Linux users don't pay for software.

Selling to people who are unwilling or incapable of paying is not a good business model.


And no, no holy wars. It's a fact. Look at market shares. Unless you're RedHat, selling enterprise contracts, there is no money. There is definitely no money in boxed software.

And if there is, Windows and Mac markets are thousands to million times bigger, so might as well focus on that.

I'm sorry to continue derailing the thread, but this is just beyond stupid.

I use Linux on a daily basis, and the biggest thing that stops me from buying more software for my linux boxes is the simple fact that I rarely find software for sale on Linux. I would gladly buy games for Linux instead of windows. (Or ideally, games that let me run them on both my computers.)

Edit: I also can't remember the last time I bought a boxed game out of a store. 90% or more of my software is purchased online with digital downloads. I do miss the box art however.

[quote name='weaponx69' timestamp='1302365452' post='4796388']
How do you explain the humble indie bundle and those numbers then?

They aren't Linux, they are portable?
[/quote]

You've missed the point. The Humble Indie Bundle (using a pay-what-you-want system) got a considerably higher average payment from Linux users than Windows or Mac users.
The averages were: $6.68 for Windows, $9.27 for Mac, and $13.78 for Linux.


On the actual subject, I agree with other comments that when using higher level libraries the differences in developing for platforms are fairly small.

You've missed the point. [/quote]yep
this is not the sole example as well, theres been a few cases where games have come out on windows & also linux & the linux ports have earned decent. & like the example mentioned above the linux users have paid on average more than the win users

anyways to the OP, perhaps look at a crossplatform solution eg Ive been doing some html5,webgl stuff recently it seems OK (apart from javascript is an idiot language, I just discorved an implemention bug this morning), theres also flash & other things

Only a fool or a masochist would use X11 directly. If you use a portability layer like SDL (or SFML, or whatever) you never see X, and your code is pretty portable to any platform that supports OpenGL.
[/quote]

Come on man! I'm not either of those things and I work with X11 directly a lot. Using SDL is cool too but from my experiences its pretty close to X11 any ways. All OpenGL and OpenAL calls are the same the only difference is how they are linked to the system. What I mean here is how you would use glX* calls vs. wgl* calls. Other than that they are the same. The actual amount of code to init X11 isn't that much. I just don't really like the way it looks because I'm OCD about names and such...yeah... some might remember that topic, but any ways. OpenAL seamed to be the same on Linux and Windows.

By the way, I would always pay for the software I would use. No matter what system it runs on.

You've missed the point.

yep
this is not the sole example as well, theres been a few cases where games have come out on windows & also linux & the linux ports have earned decent. & like the example mentioned above the linux users have paid on average more than the win users

anyways to the OP, perhaps look at a crossplatform solution eg Ive been doing some html5,webgl stuff recently it seems OK (apart from javascript is an idiot language, I just discorved an implemention bug this morning), theres also flash & other things
[/quote]

I think it would be really cool to develop a program similar to Flash for simple game development for Linux. I think there are some just like that, but I could be wrong. I can't remember actually. But I've been looking into a lot of cross platform things and I have found that Java would make an awesome installation, configuration utility. I've even though about making tools with it but I've noticed that swing is a little slow. I seen some cool UML tools done in Java that could be converted to game UI creators or scene managers or something of that nature. I personally think that kind of thing stems naturally from UML so I would love to take advantage of it. I'm prolly not the first to think this either so...

I think it would be really cool to develop a program similar to Flash for simple game development for Linux.

Try the Blender Game Engine?

It's not really advisable to use X11 directly for a real project. I understand that it may be interesting to program directly to the X11 API for curiosity and tinkering purposes. However, there are a lot of subtle things that you will probably do wrong, which will cause troubles for people who want to use your program under a different window manager, for example. If you haven't read the ICCCM, you shouldn't code to X11 directly, and the ICCCM contains some pretty heady stuff. You'll do yourself and the world and your users a favour by using toolkits, or libraries geared towards games such as SDL and SFML, because they have already been debugged against problems related to the ICCCM.

As for the side topic of market size and willingness to pay, the key thing to recognize is that the Linux market may be much smaller than the Windows market, but the Windows market is totally saturated and the Linux market isn't. As long as you develop with a cross-platform target from the beginning, targetting all three of Windows, Mac, and Linux isn't that difficult, and the investment will definitely pay off, simply because your game will get noticed more and spread by word of mouth within the small but desperate for attention Linux gaming world. This word of mouth factor can perhaps even help your Windows sales if you're an indie without a big marketing budget.

I don't believe that X11 is all that bad to work with. True, it kinda looks ugly in source code but it works. In my experience, I have found that X11 has it's own logic similar to Win32. But they are different in a lot of ways. I glanced over a google on ICCCM and what I seen were topics on Atoms and things of that nature. I've been working with X11 for a while now and have had no bugs with it on any other Linux box I ran my application on. I did learn the hard way about a few things, but oddly X11 helped me debug.... X11. Like OpenAL, from what I've noticed, when you screw up or forget to release something or try to use something that doesn't exists they both hick'up and dump a bunch of crap in the terminal. Yes, I said terminal. Who knows that one of those is? I still use the old tools because I'm comfortable with them. I haven't seen any lack in development either. Now back on track, X11 and OpenAL both printed out error codes that I looked up via google Xlib. Turns out I learned a lot of neat lil tricks and helpful info that way. For example, I've seen a few sites the demonstrate OpenGL using X11. This is cool, but they close their applications the wrong way. First, they use an atom they technically have created for their application yet so when they try to check for a ClienMessage X11 complains. Well... or... maybe that was just me, but I swear I'm not the only one I've seen it! But who cares, SDL is easy to setup to. I didn't like how it handles sound though. I'd rather use SDL for event processing and OpenGL initialization. But then that takes the fun out it for me... hehe.

Besides all this, its nice to see that there are people here interested in Linux. Look at all the replies I got. Even is some were negative, oh well. Again, I would just like to see more Linux stuff out their. I just downloaded a couple of cool programs from Ubuntu.One: Gtick and tuxguitar. Amazing, I didn't think I could break 100 on chromatics yet but I did. Anyways... all cool stuff cheers

If you're portable, Linux will be your last market. If you're Linux exclusive - well... TuxRacer is pretty big I hear.[/quote]
I don't agree with your point. Windows (and to a lesser extend the Mac) is a large market - but extremely crowded. I think you could do reasonably well targeting Linux exclusively. There are few commercial quality games available for Linux, even smaller ones. Also consider that Linux users tend to be more geeky than their Mac or Windows counterparts, they might be more disposed to playing computer games, particularly non-browser based ones.

And if you were to make an effort to keep the code cross platform so you have the option of targeting the others too.

As for the OP, I find Linux very nice to develop on. I use it at work, though at home I use Windows (mostly).

@Antheus

I'm not going to argue that Linux is a viable platform to target, but stating that Linux users cannot or will not pay for software and claiming that it's a fact is kinda ridiculous. You could say that they're rarely willing to pay, but a flat no is just asking for a rebuttal:

http://blog.wolfire....s-Windows-users

Saying "nobody buys Linux software" doesn't mean literally nobody. It means the proportion of users is low, and therefore the potential market is tiny.