason to complain at all.

If they miscalculated the costs, that's not our fault either.
So, yeah I can't understand their point at all.


That said, I don't think this is a classic "we dont develop cause you don't have user base"
It's more like: "I know you wanna build a Space Station, I gave you some of my trust, but where's the profit on those buildings you are raising..."

Overall, I'm with those who think that very likely, if they say it didn't make money for them, it probably didn't. We can go back and forth on the revenue and the potential expenses all day; it seems like there's room for plausible arguments in various different directions about how much the port could have cost and how much money it might have made, and lots of people have said intelligent things about that. But since we don't really know, we have one fairly definite data point: This dude saying they didn't make money. Note that it doesn't really sound like he's saying they hemorrhaged money over it, either. But well, 1.5% of sales, and I really don't see it as too implausible even with modern engines that supporting an additional OS that they don't understand well at all could represent over 1.5% of costs.
Probably if they did it again it would be slightly cheaper, with an ongoing but flattening curve of more cheaper every further outing.
More broadly, it seems like Linux is kind of . . . right on the edge. Given current technology (engines and whatnot, as well as the state of Linux in certain game-related areas) and current market share, it seems like some studios do ports or cross-platform releases and say it was worth it, others say it wasn't. And of course the ones who know Linux seem more likely to say it's worth it, although I don't know if that's because it's cheaper when you know how or because the ones for whom it worked out well continue and get to know Linux better or just out of sentiment, with people who know and like Linux simply wanting to judge Linux releases a success . . .

What that says to me though is that, first, we need more market share (duh), and, second, that at this point even a little more could make a major difference. Steam Machines are likely to be very important as long as they're not a total flop; even if they only add like .5%, even just .2%, that could tip a huge proportion of ports over from "Meh, that was a wash at best" to "We actually made a tidy bit of change".
Then there's those Google things, the Chromebooks; there's a lot of them around these days it seems. They're basically Linux (much more so than Android is). You can't use Chromebooks for serious gaming, but surely the little buggers could run casual games. Maybe someone should do some sort of push to make Steam games more available to them, both technically (Some kind of group of packages for making ChromeOS look to a game pretty much like either Ubuntu or SteamOS, so stuff bought from Steam would reliably run on one) and marketing-wise (I'm not a marketer, don't have any great ideas for this, sorry). You could have this group of packages called "Steamify" or something that would make Chrome work well with SteamOS games and install Steam itself, and get Google to include it in its package-manager GUI thing (I assume they have one), which Google presumably wouldn't mind 'cause it'd be an extra feature. Well, something like that.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 31 Aug 2015 at 7:15 pm UTC

@Kimyrielle (since I'm not gonna pull that quote wall): Not sure what you're missing here. You seem to be under the assumption that the port was 'paid for' in a way that didn't takea way from funding elsewhere. That's not true. They could have gotten that 200k with a different feature without going out to back Linux.

That's the problem here. Linux created a bunch of extra work, took a bunch of extra time, took up a large chunk of their budget... for what? Nothing. Your quotes of 500k revenue is silly; there's more cuts than steam involved and it's highly likely they either A) Did not break even, or B) Barely broke even. Doubly so when you say ports are a 'one time affair'. No. They have to bugfix the port every time they make a patch, every time they add new content, and with every xpac (there'll be three of them).

Also, it's worth saying that while Linux has around a 1% market share (as in the percentage of the population with it) that does not mean the game needs to have a 1% Linux share. It's entirely possible for an under-delivered demographic to have a much higher market-share than usual if there's no other options. That didn't happen.

Regardless, there's no argument to make here. People can deny what they want but having 200k of backing for a port wasn't worth it on the cost side of things, which is what matters. Obsidian is doing nothing wrong by not supporting something that doesn't make them money and the "it's an investment" argument has been thrown around for years without it being true. There's no reason to believe that Linux will suddenly blow up to be a dominant force in gaming, or a worthwhile one.

...and that said, if someone can afford a game for 40 bucks, they can afford to get a windows license and dual-boot.

It's a shortsighted view that "it didn't make money". Cross platform development is an investment. They wanted people to invest in their project (crowdfunding). They can also invest now in the growing Linux market.

...and that said, if someone can afford a game for 40 bucks, they can afford to get a windows license and dual-boot.

