273
God of War (PC) is now available on GOG
(www.gog.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
273 points (97.6% liked)
Games
32362 readers
1049 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Surprised we haven’t seen launchers adding native support for Linux. You’d think they would want to take advantage of the millions of steam decks on the market.
Perhaps they are busy contemplating their own hardware investments, which will surely flood the market with cheap and poorly constructed knockoffs.
There's little to no business incentive for other launchers to add support for an OS used only by approx. 1.7% of PC gamers.
Less incentive, but 1.7% of a huge number of customers may still be profitable.
You'd be doubling your building, testing and supporting efforts for a ~1.8% increase in sales at best.
Granted, these numbers are just rough estimates based on Steam's hardware survey, but that's the ballpark we're finding ourselves in.
Nah, it doesn't just linearly double like that. If it takes 10 people to build, test, and support the launcher for Windows, it doesn't take 20 people to support Linux, since most of it is going to be the same across platforms. A 1.8% increase in sales also isn't the best prediction. On Steam, the vast majority of their players and revenue are accounted for by just a couple of the most popular games, and a lot of that is dictated by what games are allowed or successful in China. If your game isn't selling in China, your addressable market is actually much closer to being 4.5% Linux. That's not to pick on China, but China is a massive market on its own, and it's the difference between the case where you're selling microtransactions in Counter-Strike 2 or if you're selling a metroidvania.