Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post." A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.

Comments

Valve hasn't said a word.

[Beelzebud]

Until Valve says anything about a Linux client, it's just rumor and speculation.

And contrary to what Phoronix has reported for a couple of years now, Valve has not said one word about a Linux port.

Re:Valve hasn't said a word.

[Beelzebud]

No they have in no way confirmed a Linux client. Not at all. Show me one quote from someone at Valve confirming it. You can't because no such confirmation exists.

Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to see a Linux client, but Valve hasn't said anything about it. The fact that people from Phoronix hacked together an alpha quality client is meaningless.

Re:Valve hasn't said a word.

[kiddygrinder]

the confirmation of a linux client has come from articles like this one telegraph.co.uk and they have definitely been working on it as people have downloaded and actually run some of their linux code, however there has been no actual confirmation directly from valve.

Re:Valve hasn't said a word.

[Burpmaster]

Until Valve says anything about a Linux client, it's just rumor and speculation.

That's absurd. It's no longer just a rumor once it's been proven, regardless of where or who the proof comes from. What we have is better than an official announcement, since an announcement could be false.

We have the actual binary. Sure, it's a largely non-functional pre-alpha, but the build was frequently being updated, which indicates active development. And now the URL is an error 403 Forbidden. I'll bet the URL only works from Valve's internal IPs now, but that's just my speculation. The existence of a Linux client, however, is confirmed fact.

Really good news

[erroneus]

"Windows for gaming" will still be the chant for the next 5+ years I fear, but I have to wonder some... "What If" someone got together with some other somepeople and created a "Linux gaming standard distribution" or something similar to LSB for gaming... something similar to "Wine bottles" but for game installation and playing. This could make Linux gaming SO much easier and more direct. It could ALSO aid in making the games more controllable by the software publishers (I know, no one likes that idea except the software publishers...) but consider that this would make a really nice link between console gaming and PC gaming. If this were to happen and somehow catch on, (yeah I know... fat chance) the new chant would be "Linux for gaming* because it can be faster and better than Windows can.

Are there still people running Windows 9X for their games? Last I saw (years ago) that was the case... makes me want to load up Win9X and then set up XvT and such... Those were some good ole days!

.deb v .rpm

[gbjbaanb]

That part was most surprising for me - whilst I think .rpm is more of the standard for server based business apps, it appears debia (ie ubuntu) is the predominant platform for clients.

Ok, it doesn't surprise me at all now I've thought it through :)

One game?

[bonch]

One puzzle game proves that it's worth it to port to Linux?

If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.

Re:One game?

[jmorris42]

> If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name...

One suspects most of that time was learning a new platform. If Linux was a target from the start and the game house had done it before the porting time would be less. To begin a cross platform library like SDL would probably be selected at the start of the project. Porting would then be a minor problem. Even better would be to divide the development team's workstations and develop all targeted platforms in parallel to catch cross platform issues during development. Done that way a wide targeted product should not add more than a couple percent to the development costs.

Another idea. If a game house or group of them developed a common repository the distribution costs could be minimal. This doesn't require their wares be free either. Activation keys/etc could still be used while using repos to eliminate installation problems, distributing updates, etc. Who needs Steam? Better, who needs to cut Steam in for a cut for something Linux has native?

Re:One game?

[Kjella]

If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.

Two manmonths of work is extremely little. Development studios like Inifinity Ward has 60 employees, Telltale Games 70, Bizarre Creations 165, Valve 225, Turbine 300, Bioware 500, Take Two 2000, Blizzard 4600. Some do publishing and other game-related stuff, but still two months is a drop in the ocean compared to the manyears laid down in many games. Even a small increase in sales would pay for much, much more. Enough? Tough to say, depends on how it scales. True this isn't proof but you also brought nothing but a very spurious argument for why it couldn't.

Re:One game?

[Kjella]

One suspects most of that time was learning a new platform. If Linux was a target from the start and the game house had done it before the porting time would be less. To begin a cross platform library like SDL would probably be selected at the start of the project.

Quote TFA:

The code was engineered to be cross-platform from the start, built on libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/libvorbis, freetype, etc.

rather impressive

[Sir_Lewk]

I don't think linux will become a more profitable platform to target than windows for major game houses in any sort of foreseeable future, but I think that graph from the article makes a pretty strong case for indie developers to target linux.

Good news for indy developers (who now have a larger potential audience), and of course good news for linux users.

Interesting

[immakiku]

Gaming is one of the last things keeping people from switching to Linux entirely. Once the Linux gaming scene picks up steam (pun intended), "those in the know" will have no reason to retain an installation of Windows. The increase in user base will spur further development in the areas of Linux that are inferior to Windows at the moment.

Re:Interesting

[Beelzebud]

You'd be in for a surprise then. Gamers love to tinker with their systems, and most of my friends, and myself would be using Linux full time if we could. It wouldn't be 99%, that's a bit of a stretch, but I know it would be around 10-20%.

Re:Duh?

