It must be close to a year since this has last been asked, but the indie gaming scene is evolving, so please just hear me out.
Mac and Linux gaming is growing. Linux gamers are
desperate to get games that support Linux (source: the average Linux user pays more than twice as much for
Humble Bundles as Windows users), and Mac support is increasingly common (between the huge success of Unity and many Valve games getting Mac support in recent times). More and more non-gamers are getting into games thanks to their iPhones, and most non-gamers I know (by a long shot, where I lived in Australia and here in Canada -- and most of my friends are non-gamers) own Macs. Their first taste of PC (as in personal computer, not Windows specifically) gaming will be on Macs.
I've received a lot of requests to have KarBOOM work on Linux, and more still for Mac support -- most of these potential customers don't own Windows PCs. I'm proud to be using GS, and when new developers ask about starting off in game development I always recommend GS. But I can't see myself sticking around for my next game if I can't get on Mac, and I'm sure that's why Dejobaan is using Unity now.
The
Humble Bundle gets huge respect from gamers, not just as one of the first of its kind, but since
every game in every bundle supports Windows, Mac and Linux. A lot of games make their Linux and/or Mac debut on Humble Bundle, and each bundle makes hundreds of thousands of sales. Getting in the Humble Bundle is a big deal for indie developers, but only available for those supporting Windows, Mac and Linux.
Finally, Unity does
not run on Linux. With so many choices of engine to learn how to make games, and considering how daunting that process actually is, new developers (a big target for GS) want to start off on a cross-platform engine, and more experienced developers (such as Dejobaan) want to move to cross-platform engines. If a developer wants to support Linux, they move on past Unity. GS should catch them -- support for the 3 big personal computer OSes for those who want to make PC games, Windows or not.
As far as I know, a lot of GS features that previously relied on DirectX don't anymore. Rendering still does, and shaders use HLSL, but Cg is
identical and works with OpenGL, so GS's extremely respectable shader programming features (which are my favourite part of GS) wouldn't be compromised as far as I can tell from all the way over here. I'm sure porting to more platforms isn't easy, but given you're working on Android stuff it's also certainly not too much to think about.
Anyway, thanks for reading,
Jibb
EDIT: Have some stats! (thanks, Error014, for finding most of these)
The distribution between platforms depends a bit on how you count it. In our own store it is as follows:
Windows: 70%
Linux: 15%
Mac: 15%
.
We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be [...]
Also, the per-platform download breakdown was pretty surprising, with Windows accounting for 65%, and Mac and Linux pretty much splitting the remainder evenly
.
35/65? That's a
54% increase in downloads thanks to a larger market. Yes, I know it's not necessarily indicative. But it's also not necessarily a maximum, especially considering how much more noteworthy our games will appear to the Mac and (especially) Linux gaming communities than they will in the Windows market. Case in point: another game, Lugaru, by Wolfire (developers of the very highly anticipated Overgrowth, which will also support Mac and Linux):
From a short sighted, graph reading viewpoint, supporting Mac OS X and Linux directly increased sales by around 122%. However, this seemingly unbelievable number is actually understated. Here's my attempt at an explanation in five points...
.
That's right,
122% increase in sales with Mac and Linux support.
Oh, and here are the
stats of every Humble Bundle to date. Check out the blue and green in those pie-charts!
