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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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There are 3.2 billion video gamers in the world, and 1.17 billion play online (numbers are from 2023).
"millions" is a couple percent. (As seen in the steam survey as well as napkin mathing the numbers from above)
Call of Duty is the biggest fps game in the world, every year. Their playerbase is "only" in the millions, so I suppose you agree with the executives that it's not nearly successful enough?
No, because they are above the average video games market share.
But you can't argue that Linux gamers are a significant market share, just because the number in front of the % is the same lol.
There are millions of video games, which all have below 1% market share. Compared to the average game, a single percent is huge.
But there are no millions of operating systems with below 1% market share. Compared to the most popular OS, which has above 80% market share, 1 or 2 percent is insignificant.
Ok so if you agree that their playerbase of millions marks a successful game, then why do you consider the possibility of millions of players insignificant?
It's not absolute but relative.
Because for each individual game dev, linux gamers account for on average 2% of their sales, which is insignificant.
Linux gamers are spread across all of the games and game devs.
Every person excluded from a purchase is money lost in the eyes of corporations. It's why boycotts work when they're properly organized. It's why microtransactions are usually less than $5. I've been in corporate meetings for game companies before, I was recently illegally fired. The addition of Linux support is coming, but the big corporations need motivation to do it quickly.
You have to compare income from sales to development and ongoing maintenance cost of supporting a whole other platform. Not all engines can easily build for Linux. And the ones that can, are sometimes hindered by windows only libraries, which may significantly speed up development or quality of the game.
Boycots work when the market share of boycotters is significant.
I am, remember? I just told you that I was (is, will continue to be) a game developer. I've already considered cost of development.
As with your arguments where you mixed relative and absolute numbers - you can not apply the learnings of one subset of game devs (yourself & the companies where you worked at) to all of them, as they operate in vastly different circumstances.
For example, here is a different opinion from a game dev: https://x.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
I was illegally fired for organizing unions. The labor activist world is tiny. I'm able to make these statements with the confidence that I do, because I've talked to hundreds of people in several game companies.
There were 11.1 million game developers as of Q1 2024.
The total number of game development companies from the tallied data is 9,924.
https://qubit-labs.com/how-many-game-developers-are-there-in-the-world-surprising-statistics
So you have knowledge of a tiny subset, which can not be extrapolated to apply to all of them.
I don't think you understand the outsized influence a few hundred activists can be. I was 1 of about 30 people who helped organize AQAU, one of the biggest unions in the industry, 600 people encompassing all of publisher-side QA.
Just hit me up when your prediction comes true and I'll happily agree that you were right all along. But looking at historical trends and the data that we have on the matter today - I can not share your confidence.