Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbersac | Hacker News Reader

Support for game on linux is improving, but there is still few people playing on linux. Sales on linux are so sparse, I wonder if porting games on this plaform is profitable.

View on HN

Depends on the choices you make architecturally. If your game uses libraries available cross-platform (i.e., Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux (and thus SteamOS), but optionally also Android and IOS for games suitable for mobile) and your software build doesn't make any hard OS-choices, making your game available on each platform capable of supporting your game is almost always profitable, because the overhead is mostly taken care of by the libraries used, and what remains (some development, quality assurance, support) is easily covered by the added sales.

If on the other hand you use libraries or in-house code that is not that portable, the profitability of making your game available on other OS'es is a matter of a couple of factors. Is the game good enough to garner enough sales to cover porting? Is the market saturated or is the game rather unique on the target platform? Does the game have lasting appeal so it can sell for years? How much will porting cost?

These questions are not unique to Linux, this holds true for Mac OS X as well.

There are benefits to having your game on Linux too; because there are less games available on the whole (although I am not complaining as an avid gamer on Linux) the market is less saturated than on Windows. So depending on the genre you are publishing in and the quality of the game, you may very well sell more copies per capita than on Windows.

What's more important is toolsets that make porting easy or trivial. A lot of Unity projects are very easy to build for a linux target. The Humble Bundle often has linux games (though less-so than when they started).

The Humble Indie Bundle usually has all games available on all three major desktop OS'es as a matter of rule.

In addition to this, they are now offering a lot of other bundles as well, such as ebook bundles or bundles with games from a single developer. The latter often include Windows-only games.

I've noticed it's only the Humble Indie Bundles specifically that all the games have Linux versions. I've also noticed that they don't happen as often as they used to.

It's funny how it started as a kind of charity / publicity thing and switched over to being a store that runs slightly unusual promotions.

Well HB has decided to go for the quick buck by focusing on more bundles for Windows than anything else. Too bad they lost the multiplatform aspect in the way.

Really? What about the books and comics? I doubt that they are out to make a quick buck, since the sliders for developers, charity, and HB still exist on every bundle. I think they wanted to do this more often, so they had to broaden their lineup.

It would help if Linux games actually worked on Linux, instead of only on single version of Ubuntu that's usually a few years out of date, and you have to have libraries X, Y and Z installed, only it won't tell you this, so have to trawl through various support forums. And god help you if you're running something truly bizarre, like Debian.

I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

That's interesting, I run one of the more esoteric mainstream distros, Arch, and I almost never have problems with Linux games on Steam. I ran into one issue with Hyper Light Drifter and libxcb incompatibility. Otherwise, everything has just worked to my memory. I remember things were a little rougher years ago, have you tried it again recently?

> I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

Glad you find it useful! If you are able and want to support the project financially, buying a copy of CrossOver from my employer is the best way to continue funding Wine's development. Our salaries don't come out of thin air ;)

That's one of the benefits of Steam as a gaming platform on Linux. It provides a standard set of libraries that games run against, which match those used on Steam OS and Ubuntu.

Occasionally a developer might use a library outside of the runtime and you could run into an issue, but as you say, 99% of the time games will work under any distro. My situation is the same as yours - I run Arch, and almost every game I've run has worked, besides a couple of small issues.

The downside of this is that you might lose out on some performance gains that you could get from newer libraries, but it's an acceptable compromise for compatibility. A lot of the times devs say they don't want to develop for Linux because it's difficult to test against every distro, but I don't think that's an issue. It's fine to test for Steam OS and the last few versions of Ubuntu, and release it for that. With Steam, it'll almost always work anyway, and if there's a few incompatibilities on more complex distros like Arch or Gentoo, users will usually be able to fix them themselves anyway.

> esoteric mainstream

Is this slang for hipster?

Heh, fair enough, esoteric doesn't mean what I thought it meant. I was going for something like "unusual" or "non-standard".

Strange. I run Steam games just dandy on Debian Sid with little to no hassle. The Steam runtime provides a base platform with libraries to build against, which cuts down on the library rot and version mismatches that plagued proprietary gaming on pre-Steam Linux, and I find that gaming on Linux using steam now fits roughly in the 'just works' ballpark.

Sure, I'm technically on my own support-wise, but game devs haven't yet rebuffed me for not having the right OS (I submitted a bug report yesterday for Life is Strange - a GPU issue, not an OS one, and pointing out my OS - and got an encouraging reply from Feral today).

Steam Runtime solves that issue. What you describe however happens with GOG games, since they don't have a Steam Runtime-like system to take care of dependencies.

If you look at the long tail, it's probably profitable, but for now I am guessing it's not a very lucrative business, compared to developing for other platforms.

What happened here is that there are third party porters (in this case Feral) who take all the hassle off the devs hands, so that it's likely a small chunk of free money for Squenix to have their games ported (this is their fourth so far, and a Linux Hitman is apparently in the workds).

People like me probably don't help. I have a large number of games in my Steam library, and quite a few work in Linux. I'd gladly use Linux for all my computing, but there are just enough Windows-only games that I play regularly to make me keep Windows, and laziness makes me stay on Windows most of the time.

Honestly I think you'd be surprised with how well Steam and associated Windows titles run through WINE. Some are garbage, but games like Rocket League, anything by Valve, or anything by Blizzard tends to work extremely well.

Obviously the choice is yours, but it might be worth checking out if you're really interested in switching over to Linux.

I can't help but think that we have to come up with some other word for non-Android Linux. Because technically, Android is Linux, and people are playing on Android. A lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com