Normally I feel at least a trace of sadness when a company states that they won't support Linux anytime soon or ever. In this particular case, all I did was shrug and thinking "Yeah, so what?". EA hasn't released a game in a while I was remotely interested in. Probably that's because they haven't released any halfway original game in like a decade. All they do is churning out yearly updates of the same old concepts and add a few new explosions (or updated player names for their sports series). Even Bioware (which I used to be huge fan of) has been completely assimilated into the EA way. I got Inquisition for Christmas, played it for a few hours and then put it away. The story just couldn't hook me at all and the gameplay was basically the same boring dumbed-down clickfest they got bashed for Dragon Age 2 already.

That being said, I still could giggle that a fat-cat company like EA isn't able to write a cross-platform engine when much smaller studios can and have done. EA's revenue is so large that 5% more revenue amounts to a fairly large sum. Should think it's profitable to do even then. But then, since EA's only field of actual innovation is developing intrusive and annoying DRM software, they probably think we don't want to have that on Linux anyway. Rightfully so.

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Good news. Among all these "Developing for Linux isn't worth it" debates, I was wondering if they had given up on Linux, too. Going to back this one, then. :)

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Quoting: Maquis196So many time consuming games being ported, can barely keep up. Still, should have finished Shadow of Mordor by the weekend so can pick something up next.

Also, quite a few games I already own. Ah well, time to buy another copy off Feral and donate!

For real. I never thought I'd ever have more Linux games than I can play. oO

And yeah, poor Feral won't earn much on this one, it seems, as many of us already have it. But this just means it's a great game. :)

*still has her fingers crossed to see Skyrim on Linux one day*

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Shadowrun HK for me.

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Compared to the earlier statement, this makes much more sense now. Everything is more difficult if you do it for the first time. I guess once devs are getting used to Linux, they might even find it's a great platform to develop on and for.

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Quoting: maodzedunWill 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.

I must admit I am not a fan of this argument as well. It's being brought up a lot in online discussions about games and essentially means "Just shut up, for you can't have any clue anyway if you're not working for the industry." It's being used in discussions for no other reason than to discredit the opposing opinion in a debate by questioning their qualification to participate in the debate in the first place (and perhaps their intelligence on top of it). The target of the statement will either appear incompetent or is forced to reveal their real life background, both of which is an undesirable outcome.

It's also exclusively used by people who have no real point to make.

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Quoting: ManyFaced@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!"

QuoteThat'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?

QuoteYour 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.

QuoteAlso, 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.

Quote...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?

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Quoting: ManyFacedThis 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.

QuoteEither 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.

QuoteAnd 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.

QuoteThen 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.

QuoteObsidian 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.

QuoteAll 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.

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So the Linux users will get to collect the dead after everyone else died?

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Sounds great. I am not yet too far into the main game (don't ask, so many great games to play!), but I will sure get the expansion as this is one of the better RPGs we have on Linux so far.

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