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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

> Also... no Linux version? Really?

You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?

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With engines like Unity and Unreal, supporting multiple platforms (including modern consoles like PS4, Xbox One and Switch) has a level of complexity of writing a portable Electron app.

As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).

Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.

- Linux desktop market share is tiny. My own app supports Linux, but I'm 100% aware that I'm doing it at a loss in every possible way, it's a passion project. Bang for buck is terrible, so you need to justify as a labour of love.

- The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much hidden gotchas that they do a poor job of explaining ahead of time.

- Making a cross-platform Electron app that behaves well and up to to snuff on Windows, Mac and Linux is not even close to easy. The fact that JS theoretically works on all three platforms buys you way less than most people think.

Source: I'm making a cross platform Electron app that supports Linux.

I disagree with your assertion Linux desktops are hard to set up.

You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.

Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.

A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos

I think your parent meant "The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop [app] to work as it should is huge"

Me and my HiDPI monitor disagree.

The market may be tiny but it is a lot easier to sell copies of a (decent) game because Linux users will love you for supporting their platform.

You also don't need to support every distro on the planet. Just focus on Ubuntu. With proper planning and choosing your game engine wisely it's not the biggest deal to build for Linux.

My experience (though I'm not a game developer) is the opposite. Linux users are very demanding, and instead of being thankful that your app works well on Linux, they'll take the fact that it works and works well on Linux for granted, and will resent you for charging money for it.

If you support Ubuntu+Debian (1.15% user base globally on average), the next feature request you'll get will be Xubuntu, Arch, and then some smaller distros which has their own undocumented quirks, they'll ask for 32 bit versions (0.0015%) to run on ancient machines that aren't really powerful enough to run the app anyway, and there goes the rabbit hole.

(In the meanwhile, Windows users are 85%, Mac OS is 13%. We're talking about fractions of fractions a percent here when you move out of Ubuntu x64)

These features will be framed as "You're supporting Ubuntu, getting it to work on this {{similar_distro}} is so close, you should do it and you'll have a lot of users". It's not that they're wrong or malicious — it's just that their concept of a lot of users is a whopping multitude of three people.

I'm also purposefully ignoring the more acrid side of the Linux community where they'll call you names, find your personal email, and make sure it's the first thing you read in the morning for not pulling heroics to make it work for their distro of choice (0.0000075% user base).

All in all, not worth it, really. Not financially, not logically. Not from a human point of view, either.

Here are a few things I've found helpful if you're making a desktop app for Linux:

- Consider charging Linux users for support. This is justifiable because for every Windows support request, there are likely 10 people that experienced the problem and haven't written to you about it, for Mac, 2-3, but for Linux, very likely you're only helping that single guy only. This is the best way to do this, but since my app is free, I don't really want to set up a payment infrastructure.

- Make your app free, and ask Linux users to either make their own builds from unpacked releases, or pay for support for their distro on a rolling basis. You don't really expect anyone to take the latter, but it does wonders to cut down on requests in which people demand you support their favourite obscure distro of choice with no help or support from them.

That said, I still provide Snaps, as it's the closest I can get to a universal Linux runtime. This exposes me to requests to provide AppImage, Flatpak, and some other stuff even then, but it's way better than trying to support distros directly. [0]

[0] I tried to support AppImage, I gave up after a full day of trying. Flatpak had similar issues. One of the core developers of AppImage reached out trying to debug, and I helped him as much as I could — but the point is, while the intentions are pure, and I'm glad for the effort, this is deeper and deeper into the red in terms of price / performance.

I agree that Linux users can also be a pain to deal with :)

But yea from my experience the game market is a little different because there is a growing group of people that rather would not boot Windows for gaming and instead stay on their platform. This group of people is very thankful for ported games.

What I heard third hand from game developers has been that it’s fairly hard to get games to perform well on Linux, and that most of the complaints come because of performance reasons outside the developers’ control.

This is true, but also the game in question was coded entirely from scratch, which is part of the problem: the majority of those 3 years were probably spent duplicating the work done already by Unity and Unreal. If you want to make a living as a carpenter, you don't start by planting walnuts.

I would say that nowadays is not that difficult to have a game that works on both Windows and Linux.

Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.

Seriously, how many Linux users you know that pay for software? How much would that increase indie's sales? By 2?

I think in OPs case a Linux port could have a non-trivial affect on sales because he's on the front page of hackernews and people that see this post and feel sorry for him will buy his game and not play it because he supports Linux.

The humblebundle sales showed clearly that linux users are ready to pay much more for video games than windows users are.

I have personally used hundreds of dollars on linux compatible games.

When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though? I think it proved that for a short moment a very small percentage of users were supporting games at a higher rate than the majority in order to support a cause, but once the novelty wore off they went back to not caring. I just don't think there are enough Linux users out there that are also regular gamers to make Linux support worth it for most titles. Sure there are exceptions especially if you're building a game that disproportionately appeals to that audience (like KSP or Zactronics), but in most cases its not really worth it.

>When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though?

Some years ago, but that is explained by a sharp decline in the quality of games included in their offers (which was about the time they dropped ensuring that their bundles were compatible with the three platforms). A better question would be when I last spend money on (game) software for linux. The answer is 28 hours ago.

I concur that the market is small. But when your sales are small too, it is not smart to throw away access to a market with a higher proportion of dedicated users and consumers. From the perspective of tech, less time may have been "wasted" on infinitroid if the developer used more off the shelve solutions that would help with multiplatform targeting.

In the end we are just basing our arguments on our gut feelings. I doubt very much that Valve would push as hard for gaming on linux as they are doing if they didn't see the potentials of sales for the platform in their data. But time will tell.

There's not a ton of information available on the breakdown of sales by platform, but the data that is out there shows Linux sales usually compromise ~2-4% for cross-platform games [1]. If you get linux support "for free" by utilizing an engine, then absolutely go for it, but even major companies with massively popular games are still skipping out on first-class Linux support [2], due to the low market share.

[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales-stat...

[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/president-of-blizzard...

It's also exponentially harder to make a Linux port for a AAA game than for an Indie game, for many reasons. The most obvious ones being that most indie games are made with an off the shelf cross platform engine (Unity, unreal), and that AAA titles require a lot more hardware resources, and optimization of this usage is often platform specific (what helps OpenGL might not help DirectX, etc).

If he's using C++ he is probably using a cross-platform library like SDL2. So porting to Linux shouldn't take longer than a day really.

I agree, C++ projects are quite easy to get running on Linux. I've done cross platform C++ game stuff and almost always had more trouble with Windows than I ever did with Linux. MacOS was pretty annoying in some cases too, actually...

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