As I mentioned above, for us the conclusion is simple - we are writing our custom engine (Renkei Engine: ) for our future projects to ensure total compatibility with all three platforms. But if you are making something simple and only using native Unity tools, making a port is definitely a good idea.
#DINOCIDE STEAM SOFTWARE#
If you are using Unity and your game is a complex piece of software with many third party modules - porting isn't a good idea. In fact our second game - Dinocide, which is a classic platformer, was indeed a relatively easy port without any serious issues and we did make some extra income from this port.Īnd I would say, again. Some simpler games might actually be a very straightforward to port. This is obviously only true for VoidExpanse. I would say with the amount of effort we had to put into making this support available we ended up losing money. As you can see from the stats I provided above the sales of Linux version turned out to be minuscule.
#DINOCIDE STEAM MAC#
Q: Do you feel you made any profit on the Linux version? QuoteThe game was released simultaneously for Win, Mac and Linux. However, there might be some improvements in this regards after merge between Microsoft and Xamarin. Which again, doesn't make supporting Linux easy. But that was one hell of a task to overcome. We solved that problem by providing a special bundled-mono with the game. Obviously not the Linux itself, but the software tools that are available for that platform.Īnother thing I want to mention, our game required Mono, but most of the users didn't have it installed or had an incomplete version and many actually had a corrupted installation. Unfortunately I must say that the Linux is the least stable platform when it comes to these kind of third party software and libraries. We also had to rewrite many of our custom plugins and contact third party developers whose solutions we were using in order to improve their products in relation to Linux and Mac support. However seeing as Unity is one of the most used engines in the indie scene it is a serious problem for everyone. We are hoping that the situation improves, but for us the conclusion is that we will never use Unity for our future games. And you can't always find workarounds to these problems and bugs.
Not to mention critical bugs in the Unity itself when running on Linux. Even though Unity is supposed to be cross-platform solution, yet there are hundreds of problems related to compatibility and performance. Q: How hard was it for you to support Linux? QuoteSupporting Linux was a very difficult task. I think this is because Mac has a higher percentage of casual users.īut as you can see it isn't really worth financially to support any platforms other than Windows, especially considering how broken the support for these platforms on most of the cross platform engines.
But mac sales are a bit bigger for Dinocide since it is a bit more casual game. The developer had this to say about the figures: QuoteLinux sales are more or less consistent across these two projects, the difference is within the range of standard deviation.
Those figures seem pretty similar to what we have seen from other developers before here on GOL. I asked the developer about how their sales have been going across different platforms: VoidExpanse: I had the pleasure of speaking with another developer today about their Linux sales, and this time it was Lurler from AtomicTorch Studio.
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