Developer of 'Steam Marines' talks sales, Linux represented 2% over the lifetime of it

Quoting: WorthlessBumsIs 2% good or bad? If it's bad then there's presumably things I could do to get more Linux users. If it's good, what most people here seem to be saying, then that's actually really bad because that's a strong argument against supporting Linux in my games; they'd simply never even break even.

Mathematically, there's 4 times the number of games for Windows compared to Linux, so you might expect 4 times the sales compared to the OS percentage. On the other hand, other effects will come into place. Maybe Linux users tend to certain genres. Who knows?

Quoting: WorthlessBumsWhat did I expect? I didn't really have a round number in mind, truth be told. Steam Marines 1 sold quite a bit better than I expected overall and this was my first time porting any piece of software to Linux. If I had to do something similar in the future I expect that it would take me less time.

This sounds good and is to be expected. What doesn't sound good is the mentioned bug list for linux. I don't know how you are handling this, but restricting the official support to only one or two versions (Ubuntu & SteamOS) and strictly defined requiremnts might help.

Thanks for your open words!

Quoting: LeopardWe're a small community.In all platforms,%3 Linux sale is not a bad thing.

What is he expecting?

He expected less than 6%, it seems:
https://twitter.com/Worthless_Bums/status/485238498124124161

@WorthlessBums

I see that you've taken the correct approach this time by developing a new game in Unity :) There you can literally just push compile and the game has a great chance of already working on all platforms, just avoid using platform specific middlewares and you should have no time or cost loss there :)

Secondly, the testing. Trust me when I say that www.gamingonlinux.com is one of the best and nicest communities in general, sure there are exceptions, but make this community your friend, all in all it is great and trust me that a lot of users would love to do majority of the testing for you as well and report the bugs for the linux platform so early access or beta could be a great Idea regarding Linux. Even some Linux youtubers would probably love to do a review of your games if you let them know about them and promoting it!

Not really sure about how Mac stands, a lot of devs say that it is much more profitable to support Mac eventhough I honestly think that this is just because of the commercialism, Majority of Apple's hardware cannot even run the newest AAA games and those that can cost so much money that only small portion of people can afford it... so percentage of marketshare for Mac can be really misleading as long as AAA gaming is concerned.

Best of luck on your new game and let us know when you finish it!

I didn't read what all wrote, but this is my opinion,
general video games news spoke few month ago about a CRASH from business:
There are so many indies and the market is saturated by games.

So linux buyers supported a lot independants studios, and I think this was a part of their popularity.
I add that: crowfunding system follow the donations to support, which came with linux, and open source mentality.

But now what we need on linux are AAA games, I'm sure about it.
Vulkan and wayland are very good news the future of linux gaming.

I have 170 games on my steam account and 90 support linux, I bought them especially since a year.
But I have no TIME to play them.

And I still buy some, mostly to support developers work.
I look indies with distance. I have so many arcade games which are waiting on my library.

It sounds familiar that linux gamer ask for indies about a linux version.
Me again ;), I don't buy indies which are not on linux, it's buying criteria, but I won't ask dev about it.
I think that should be in their process, like the subtitles for example.

2% of games sales can be a lot of money if they sold a lot.
No one is to blame

Long time I didn't wrote here, thx for your work guys


Last edited by Voltage on 8 November 2016 at 8:07 pm UTC

Is 2% good or bad? If it's bad then there's presumably things I could do to get more Linux users. If it's good, what most people here seem to be saying, then that's actually really bad because that's a strong argument against supporting Linux in my games; they'd simply never even break even.

Look at that answer...Wow.Just wow.

Come on sunshines.Enligten me up.

Come on,don't be shy.

We all know if Valve is not interested to develop SteamOS we wouldn't see so much game on Linux.Valve is simply pushing big developers and studios,because they want to compete with consoles with SteamMachines.And of course they're want to take precautions to Ms Uwp and Ms Store.

So don't waste your breath on devs like this.When Valve is succeded Linux succeded,when Valve is not Linux is not.

Quoting: WorthlessBumsDeveloper here ;)

First, thanks to everyone who said some kind things! Second, I'd like to clarify a few things.

...

Someone tried to run the revenue numbers from Linux sales of Steam Marines 1, but it was both inaccurate and incomplete. I am under NDA as a Steam developer, but I can cast a bit of light on the whole issue.

I recently blogged that the game's entire development cost was $97,913.88 USD over a 30 month period. That comes out to an average of $3,263.90 a month of development cost. About 70% of that cost was spent paying myself to work on my game (i.e. not contracting for art, audio, et cetera). That brings the monthly cost down to about $2,284.73.