If you can afford 120 bucks for a windows license, you can afford to send me 40 bucks to buy PoE for linux.


Last edited by Menelao on 31 Aug 2015 at 8:49 pm UTC

Damm , why do we do wild assumptions and not just ask them ? Gaming on linux just send them an email how this comment was meant and express the questions raised.

Second i would like to give you all access to the documentation of the game (sadly i can't) but 2 Facts which are never mentioned in the whole discussion:

1.) Obsidian was on the edge of closing the studio. So maybe they did compare what could have meant a 200k invest in case of more features to sell more copies on windows and what did a 200k invest in case linux as a platform meant. The conclusion might had been, that it would be more wise for the studio to survive when they invest this money into windows features. Thats just plain where is the chance higher to survive. I'm honest here i would rather see Obsidian drop support for linux and make sure the company survives than makeing a linux version and die. Hopefully they come back and besides complaining that it wasn't as much return as they hoped that the experience and the linux crowd was still a pleasure. That also includes the fact that 1.5% are realy good sales for a "popular" game.

2.) Pillars of Eternity is one of the best unity games on linux up to date and it already was when they first released it. It's one of the few unity games which maintain 60+ fps even on highest settings on my rig (very uncommon). They must had done a lot to secure this. It even runs better than the current build of Wasteland 2. In the documentation you see that they even tweak their game using a gpu debuggers just to make it running smooth. I for myself wouldn't wonder if they crushed their selfset limit (so the investment was higher than the return in their eyes) for a port. At this point i only hope that they trust their new knowledge and for future tittles on linux make sure to avoid most of the issues they had with Pillars of Eternity.

The following points also floating in my mind:
a.) when Pillars of Eternity's development was started noone knew about how good or how bad unity on linux realy was / is. So they did a damm good job. Also i remember that at this point most of the tools which are available now wheren't available back then and they basically did the port blind (Unity not on linux / gpu debugger not realy existent / for most stuff a gamedev does only workaround exists at this time)
b.) The RoI (return on invest) for a lifelong used platform will most like always be better than for a new platform.


Last edited by Glog78 on 31 Aug 2015 at 9:28 pm UTC

2.) Pillars of Eternity is one of the best unity games on linux up to date and it already was when they first released it. It's one of the few unity games which maintain 60+ fps even on highest settings on my rig (very uncommon). They must had done a lot to secure this. It even runs better than the current build of Wasteland 2. In the documentation you see that they even tweak their game using a gpu debuggers just to make it running smooth. I for myself wouldn't wonder if they crushed their selfset limit (so the investment was higher than the return in their eyes) for a port. At this point i only hope that they trust their new knowledge and for future tittles on linux make sure to avoid most of the issues they had with Pillars of Eternity.

Can you tell me your build? I can barely get above 40 fps in my game despite being over the recommended settings.

I think this is why sometimes devs get PR training - even with market share small as 1.5%, there's really no point pissing off your customers like this. Especially when further answers indicate they still want to work with Linux, which leaves potential customer like me very confused.

I think experience is something you gain and if you keep pushing it you get very good at it. I don't see reason why having Linux development experience is bad for Obsidian.

2.) Pillars of....

Can you tell me your build? I can barely get above 40 fps in my game despite being over the recommended settings.

v2.00.0706 - steam
on nvidia the trick is -> __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 LC_ALL=C %command%
Use a Phenom II X6 1090T + GTX 970

In fact, they didn't say it was loss to them. They said it was comparingly easy, but QA and testing involved seem to be burden for them - that or they don't know how to do it cheaply. So my guess they didn't lose money on port. However they expected bigger sales for some reason.

@Kimyrielle (since I'm not gonna pull that quote wall): Not sure what you're missing here. You seem to be under the assumption that the port was 'paid for' in a way that didn't takea way from funding elsewhere. That's not true. They could have gotten that 200k with a different feature without going out to back Linux.

Perhaps they could have gotten the 200k for some other feature, sure. But again, this is totally and utterly IRRELEVANT. They asked for 200k to fund the ports and got it. Your statement is akin to saying "Yes, I asked my dad for $500 for college textbooks but I spent them all on booze, so my college books weren't funded!"

That's the problem here. Linux created a bunch of extra work, took a bunch of extra time, took up a large chunk of their budget... for what? Nothing.

