>""Porting games to Steam on Linux is a waste of time." "The sales we do get on Linux platforms result in an inordinate amount of technical support and refunds." These are statements often heard inside the game development community. Well, Constantine Bacioiu, who runs the one-man indie game studio Bearded Giant Games, enthusiastically begs to differ."
>To understand Bacioiu's argument we first need to set the stage a bit. So I reached out to someone who's been covering the Linux gaming world with authority for years: Liam Dawe of GamingOnLinux.com.
>It may surprise you to learn, then, that Bearded Giant Games' latest release on Steam -- Space Mercs -- has a whopping 35-percent sales share on Linux. Not only is that significantly higher than the norm, but Bacioiu insists his Linux customers make the development process easier.
>What's going on here?
>I immediately interviewed Bacioiu (who goes by "Zapa" within his community) on my podcast Linux For Everyone after he told me this unusual statistic. I was fascinated with his story.
>Basically, Bacioiu believes there are 2 things the majority of game developers are doing wrong.
>"People say 'OK I know about Linux so I'll just do an export in Unity and make a Linux build and that's it,'" Bacioiu says. "But they don't do any QA [Quality Assurance testing], and it's a terrible experience. People are going to ask for refunds, and then your average developer is going to say 'well Linux isn't worth my time.'"
>Bacioiu also argues that developing on a Linux platform ensures that your game will have better cross-platform compatibility than developing on Windows.
>"All the middleware that I'm using on Linux is guaranteed to work on Windows, because it's not relying on DirectX or any Windows-specific things," he says.
Aiden Sanchez
If you like gaming, you'd be stupid to not dual boot with Windows.
Literally a non-issue.
Mason Clark
>How about that second thing? It certainly backs up Liam Dawe's statement about developer / community interaction.
>"Others want to do Linux so they install Linux on their computers, they do proper QA, but they do not interact with the Linux community," says Bacioiu. "Their blog posts, their demo versions, everything is based around the Windows community. Then they're disappointed, but they're not marketing or engaging with the Linux community!"
>It all boils down to supporting the Linux community rather than treating it as an irrelevant data point. Bacioiu is active in various Discord channels. He blogs about other indie developers and ports, and gets down in the trenches. "It's paid off and it's amazing," he says. "I'm getting very close to being able to just do Linux [and have that support me]."
>As a result, he has a small army of fans that help him with all that essential QA testing. They get early builds of the game and he gets valuable feedback and bug reports.
>Amusingly, Bacioiu says that Linux gamers give him an edge for one very specific reason: "You don't have to micromanage anyone," he says. "If there's a problem, they know where to find the player log. They probably know why the problem is happening in the first place! They're the most technical users you could ever wish for."
>Space Mercs is now available on Steam with a 96% positive rating, and is coming soon to itch.io. It's a frantic arcade space shooter with very modest hardware requirements -- primarily because Bacioiu built a game he wanted to play, and only has access to low-powered hardware.
Jayden Lee
>windows Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Fortnite >l00nix space mercs more like ligma balls lol
Bentley Thompson
>not doing gpu passtrough
Logan Collins
>develop a literally who game for Linux with some ports for other operating systems >brag about your success with a group that makes up 1% of the desktop market share Yawn. Might as well write an article about Super Tux Cart.
Jack Gutierrez
>not software rendering real time ascii graphics at one user input per frame Responsive terminals make my dick go to elon musk's house and backdoor his wife with a tesla rod
Lincoln Rodriguez
>Fortnite, Apex More like gaynite and faggotex
Adam Gonzalez
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Joseph Davis
Windows is going Cloud, so gamers will have to pay the bucks that they otherwise would on his shitty game on the monthly subscription to use their OS instead. Good luck to him on cloud-OS, everyone will start moving either to MacOS or Linux.
This guy is right, and I'll probably go buy his game just because he's not making excuses for why he takes Epic's ill-gotten Faustian bargain cash or whatnot like half the indies today.
It shouldn't be a controversial statement that treating Linux like a parity platform is required to make the ROI worth it. You can't just not engage with the community, or do zero QA if you want to release a formal build. Hell, you can probably get away with a big "unsupported beta status" if you need the QA support from the Linux community for awhile, but you have to at least listen to their bug reports and improve things.
Good on this guy for putting whiny indies in their place. There are lots of good indie (and even AAA devs/porters) devs that benefit from Linux and porters such as Ethan Lee who can help a studio get their shit in order.
Dylan Morgan
this shilling actually made me wishlist his game, congrats.
Nolan Martinez
Well shit, if so then why are you still complaining?
>The sales we do get on Linux platforms result in an inordinate amount of technical support
Crash on Windows: "Whatever, I'll play something else." Crash on Linux: "I must write a bug report to help the developer fix this issue."
Some devs are ungrateful cunts.
Henry Cooper
Fuck Windows
Liam Fisher
its called GNULS now, plz update your copypasta
Lucas Allen
linux got me to beagle point
Blake Watson
virtualization costs next to nothing these days. i play warband on a rather old system using virtualbox and i honestly can't tell the difference from playing on my windows boot. just install windows in a vm (virtualbox works best in my experience), spin it up when you want to play a game, then kill it off when you're done.
Lincoln Ortiz
Linux anticheats are a waste of time
Charles Mitchell
If everyone pandered to linux as much as this guy, his game wouldn't be anything special and then his sales wouldn't be 35% linux.
Jackson Perry
Sometimes devs only give enough of a fuck to just have it run in a particular configuration
Nathan Smith
Atleast try to list good games, even 14 yo kids do not mention them.
Ryder Kelly
Putting aside that it is not an emulator, Wine (and related projects like DXVK, winetricks, and most of all Proton, which was created by Valve to make playing Windows games seamlessly even easier, is open source and contributes upstream to Wine) is a great option in most cases.
Of course, if you absolutely need to, its possible to use a virtualized guest Windows system configured with direct GPU passthrough (I think this can be done in Virtualbox and QEMU ), but that's actually running Windows itself within Linux . Most of the time Wine/Proton will be sufficient and much lighter.
Gabriel Reyes
SUPER TUX IS A GREAT GAME >:C
Adrian King
>OK I know about Linux so I'll just do an export in Unity and make a Linux build and that's it,'" Bacioiu says. "But they don't do any QA [Quality Assurance testing], and it's a terrible experience. So are they saying that devs these days have the standards of a nigger in africa choosing between drinking the piss from a cow or a river with dead bodies and shit floating by? WOW WHO KNEW that devs these days have devolved to the quality of the melanin content coming through their boarders.