Yacht Club Games have announced that Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove [Official Site] has officially sold 2 million copies, with Linux accounting for 1.1% of Steam sales. It's great to see another success story for an indie developer, as that's a pretty healthy amount of sales, especially considering the amount of competition when it comes to this type of game.
In their announcement, they actually left out Linux statistics completely (likely due to how small it is). So I reached out to the developer to ask about Steam sales with Linux being included and they allowed me to share this with you:
So that's Windows: 93.5%, Mac: 5.4% and Linux at 1.1%.
It is worth noting, that the Linux version was released several months after the Windows version, so it's possible a few sales would have been lost there. We know a timely release does affect Linux sales, with people running games in Wine or loading up a Windows install for some games (something I read about people doing quite often).
Also, when comparing PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) to other platforms, Windows itself only sold 24.4% of the copies with 3DS coming in hot at 23.9%.
Don't own it yet and want to boost their Linux sales a little or just fancy giving it a go? You can grab Shovel Knight on Humble Store, GOG and Steam. Note: Humble and GOG links are affiliate links.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Pompesdesky Apr 13, 2018
I would like to share this interesting bit : around me, in France, the only people I know who are using Linux are environmental / left wing militants / activists. Apart from those, I don't know any. Not even people working in computer science (except if they are also militants) and obviously not gamers.
I'm French and don't consider myself an activist, but I consider myself a gamer with close to 3000 hours on the last iterations of the Battlefield Franchise (BC2, BF3 & BF4), plus a lot of other games. So obviously there are some like me, but I agree that I can't see a lot in my environment. I'm trying to make people switch to Linux but gamers I know mainly don't want to leave out their Windows Steam libraries and don't want to mess with Wine and such complicated workarounds :(
I would like to share this interesting bit : around me, in France, the only people I know who are using Linux are environmental / left wing militants / activists. Apart from those, I don't know any. Not even people working in computer science (except if they are also militants) and obviously not gamers.
I'm French and don't consider myself an activist, but I consider myself a gamer with close to 3000 hours on the last iterations of the Battlefield Franchise (BC2, BF3 & BF4), plus a lot of other games. So obviously there are some like me, but I agree that I can't see a lot in my environment. I'm trying to make people switch to Linux but gamers I know mainly don't want to leave out their Windows Steam libraries and don't want to mess with Wine and such complicated workarounds :(
Being a Frenchman myself I would say that french people like to belong to the mainstream. Everything, from movies to music to literature is utterly mainstream in France. As a master student I chose to specialise in science fiction, which is not even considered as a literary genre. Our metal bands are awarded at Grammy awards but are completely ignored. Our best writers sell less than 50 Shades of Grey. Guess what, it's the same with computers. We spend 300,000 a year in software in our public institutions and keep cutting the education budget.
I'm surprised that macOS is still above Linux sales. With Apple planning to kill 32-bit support in the future, I suspect at least a portion of macOS gamers will migrate to Linux (otherwise they'll lose their 32-bit games for good).
In all seriousness, if people want to keep playing 32bit games... they don’t have to upgrade their os.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Apr 15, 2018
Of course I know a few other people using Linux, usually they don't play games. The only exception I know are other computer science students.
Even though I tried to convince my friends to switch, it's not happening. I wonder why, they're already a little older and don't care too much about gaming anymore anyway. The only exception would maybe be my sister, she's fine with gaming and Linux since I made it the default OS at home - even though I moved out a decade ago. (;
In other words: Linux gaming has come a long way but still has a long one to go, if it want to be successful. It has to be as wide-spread and easy as on Windows. Well, Steam does exactly that. Still we have a lack of AAA games. Even though Feral ports a lot of games, many major publishers (which I don't care about anymore) do ignore us.
Goes to show though, even if Steam says we're at 0.001% of users we can still count for a larger number of sales than our expected userbase.I do know they declined to have a prior game in the F1 series ported to Linux due to lack of sales though, so it's not that good. Presumably Aspyr managed to convince them to give another shot.
So yes, we're only 0.001% but we can still add that 1.1% (more or less depending on game) to a games sales. That's still extra money for the developers whichever way you spin it.
What would be interesting is to see statistics on a big game ported by Aspyr like DiRT Rally (epic game) and where we would stand on a game like that.
The numbers must be OK because codemasters have let them port a few games now.
Aspyr, care to help? :-D
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me