It took me about a 3 month span to port the game over to Linux, but part of that was not full time dev, so let's just say it took about 2 months. That's a total cost of $4,569.46 to get the first Linux build up and running. The person who tried to run the revenue numbers came up with a gross figure of €4,440 - so you can already see the problem.

.....

Is 2% good or bad? If it's bad then there's presumably things I could do to get more Linux users. If it's good, what most people here seem to be saying, then that's actually really bad because that's a strong argument against supporting Linux in my games; they'd simply never even break even.

.....

I'm currently working [Steam Marines 2](http://www.steammarines2.com/), and the subject of Mac and Linux has already come up. This time there's no significant cost for porting because I'm making the game in Unity instead of Torque2D. That said I've already been performance testing on Mac and there are issues, and I have Linux-specific bugs a mile long. To support both those platforms is likely to result in yet another loss on the long run although not a foregone conclusion.

Thanks for the additional detail and for supporting Linux! I honestly probably haven't and won't buy any of your games but I still appreciate your work. It's unfortunate to hear so many bugs on steam marines 2 using Unity, does this appear to be more work than it was with 1/no Unity? What version of Unity? Is it actually Unity or plugins/middleware that are the problem? Do you plan on releasing Mac/Linux day 1 with Windows? Comparing 3 years of Windows sales to 1 year of Linux sales doesn't seem very helpful. Would be interesting to see if the numbers are the same with simultaneous releases.

1) I'd like to thank the dev for supporting Linux and also for his thoughtful post here on GoL..

2) Is there a way to ignore people like Leopard in the comment sections. His comments really make me sick.. They are singularly unhelpful in attaining our end goals of game parity with other platforms, as well as unappreciative and ungrateful.. :(

Quoting: WorthlessBumsDeveloper here ;)

[cut to keep the thread readable]

Thank you a lot for your feedback. I hope this will clear a few misconceptions.
As for your game, I am sorry to say that I didn't buy it until the Humble Bundle (I wasn't even sure it was in my library to begin with).
I however remember looking at it quite a lot of times and wondering wether to buy it, but it didn't appeal too much for me... Tastes, you know :) I guess it's the same about every game, platform or thing ever made. Some people don't like chocolate cakes, hey.

So, while I feel a bit guilty about not really purchasing your game (even though I put non-linux games at 0 in my humble bundle purchase), I think those figures are pretty accurate, expected, and, most of all, interesting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it, too.
I must say that given those figures, I was expecting a bit more hostility (à la Garry Newman :) ) towards this market. I however still have some hope that it will grow even more in the following years. Plus, being multi-platform is "future proofing", and has quite a lot of advantages that don't need to be detailed here. But that's very true that it's different from actually supporting a game. I guess that continuous integration with unit test would help, here, but that could be said of any project, and requires testing anyway.

I don't have any magic bullet for solving those issues, but now I have something to chew on for the next couple of days :)

P.S: On the plus side, you could now probably provide a Steam Marines build for the Raspberry [would be cool to see a steam-like store there], Smart TVs, car infotainment systems, the steam controller, and maybe some toaster out there. How cool is that? :D (and how useless, btw).


Last edited by MayeulC on 8 November 2016 at 8:47 pm UTC

Quoting: WorthlessBumsDeveloper here ;)

First, thanks to everyone who said some kind things! Second, I'd like to clarify a few things.

Thanks for the detailed reply - superb stuff. Please do try to ignore a few bad apples in the basket... this is usually a very friendly community, honest guv. Thanks for setting me (specifically) straight too - I've always equated that 1% of steam users must mean 1% of direct sales, but clearly, it's not that simple. I hadn't, for example taken into account the overall game tally. That said, I still believe that a dev porting to Linux and expecting much more than one or two percent sales from us... particularly a year after Windows release is... optimistic.

I'm not a fan of the misconception that "if you build in Unity, you'll only have to hit the Export to Linux button to make it work", so while it's a shame you have a big list of Linux specific issues, I'm not at all surprised that it's not that simple. It's a tired line that "unity = Linux support" and that you must be lazy or incompetent to NOT support Linux.

I destroyed Bionic Dues, as I mentioned earlier, and loved it. So if you do manage to release on Linux (particularly if it's day one support), then I'll be very interested in Steam Marines 2.

Good luck.

Quoting: inlinuxdude1) I'd like to thank the dev for supporting Linux and also for his thoughtful post here on GoL..

2) Is there a way to ignore people like Leopard in the comment sections. His comments really make me sick.. They are singularly unhelpful in attaining our end goals of game parity with other platforms, as well as unappreciative and ungrateful.. :(

Yeah dude,you should block me.If there is a thing like that exists

So you're not sick about these Tweets and sick from my comments.

Excellent