Unity Stats Show Linux Gamers Are Well Below 1% Of Their Customer Base

[ruthan]

If you knew remotely accessing was going to be a problem, you should've had the foresight to port forward ssh.

Busybox - isnt safe mode, afaik it doesnt support ssh..

[ssokolow]

I'm wonder, how much of that is Wine imitating XP. Unity should get some way to distinguish Wine users (the problem though is that accordingly to Wine FAQ that way would break in some point because it is supposed to be a bug, though not important one).

Well, the Windows Genuine Advantage tool does it by checking for the existence of certain Wine-specific registry keys. I doubt the Wine devs are in a hurry to hide those or move them to separate storage.

[FuturePilot]

I don't understand how these statistics are gathered. I don't think each individual game submits this data. Unity is appealing to indie devs, and indie games are the most popular on linux,

Most of the titles available on Linux are indie titles but that doesn't mean that they are more popular on Linux than other platforms.

[Hi-Angel]

Windows XP at 17.3%

I'm wonder, how much of that is Wine imitating XP. Unity should get some way to distinguish Wine users (the problem though is that accordingly to Wine FAQ that way would break in some point because it is supposed to be a bug, though not important one).

[Zoll]

Unless you go into your local store and buy a PC/Laptop/Console preloaded with Linux, these number will hardly change. Most people do NOT care about the OS, they just want to play games.

[ssokolow]

UPDATE: Yeah, according to GamingOnLinux.com's article, they're not making any attempt to control for the large number of Unity games that are limited to one platform.

...which means these stats are worthless at determining Linux market share because:

1. The data they released is too processed for us to filter it to only the games that are available on multiple platforms.

2. It says nothing about all the people playing non-Unity games (eg. MonoGame, Unreal 4, etc.) ...which also could introduce an unknown amount of skew, depending on how much of that "I'll play something else. These Unity developers never tested their push-button Linux build before releasing it" is just bluster.

3. As mentioned, the Unity browser plugin was never available for Linux (and I know a lot of people, myself included, who either never knew about pipelight or considered it too much bother when other games exist)

(Plus, of course, the dubious utility of the more detailed information, given that over 80% of Linux users are on "unknown" rather than Ubuntu/Mint/etc. and the suspiciously distributed percentages for the various Windows versions.)

Heck, I'm not sure what they would be useful for. Developers would want to know how much effort to put into various platforms, but this survey can't be used for that. Similar problem for users. This survey is like those old GeoCities-era vanity visitor counters.

[torsionbar28]

That may be so, but I will tell you this, without manually setting the power states of my 390x under Linux with the standard package driver results in freezes and system restart problems. NOW that I understand the problem better I can easily resolve it, but it required a fair bit of tom foolery under terminal before X start to resolve that issue.

How is that a Linux issue? Does your Linux distro explicitly state support for this hardware? If not, then it's on you for experimenting.

For example, I buy only SuperMicro brand motherboards, because they explicitly state Red Hat Enterprise Linux support for their hardware. That's the distro I use, so I know it will work 100% straight out of the box, with no tinkering and no issues.

Example #2, I use only NVidia graphics cards (even though I dislike using a closed binary blob) because my hardware and OS are explicitly supported - I know it's going to work 100% right out of the box, no surprises, no tinkering.

There are a number of vendors that sell laptops and workstations with Linux pre-installed and fully supported. Buying from one of them is a sure bet for a fully supported and working no-tinkering-required system. Just as buying a Windows peecee from Dell you know the hardware will be 100% compatible with Windows, or buying a computer from Apple, you know it'll run OSX 100% with no issues.

[Dukenukemx]

Really not a surprise. Fallout 4 for Linux? How about GTA V? I could list a number of games, but you need new titles like these ported ASAP for Linux. I still have a Windows 10 machine for this reason.

[kpedersen]

Unity Linux support is extremely poor and pretty much an afterthought. The only "Linux" they support is Ubuntu and the support is almost unofficial. *

Perhaps this could be the main contributing factor as to why Unity is failing in the Linux market?

*The Linux editor support is almost non-existent.

I am hoping Unity will be gone in a couple of years. I really do dislike it and find it a big waste of time for developers. The only thing it has going for it is a very large marketing budget towards the "prosumers".

[duby229]

If you knew remotely accessing was going to be a problem, you should've had the foresight to port forward ssh.

I'll be willing to bet that most of these so called windows "experts" don't even know what NAT is.... Port forwarding, what?