Originally posted by Newfie
First, the wanna-be elitist users just go around bad-mouthing the company's "crappy" products and poor "Linux" support, which costs the company sales from other potential customers.
Second, the company has to process refunds, which has overhead. Overall, an unhappy customer costs more than no customer, which is why successful companies try so very hard to both make their customers happy and target advertising and sales only to demographics that they know they can keep happy. And in the world of software, that often means only targeting one major OS.
Originally posted by Bomyne
Linux user have both an image problem and some actual, real evidence working against them. The image problem stems from the fact that they're using a free OS instead of just up and paying for another OS. If the user is so against paying the "Microsoft tax" to get an OS that already runs a game company's products, it stands to reason that the user might be against paying the "fun tax" to get a legal copy of the company's product. That is just an image problem; I know of no proof that's true. But it's a common sentiment, both in the games industry and the larger software industry as a whole.
The actual evidence stems from stats back in the Loki days. The one that actually did Loki in was the Quake 3 boxed copy sales. They made a mere 50,000 boxed copies of Quake 3, in the collector's edition tins, which they planned to sell out and then release regular boxed copies. They sold well under 50% of that stock. Stats of players online showed a couple hundred thousand people playing on Linux.
Now, Windows games have a ridiculously high piracy rate too (which is why bitching about DRM is a dead-end; DRM is a symptom of the problem that most people are selfish little fucktards, not the problem itself). However, when you both have a huge piracy rate and can't even sell a pathetic 50,000 copies of a product, your target market (Linux) is pretty much entirely dead. Sure, these days Linux users would likely easily buy 50,000 copies, since Linux has more users today than it did 10 years ago. Whether that increase is users has been offset with an increase in _ethical_ users is as yet unknown. The only real data we have to go on, despite being very old, is not very flattering to Linux.
Originally posted by varikonniemi
You have to be careful interpreting the HiB stats without further data anyway. At face value, they would also indicate that 25% of all gamers are Linux users, which even the single most fanatical Linux believer would admit is completely untrue. There's more going into those numbers, and that makes them suspect when trying to evaluate whether a real AAA game is going to see the same kind of sales turnout from Linux users.
The total sales of all the Humble Bundles combined, on all platforms, still falls a whole order of magnitude short of the budget of just Call of Duty 2, and a whole two orders of magnitude below the profits on CoD 2. If you're a sales analyst, that's going to stand out a hell of a lot more than the average Linux sale price on the HiB.
Originally posted by Dukenukemx
They have identified a legitimate problem -- dumb users download random crap off the Internet, install it, and then blame the OS when their whole computer stops functioning properly -- but have completely missed the target on the proper solution.
Originally posted by Gps4l
Obviously, anything from Bethesda is not on that crash-free list.
Also keep in mind that many, many game crashes are actually video driver bugs. Video drivers are both the most complex and more fragile software running on your computer besides the kernel itself. There's a reason Windows moved to a micro-kernel design just for WDDM; they got sick of having their OS called crashy and fragile just because AMD/NVIDIA/Intel couldn't deliver a stable driver.
Originally posted by zerothis
Even more importantly, anywhere other than little one-man shops, the developers are not ever going to see any actual paper money from customers. Developers (and artists, and advertising folks, and executives, and producers, and so on) get paid via check or direct deposit from their company's payroll departments. The sales agents are the only ones likely to see any actual cash, and then only in the increasingly rare case that payments aren't collected and processed by an outside firm.
This is just a horrible idea. Don't do it.
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