Comment by jorvi
4 hours ago
What is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support.
I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton.
Edit: It was <0.1% sales but 20% of all support tickets: https://xcancel.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
If those bugs are only present in the Linux port, then yeah, Linux users cost more to support. But if a significant amount of these bugs affect all platforms, then you could argue that a Linux user is much more valuable to them than a non-Linux user because they provide better feedback. Assuming they actually care about fixing their product.
yes, this. i don't know if it was the same game another another where the devs said that while linux users send the most bug reports they are also the most grateful about having a game that runs on linux, and all their reports genuinely helped make the game better for everyone. (wildly paraphrased from faint memory)
in other words, if you want your game tested and get good feedback for it, do release on linux. maybe even release on linux first. linux users will love you for it, and you get to release a more polished game for a wider audience on windows.
Personally, I think it's probably best to test with Proton as part of a game development cycle to reduce the overall complexity in terms of development (not that games aren't already exceedingly complex). That's just my take... especially if you want to take advantage of that extra 5% or so potential extra market share.
Part of the problem is that Linux isn't really one platform, it's 10 different ones of varying popularity (e.g. supporting Gnome on Debian with Wayland doesn't mean that KDE on Nix with X will work). And it costs somewhere in that 1-10x range to support it because of that.
Most software picks 1-2 distros (usually LTS Ubuntu and/or Fedora) to support in the default configuration.
Steam fixed this years ago. Many native games will default to the Steam Linux Runtime to ensure long-term compatibility and generally consolidated runtime expectations: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
Compared to the dylib nightmare that Microsoft keeps shipping in Windows, native Steam/Linux is actually pretty consolidated.
When I worked at a Linux distro I worked with one device maker who told me in confidence that 90% of their revenue came from Linux-based shops and they only needed a one-person support team. They had a 20 person support team for the remaining 10% of revenue coming from Windows-based shops.
Where I work now the top 10 customers are Linux shops. They probably account for 80% of our revenue. The remaining hundreds of customers are more evenly split between Linux and Windows.
So I guess it depends very much on what industry you're in. For consumer games it might be Windows, but outside of financials and administrative realms and into the world of embedded it's a heckuva lot of Linux. Support costs tend to be lower, and you really only have to target Red Hat and Ubuntu.
20% of auto-reported crashes. So it's not like Linux users were writing more tickets but the game crashing on Linux more (because of gfx drivers).
Yes, and I think a free-version user might produce more support requests than a commercial user for two reasons: 1) commercial/professional users might feel more entitled to support, but typically have a better understanding of linux and more versed in fixing stuff themselves. -- and more importantly -- 2) They probably have a dedicated setup where they can run the AMD-blessed distro
Would you rather that the 100% of bugs in those 20% of tickets never got fixed?
Linux users write highly detailed bug reports because it's the only way to get things fixed without coding the fix yourself.
That single, annecdotal evidence gets posted everytime a topic like that comes up. I would really love to get more reliable stats about this.
Even the "0.1% of sales" figure is quite atypical.
I don't think gaming on Linux is comparable here.