[icebraining]

To reinforce the point:

Loki Software was founded on November 9, 1998 by Scott Draeker, a former lawyer who became interested in porting games to Linux after being introduced to the system through his work as a software licensing attorney. By December of that year Loki had gained the rights to produce a port of Activision's then upcoming strategy game Civilization: Call to Power for Linux. This was to become Loki's first actual product, with the game hitting stores in May of 1999. From there they gained contracts to port many other titles, such as Myth II: Soulblighter, Railroad Tycoon II , and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire. Throughout the next two years the company would continue to bring more games to Linux.
Although successful in its goal of bringing games to the Linux platform, the company was eventually forced to close due to financial troubles, with it declaring Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in August 2001, and finally being disbanded in January 2002.

Re:Duh?

[Beelzebud]

I've read many tales about how he also spent most of their money on vanity items, and drove the business into the ground. Not to mention that 10 years ago Linux was a pain in the ass for a lot of people to set up and use. With distros like Ubuntu and Mint it's much more accessible now for people who simply want to play games, and not spend all their free time setting the system up.

Re:Remember DOS extenders?

[icebraining]

Imagine if games came in a live Linux CD-ROM. MS-Windows users could play those games with all the benefits of Linux

What benefits? I only see drawbacks:
- terrible loading times (wasting the hard drive advantage)
- having to reboot
- having to configure the network to play online games. Since it's a LiveCD, having to store those configurations in a USB disk or losing them
- wasting the integration of systems like Steam

In general, that would be like playing on a PS2 with better graphics. No thank you.

And something to consider

[Sycraft-fu]

What happens if you need something that is NOT cross platform to Linux? You then have to develop an in house version of it. Ok, but that is increasing the cost of development over all, not just for the Linux version.

An example for commercial titles would be Speedtree, Scaleform, or any number of other middleware apps that do not have Linux ports. None of them do anything you couldn't write yourself, however they simplify development thus reducing time thus reducing cost. Scaleform is used to make resolution independent UIs easily and quickly. It gives artists robust tools so that they can design UIs right away. The programmers then can make use of them. This is cheaper than having to have the programmers write not only the UI code for the engine, but then tools for the artists to make the UIs and so on.

So in a complex title you might well find costs of the Windows version going up because the tools you use aren't available for Linux. Saying "Just use something else," or "Just write your own," isn't an answer. The question isn't if it is technically possible to do it, the question is it economical to do it. The amount of expected sales has to exceed the costs by a non-trivial amount.

A note from LGP.

[jedidiah]

Wed, June 23 2010

Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational.
For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues on the admin side of things, which explains most of our silence, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer further updates as and when there is news to update you with.

Re:Remember DOS extenders?

[icebraining]

1 and 3 - yes, we should all install an extra partition for each game. Then we can top that with a nice grub menu with 25 entries. That's much better than having the games in a fucking folder.

2 is false for Windows users, which is who GGP was talking about. Go re-read his quote in my previous message.

4 seems to come from someone who has no idea of the current games market. Steam has a huge user base, and they're the undisputed leaders of the online games distribution, which is growing immensely.
And people *like* the social aspect of Steam: the friends list, the groups, the in-game chat, the way you can join a friend with one click, the achievements, the server browser, etc. Personally, I use Xfire for server browsing and filtering, and it's a massive improvement over in-game browsers.

I can speak of the converse - as a Linux user. If I wanted to play a Windows game, it would be partioned separately and used only for games.

The quote in my post was about Windows users, not Linux. Linux is still almost irrelevant as a desktop platform, and games are not the main thing holding it back.

Who runs IM anymore? My phone IS the message center.

Seriously? "Who runs IM anymore?" That can't be a serious question, can it?
"Windows Live Messenger (formerly named MSN Messenger) is an instant messaging client created by Microsoft. In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month" - so I'd say very few, obviously:|

In games like Call of Duty, everyone uses Xfire for setting up matches and inviting people to clans. No, people don't use the phone for talking with strangers they play with - they use integrated systems. If they want to talk, they'll use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo.

Biggest advantage: cost. Right now some SAP vendor is trying to sell us on B1 (Windows Server 2003, clients run on Windows only). I guess they didn't count on Microsoft Dynamics. In order to buy $30,000 worth of software, I need to buy $7,000 from one of their competitors too (Microsoft). If you are a game vendor, you don't have to get people to upgrade to this or that, just give them all the software they need.

I don't see how the games market is *anything* like SAP. The games require one paid thing - Windows - and that comes with 99% of the computers anyway (yes, people pay more for it. It doesn't matter, because people wouldn't know how to install anything else). The rest is hardware - which Linux wouldn't "fix" - and stuff like DirectX, which is free anyway.

Valve confirmation on the Telegraph website

[Sits]

"Valve has also confirmed that it will make Steam available to Linux users in the coming months." - telegraph.co.uk (this is on the website of national UK newspaper).

It's not the quote you explicitly sought but I would argue it makes it seem like Valve have said something about a Linux port. Regardless, your overall point that the source of information should be scrutinized definitely holds...