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The Problem With Estimating Linux Desktop Market Share
jammag writes "It's long been one of those exceptionally hard-to-quantify numbers: exactly what percentage of the desktop PC market is held by Linux? Doubters suggest it hovers around a negligible one percent, while partisans suggest it's in excess of 10 percent. Bruce Byfield explores the various sources of estimates, dismissers' and fan boys' alike, and guesstimates it might realistically be 5-6%. Still, he admits, 'the objectivity of numbers is often just a myth.'"
It's not that people don't want to develop for linux. It's that the GPL is viral. If you use a GPL library for part of your game engine, you have to GPL the whole enchilada. Game content can be closed-source, but with the engine you have to go one way or the other: all open, or all closed.
With the former, you can't use something like the Havok physics engine. With the latter, you miss out on one of the biggest reasons to make a game for an open source platform.
Your argument is more valid for cross-platform games, and the answer is probably Apple. If Apple starts to take over the desktop segment (they are the only ones with a real shot at it), then gaming may become more cross-platform, at which point linux will probably benefit as well.
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