I guess we are dependent on the fact that people are doing these ports for love, despite non-existent business cases. If someone only plans to sell 100,000 copies total, how do you justify the work to support the 500 buyers of a native Linux build? And yet something like 80/100 games in my library have native Linux versions. I keep thinking I must have screwed up my arithmetic somewhere, those numbers are so low. Wow, it's almost as though they did the port just for me!Īnother way to look at it is that the port (including QA & support) needs to cost less than about $35k (minimum sales price of $10, devs keep 70%, 5000 copies) for it to have paid for itself. So at 0.5% for Linux, that's only 5000 Linux players. Steamspy estimates Slay the Spire has sold 1-2M copies. It is kinda sad when you try and figure out absolute numbers. Surely a very popular cross-platform game with low system requirements should more-or-less mirror the state of the market? Why were they surprised? What were they expecting, and why? These numbers are very close to the Steam hardware survey. You can find Slay the Spire on Humble Store and Steam if you wish to pick up a copy. It's stolen a lot of time away from me personally, it's fantastic. Slay the Spire is a popular indie game, one with an "Overwhelmingly Positive" user rating from over 20,000 user reviews and it definitely deserves your attention. Be helpful when issues arise, put up a review for a game you enjoy, tell those developers you enjoyed it on Linux and so on you get the idea. The uphill battle remains and will do for a long time, the important thing is to continue to make sure we're worth the time for the developers who do support Linux. It's basically the same story as it always has been-increasing our market share somehow is the only thing that will help. Even just on Linux, Steam has somewhere in the region of 5,426 games available and that's not taking into account all the bigger titles that can now be played thanks to Steam Play.Ĭompetition is hotter than ever and being a smaller platform, it isn't obviously helping. Obviously a big part of the problem is just how many games there are now across all platforms. When doing this before (part 5) it did fluctuate quite a lot between 0.6% up to highs of around 16% (although that was a rare one with FLASHOUT 2 in Part 3). To me, that's a surprise (the developer was surprised too) as that's quite low even for Linux sales. Here's the breakdown the developer provided: ![]() ![]() ![]() Also, this is only on Steam and so it's not counting Humble Store where it's also sold. In the past, I've spoken to many developers about how their games sold on Linux and this time we have information on Slay the Spire to share.įirst, we need to take into account that according to the Steam Hardware Survey that Linux only currently represents around 0.82% of the Steam market.
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