Survival Horror Game Sees Linux Sales Around 1%

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Survival Horror Game Sees Linux Sales Around 0.01%

It's been one year since Frictional Games launched SOMA as their latest science fiction survival horror game. The game is supported on Windows, OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4. This game saw close to half a million sales, but just over 0.01% of them were from Linux gamers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SOMA-Linux-Sales-5K

[bulletxt]

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

[bisby]

5,000 sales @ $30 a pop is $150,000. That should be enough to handle paying a full-time dedicated developer to handle linux specific things. It's not like they are losing money on this, unless they design their engine in the most linux un-friendly ways.

Also, 5,000 out of 450,000 is 0.011.. which is 1.1%, not 0.011% ... This is roughly on par with what they should be getting based on linux overall marketshare.

[Jansen]

450,000+ SOMA sales, Linux accounted for only around 5,000 sales, or about 0.01111%.

Math, not even once!

[jbennett]

The math is very wrong here. 5k of 500k is 1%, not .01%. Please correct your decimal place.

[Michael]

Math, not even once!

Yeah fixed now. Multitasking too much while working on XDC2016 videos.

[Passso]

I am part of this 1%, and I like Soma, so I really hope they will continue porting to Linux (finger crossed).

[jf33]

they appear to plan to continue porting their games to Linux in the future

What? Are you sure SOMA is a port? I always thought it's simply a cross-platform title.

[zanny]

5,000 sales @ $30 a pop is $150,000.

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.

[bisby]

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.

I guess that was more of my point. This isn't a game selling 300 copies of a $5 game for $1,500 total in linux sales. This is a (relatively) pricey game with semi decent sales numbers. If we assume that even $50k makes it back to devs, that would be at the very low end of a dev salary, but that's assuming you have need for a full time dev. If you have a full 2000 hours worth of work just to make linux specific issues work, perhaps there are bigger issues. If you use that 50k to encourage your already salaried developers to write things in a more linux friendly way, there is a slight learning curve perhaps, but I'd be willing to bet eventually that most of that winds up being profit.

Even $30,000 worth of dev time means this would be break even at worst, and worth it for the good will even if the financial incentives are negligible.