They also want to move to the 'subscription-like' for Windows. That is what this move essentially boils down to. Simplify pricing, get rid of cheapest tier. Simplify offering, remove Linux and Mac miniscule part of market. Get your launcher with your titles to the gamers.
Not that their offerings are that great or partly already not included to others...
Removing Linux and Mac because "minuscule" is such a classic MBA-driven move. Linux and Mac is where you get the power users who sell you, by word of mouth, to their circle of friends and family on PC. You don't just lose goodwill, you lose sales even in your target market. But you can't see that on a spreadsheet, so...
This sort of thing smells of vicious downward spiral.
If they go Windows-only they're in direct competition with PC Game Pass which is cheaper and packed with AAA titles. I'm not optimistic about this move.
Not only packed with triple aaa titles but cheaper and subsidized by Microsoft. They've already commmited to everyone getting the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout as part of it.
Or EA Play for under half the price... Not great, but still decent library... The competition on that market is tough and their own publishing catalog is frankly pathetic...
Funny because for this developer [1] [2] it appears that small user base more than pulls its weight for submitting high quality bug reports. (That alone seems like great value that should encourage supporting alternative platforms like Linux that even a MBA-holder can understand).
That's only because he wants the product to be used, not only bought, a developer point of view. From an MBA point of view, the ideal product is shelfware i.e. something you buy and immediately forget about. Users who actually use what they bought are a regrettable cost of doing business.
Yeah, Arcade's selection is very lackluster. I have it as part of my Apple One subscription and I personally enjoy it, but I'm not much of a gamer and I'm pretty sure most serious players would rather have Game Pass.
> who sell you, by word of mouth, to their circle of friends and family
The warcry of uberfans of this or that IP the world over. I don't buy it anymore. That group can help, but they're not necessary for an IP/service to move forward. Worse, they have higher demands and expectations and feel personally offended when you do wrong by them.
Whether it's Humble dropping Linux or Marvel not lampshading a character detail, I'm moving closer to the perspective that a sold ticket is a sold ticket. But a sold ticket that doesn't result in a swarm of complaint emails is worth its weight in gold.
I think it matters when a service or good is new, but not so much later. In the 90s when you had to convince people that video games were worth the time + most people didn't have a home PC? Yeah, in that case a person who plays games on their Linux machine is important to growing the community. Same for things like trying to convince people to watch anime back when you often had to buy fansubbed VHSes in the mail.
Now everybody and their mom knows what video games are + they're an accepted component of life and there's a huge gaming market, so uberfans aren't necessary for growth.
"In the 90s when you had to convince people that video games were worth the time + most people didn't have a home PC? Yeah, in that case a person who plays games on their Linux machine is important to growing the community."
There were no games available on Linux in the '90s.*
Now, I wouldn't go quite that far. (I've been a Linux user since 1992-ish 0.99pl12 or 14.) It was pretty competitive with other Unixes, particularly since it didn't cost a million, billion dollars.
I guess it depends on one's definition of "full-blown desktop" - KDE is from '98 and GNOME followed later, even Window Maker is from '97, but if one was happy with fvwm then he'd have been sorted since '93.
I wonder if these people also push to release the apps their companies make for Linux phones. After all those are the power users pushing the word of mouth of great apps they get on their Linux phones...
I actually doubt that. Looking at what I consider the best metric of market. That is Steam Hardware survey the Mac and Linux have combined market share of 3.8%...
The Windows power-gamers can do the marketing as well, by pointing where to get cheap games when there is great deal around.
I really think that Linux crowd is more vocal on forums than in reality.
You're doing the same mistake, looking at the issue through numbers.
Let's say I am a power user, and I have 10 friends. I rave about a service because it serves me so well, my friends follow my lead, and now the service sees 9% users on Mac an 91% on Windows. A Linux power-user does the same, and now the service has 4.5% users on Linux, 4.5% on Mac, and 91% on Windows. Our friends then "recruit" their friends, and so on and so forth until the numbers are overwhelmingly pro-Windows - but the chains didn't start there.
Scenario 2: a Windows friend tells me a service is great, he's seen it on this video and blablabla. I check and it's just for Windows. Not only will I not sign up, I will probably badmouth it whenever the subject comes up. So chances are that at least some of our common friends will follow my lead and not sign up, even just because "what if I buy a Mac tomorrow? Their laptops are so nice, I just can't afford it right now but once I get a new job..."
You can't see these stories in a spreadsheet, because virality and clout are undocumented, so to speak, but they are often the difference between a healthy growing business and a dying MBA-driven shell of a company.
Does the math here make zero sense?
If you have 91% windows and 9% mac, and linux users suddenly surge, how do you end up at 4.5% mac, 4.5% linux, and 91% windows users still? The only way that makes sense is if the mac users converted to linux. Otherwise this would almost seem to be in favour of windows users since they're relative userbase increases enough to outset surges in linux power users onboarding? With the ten friends narrative 91 windows users, 9 mac users, into 91 windows users, 9 mac users, 9 linux users would not result in a pro-windows numbers.