No, OUR budget. Remember we gave them 200k to make the port?

Your quotes of 500k revenue is silly; there's more cuts than steam involved

You don't seem to understand the difference between revenue and profit. The $350k after Steam's cut went into their pockets (at least the largest part of it) and can be used to fund any Linux related costs OTHER than the port itself, which was already paid for. As long as only ONE DOLLAR is left after subtracting all direct costs caused by them supporting Linux (and it would be utterly incorrect to to count any but Linux-related direct costs) it was worth doing it.

Also, it's worth saying that while Linux has around a 1% market share (as in the percentage of the population with it) that does not mean the game needs to have a 1% Linux share. It's entirely possible for an under-delivered demographic to have a much higher market-share than usual if there's no other options. That didn't happen.

You don't seem to realize that 1.5% of sales caused by 1% of the customer base means a whopping 50% over-representation of Linux users. Math is really amazing, huh?

Seriously, I have no idea what their expectations were, if they are so disappointed. Did they REALLY think that 1% of the customer base could be responsible for 10% of the sales or so? In which mass market did that EVER happen?

Yes, I guess what happened is that they looked at the numbers and saw a tiny Linux figure next to a huge, huge sum representing their Windows sales. Big surprise there! I don't think they looked at it correctly, though. And the correct business perspective is checking if the Linux support in brought ONE DOLLAR more than it cost to make and maintain. If that's the case it's worth doing. That's really very basic business logic.

...and that said, if someone can afford a game for 40 bucks, they can afford to get a windows license and dual-boot.

I can afford a BMW and don't have one. Because I don't want one. Your point?

it's funny to read about this, and yet they had Aspyr port Star Wars: KOTOR 2 over to Mac/Linux. they should just let Aspyr do all their ports for them. Obviously it helps to know what you are doing. Knowledge = less time taken to develop, which equates to more money for the developers.

But whichever, I'm glad to see so many worthwhile games being ported to Linux. these are some interesting times indeed.

Will everybody stop counting Obsidian's profits? Did anybody stop and think this company consists of some of the most successful and reknown developers of the last 30 years? You know - people who maybe, just maybe, know more about making games and selling them than a bunch of random people on the internet.

Will everybody stop counting Obsidian's profits? Did anybody stop and think this company consists of some of the most successful and reknown developers of the last 30 years? You know - people who maybe, just maybe, know more about making games and selling them than a bunch of random people on the internet.

Selling games for a long time doesn't make them experts in crowdfunding. They were successful with Pillars, sure. But such attitude as shown above towards Linux users doesn't translate into good relationship with the community which can be critical for their future crowdfunding success. I.e. they still seem to think in publisher funded terms (at least in context of Linux). Such studios should also think about backers, not just about sales alone. inXile get that better I think.

They might revert back to publisher funded games, and that would be unfortunate. But if they want to continue crowdfunding campaigns, they better think twice before saying such stuff.


Last edited by Shmerl on 1 Sep 2015 at 1:23 am UTC

There's no reason to believe that Linux will suddenly blow up to be a dominant force in gaming, or a worthwhile one.

"As of February 2015, over 4,500 games are available through Steam, which has 125 million active users."

Please sir, grace us with more of your divine wisdom about this so-called Linux and why it will never being successful.

View video on youtube.com


"The native operating system of the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a fork of FreeBSD"

"Sony has revealed PlayStation 4 console sales numbers passed the 22.3 million mark"

Oops, 2 l8 m8.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 1 Sep 2015 at 3:50 am UTC

Will everybody stop counting Obsidian's profits? Did anybody stop and think this company consists of some of the most successful and reknown developers of the last 30 years? You know - people who maybe, just maybe, know more about making games and selling them than a bunch of random people on the internet.

You're a Genius. I guess 30 years of experience guarantees that someone"knows what they're doing" - cuz you know 30 years ago in game development, the platform, market, demographic and distribution mechanisms have all stayed exactly the same.

Maybe 30 years from now you can spread some audible chocolate to us all about how lobotomies and blood letting will solve any ailment because you have "X years experience".

Also "stop counting Obsidian's profits" - you mean throw away our intel which we use to make educated guesses? What a brilliant idea, while we're at it lets all just throw away common sense and good judgement too.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 1 Sep 2015 at 3:43 am UTC