Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

also from several game devs I've talked to, not only is the market share negligible, the bug reports aren't. Common sentiment was that Linux was ~1% of their sales but a third of complaints.

View on HN

I know this sounds silly, but would you be able to confirm that this is based on actual conversations that you've personally had with game developers about projects they've personally worked on?

There have been rumours stoked especially by tweets from the Planetary Annihilation developer that he has since retracted/clarified but these still seem to fuel a lot of negative perceptions of Linux support that aren't seen in the main.

yes it was from actually talking to several indie game devs, I'm not familiar with the Planetary Annihilation case.

That's fair. I know it's more likely that this is the case on HN, but there's been multiple times on Reddit when I've asked people to elaborate and it turns out that when they say "I've spoken to Devs" they actually mean "I read a comment on Reddit" or "I saw a tweet that said it".

This probably reflects the character of Linux users more than Linux. To really unpack that you need to properly categorize the complaints: (Linux platform bug, Cross-platform bug, User error.) If 50% of the bugs are real cross-platform issues, then ditching Linux saves a lot less than you think (and you're potentially losing some high-quality free QA.)

This. Most of the Windows users in my circles wouldn't even think of writing bug reports, whereas many Linux users are developers, often immediately think of writing a bug report, and are also technical enough to do it[1].

[1] It takes some technical experience to make an educated guess of where the problem lies. Drivers? OS? Game? Hardware? And if you're on Windows: Some gaming overlay? AV?

you should read this: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760

Possible solutions:

Have a demo so users can tell how well supported their platform is.

Be clear about the target platform (E.G. Tested on Debian 10.8 + NonFree, Ubuntu 2020.04 etc; also include the minimum supported OpenGL / Vulcan / whatever version etc.)

Document the product execution lifecycle, and how to manually skip steps. (E.G. steam calls X to start the launcher, the launcher calls Y to start the game. These are the arguments each take to modify behavior.)

Have developer level debug checks in the logs. Print to standard error where you're trying to open a log file ("Opening log file: %s\n"), have an example of what a healthy log file should look like. If a native command is missing say so, and if there's a test-platform link to the package page for that platform, as well as the source website. (Eventually historical gamers might need to visit Archive.org to grab the last published version.) Have debug levels to increase verbosity (even if it's just "production" vs "collect crash report") validate every assumption and requirement in the crash report log level. You shouldn't need to ask the user for any additional information other than the log file, because it should all be right there in the log file.

The claim upthread is that that particular case shouldn't be taken at face value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358183

Very possible, there seems to be a follow up tweet from the author that points out that he exaggerated.

The point is that you should stay critical. People love to glorify the Linux userbase when Linux is often not a economical option.

You will find a lot of stories about it on google. Here is one: https://steamcommunity.com/app/332250/discussions/0/49463250...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com