Also the notion that linux users "DEFINITELY" want to game on linux seems not entirely based in facts or references to anything. I've used Mac/Linux for the entirety of my highschool, college, and career time. Interacted with plenty. I've never felt if suddenly a store widely supported linux/mac there'd be a surge of new adoption. I've gamed on Linux for a long time (and many times games run under wine/proton work better than windows which is awesome!), but I also game on windows equally, as do my peers without issue or complaint.
Secondly that second point seems entirely vengeful and needless. If one of my linux using friends said as such to me I'd think they were being overly rude and spiteful, but worst of all I think such habits taints the view of developers and maintainers about the userbases. Why would developers want to support a userbase (if indeed the linux userbase all felt this way which I believe they do not) who would " badmouth it whenever the subject comes up" simply because they received a recommendation from their friend(?) that didn't support their preferred operating system? Also "maybe I'll buy a Mac tomorrow?" seems disconnected from reality by and large.
Finally virality and clout are absolutely documented. Is that not the premise of... every single social media platform these days? Every algorithmic recommendation engine is trying to represent virality and clout, since those terms directly tie in to user views, and thus profits!
It does, if you read what I wrote. 1 mac + 10 win + 1 linux + 10 win = 1 mac + 1 linux + 20 windows = 4.5% mac + 4.5% linux + 91% windows.
> this would almost seem to be in favour of windows users since they're relative userbase increases enough to outset surges
If you read it as numbers, yes. But the point is that certain things cannot be expressed in numbers. Because the mac/linux userbase is composed disproportionately more of power-users, who have disproportionately more clout among their network of acquaintances when it comes to IT and games, their overall influence is much higher than the numbers convey. They start the chains.
Your statement on not feeling this or that, btw, is directly negated by the very history of HumbleBundle.
> Why would developers want to support a userbase
We are not talking about developers here, but distributors.
> Every algorithmic recommendation engine is trying to represent virality and clout
That doesn't mean they succeed, and regardless, we are not talking about social media here.
You seem to have gone off on a series of rants without actually reading what I wrote.
This scenario you present isn't exclusive to Linux or Mac though. I have seen this play out a number of times where a friend in my group finds a game and convinces us all to play it together; the difference is we are all on Windows. This is also exactly why companies target streamers so much, because it's just what you describe at a larger scale (and it's safe to say most streamers are running Windows).
this. its stupid how gaming companies cite the minscule 1-2% of linux market share as "not worth it" when these are the people who DEFINITELY want to play their games but because of either dev incompetence or some other issue, are not able to but they still try it. Plus, these 1-2% band together and do the work of the gaming companies by fixing bugs themselves instead of waiting and expecting them to fix it. yet developers are scared of "bug reports" as if that is some scary monster that can only be killed if they adopt inbox zero approach and having inbox zero in terms of bug reports and errors is good for managerial execs.
Of the let's be generous and say 2% of userbase uses Linux. How many of the users don't dual-boot or run Wine/Proton? And what is the realistic workload to keep releasing versions on different platforms? And fixing issues specific to those.
Some devs have even said that it's not worth it to release game on EGS and GOG due to overhead for keeping it up to date there...
i find that hilarious. as a linux person, the first place to get a bug fixed in steam+wine would be proton and not the company producing the game. the contributors will fix the game for everyone and the company will have people coming for more because of generosity of volunteers and yet they want to impose anti-cheat as the gospel
3.8% users are using Steam on Linux, with their shitty support for platforms? Astonishing. That millions of users. It's comparable with XBox market share.
voice from the 90s - M$ft took "multimedia" sales titles that were both Mac and PC, and used the stats on those sales, only in the PC side of the graphs. The sales are now "overwhelmingly" windows.. later they were caught and it was even publicized.. didnt matter
exactly - like the sticker on the desk of the "CEO" of a (eventually-failed) product sales website. WINNER TAKE ALL with some WIntel reference.. f-f-f-f-f-u
Because there are no good subscription services available for the Windows market already. Oh wait I've got Xbox Game Pass and dozens of free games on that.
And EA Play
And the 1000+ games I own on Steam (Many bought from Humble) and the Epic Store.
I had Humble Choice for a year and loved it, then last Feb I skipped a month because there was nothing I wanted. I haven't paid since because the Choice options were getting less and less valuable to me. (As in interesting games, not price).
I almost purchased another year in their sale last month, but I'm glad I didn't I'd feel very ripped off now.
I wouldn't call moving from a single lump sum to a subscription model a simplification. What they are doing is replacing one-time payments with a slow trickle of multiple payments. With interests rates where they are, that slow trickle is worth more than the lump sums.
With 12$ grandfathered tier offering the most. Then having crappy lite tier, that is access to some DRM-Free games and 10% discount. A 15$ tier which allowed you to choose 3 games of 9-12 with 20% and 20$ tier which at the beginning offered single game less than grandfathered classic tier. Later they moved giving all the games to 12 and 20 dollar tiers.
I would say going from 4 prices to one is simplification.
Not that their offerings are that great or partly already not included to others...