Survival Horror Game Sees Linux Sales Around 1%

[schmidtbag]

Linux Market share is totally non-existant. This is a fact.

You made an exaggeration and immediately claimed it was a fact... I'm surprised how easy it was for you to contradict yourself in less than 15 words. Non-existent means 0%. This game has 1% sales from Linux users. That's 4500 people. The game is $30. That is $135,000 made by Linux players. Even if the game was only sold for a sale price of $10, that would still be $45,000. You can buy a lot for that amount of money.

[sarmad]

If their game engine is well designed this income should cover the porting cost. Maybe that's why they appear to be willing to continue porting their games to Linux.

[Azpegath]

Steam takes a 30% cut, factor in whatever the Swedish equivalent of a payroll tax is and you are looking at low end developer salaries at best.
The trick is, though, you don't need a full time developer to support Linux if you are already supporting OSX and using good platform abstractions like SDL.

Good point, and for extra information: The payroll tax in Sweden is 31,42%. On top of that, we have the world highest income taxes: municipal tax of 28-31% and a state tax of 20/25% (for everything above $50 307 and $74 700 respectively). We used to be No 1, then we got knocked down to position 5 (when they lowered the income tax a little bit), but since we went back to the Social Democrats ruling the country 2 years ago (in a coalition with the green party), we are quickly racing to be at the top again.

An average software developer in Sweden (Stockholm) makes somewhere between 30 000 kr - 65 000 kr/month, which would translate to about $42 000 - $90 000 yearly.

[Almindor]

Another SOMA linux player here. Loved the game, one of the "classics" for me now. I'm glad they're continuing linux support too.

Two things to note: supporting linux is not as simple as "hire one dev to port". the dev part is not that difficult if you planned for cross-platform from the get-go. The main issues are support, and supporting linux is the worst of all the major platforms. I say this as an indie dev. Too much fragmentation and library difference hell. Even getting your own libs all the way down to glibc is not enough sometimes for binary distribution. (glibc version mismatches)

So the main price tag on linux support is well, support people. A commercial entity can't just send people RTFM messages and "recompile it on your own" to fix. Sound doesn't work? (40% distroes anyone?) OpenAL/alsa issues. Graphics drivers problems? Ubuntu users on outdated drivers with known bugs? All unfixable from a distributor's perspective.

I love linux, but closed source is very hard on it, games are almost impossible.

[zzarko]

I bought my copy at Humble Store. How they counted it, I have no idea...

[eydee]

It's a steamplay/"gogplay" title, so distinguishing users and especially sales can't be that simple. I play both. Which one am I?

[Azpegath]

I bought my copy at Humble Store. How they counted it, I have no idea...

He actually mentions that in the blog post:

As always let's start with the thing that is of most interest to people: How much has the game sold? This is always a bit of a tricky figure to nail down as it depends a bit on how you want to count. For instance, we were part of the Humble Monthly Bundle this September which caused a lot of people to get the game, but none of these were "direct sales". Instead, we got one big payment for taking part in the deal. For the sake of simplicity, I will simply lump all of these figures together as a whole, which brings us to a total of a bit over 450 000

[Azrael5]

obviously linux operating system is 2% of the whole desktop market.

[Azrael5]

linux gamer developers should go to the gaming exhibition to show linux gaming to the gamers. Other question is native opengl games.

[Azrael5]

It's almost useless to present linux games to the linux users: linux games must be presented to the whole game system.