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In a recent interview with PC Gamer, lead producer Brandon Adler of Obsidian said, "I don't think it was worthwhile developing for Linux. They are a very, very small portion of our active user base - I think around one and a half percent of our users were Linux."
While he did add that is was easy to get the game running on Linux, he cites additional logistical problems like QA and a development team with no previous experience developing for the platform.
These comments stand in slight contrast with statements made in June to Mac Gamer HQ where the interviewer asked "Do Mac and Linux sales justify the extra work involved?" and got back "Yes. Any time you can get the game out on multiple platforms is a huge win for sales because obviously your audience is expanded to include many more people." Although one could argue since the site is a Mac site, the response was equally Mac-slanted, despite the mention of Linux.
As with any such statements, I wonder if the aforementioned added burden can be quantified in time/money spent, and how that compares with the income gained form the 1.5% Linux sales. Surely, it was just a matter of it feeling like a larger burden than it really was due to it being new for the studio?
Smaller studios with reservations about Linux development should really consider outsourcing these efforts, or at least be open to licensed ports. I'm fairly sure the likes of Aspyr/Feral would be more than happy to reap the rewards of managing such ports, especially when the effort is purely QA and support, rather than actually needing to port engines.
Editor Note: If any developer creates a Linux version before Steam Machines are released and expects more than 2% of sales from it, they're doing it wrong. You're doing it for the future and for the long run, not for a quick gain which you won't get right now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
While he did add that is was easy to get the game running on Linux, he cites additional logistical problems like QA and a development team with no previous experience developing for the platform.
These comments stand in slight contrast with statements made in June to Mac Gamer HQ where the interviewer asked "Do Mac and Linux sales justify the extra work involved?" and got back "Yes. Any time you can get the game out on multiple platforms is a huge win for sales because obviously your audience is expanded to include many more people." Although one could argue since the site is a Mac site, the response was equally Mac-slanted, despite the mention of Linux.
As with any such statements, I wonder if the aforementioned added burden can be quantified in time/money spent, and how that compares with the income gained form the 1.5% Linux sales. Surely, it was just a matter of it feeling like a larger burden than it really was due to it being new for the studio?
Smaller studios with reservations about Linux development should really consider outsourcing these efforts, or at least be open to licensed ports. I'm fairly sure the likes of Aspyr/Feral would be more than happy to reap the rewards of managing such ports, especially when the effort is purely QA and support, rather than actually needing to port engines.
Editor Note: If any developer creates a Linux version before Steam Machines are released and expects more than 2% of sales from it, they're doing it wrong. You're doing it for the future and for the long run, not for a quick gain which you won't get right now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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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 August 2015 at 3:50 pm UTC
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.
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.
A port is -largely- a one-time affair.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone is spitting hatred on them. We just don't agree with their assessment.
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....
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..."
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 August 2015 at 7:15 pm UTC
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.
Last edited by Menelao on 31 August 2015 at 8:49 pm UTC
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 August 2015 at 9:28 pm UTC