alt Hacker NewsWhat is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support.
I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton.
Edit: It was <0.1% sales but 20% of all support tickets: https://xcancel.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
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When I worked at a Linux distro I worked with one device maker who told me in confidence that 90% of their revenue came from Linux-based shops and they only needed a one-person support team. They had a 20 person support team for the remaining 10% of revenue coming from Windows-based shops.
Where I work now the top 10 customers are Linux shops. They probably account for 80% of our revenue. The remaining hundreds of customers are more evenly split between Linux and Windows.
So I guess it depends very much on what industry you're in. For consumer games it might be Windows, but outside of financials and administrative realms and into the world of embedded it's a heckuva lot of Linux. Support costs tend to be lower, and you really only have to target Red Hat and Ubuntu.
20% of auto-reported crashes. So it's not like Linux users were writing more tickets but the game crashing on Linux more (because of gfx drivers).
Yes, and I think a free-version user might produce more support requests than a commercial user for two reasons: 1) commercial/professional users might feel more entitled to support, but typically have a better understanding of linux and more versed in fixing stuff themselves. -- and more importantly -- 2) They probably have a dedicated setup where they can run the AMD-blessed distro
That single, annecdotal evidence gets posted everytime a topic like that comes up. I would really love to get more reliable stats about this.
Even the "0.1% of sales" figure is quite atypical.
Would you rather that the 100% of bugs in those 20% of tickets never got fixed?
Linux users write highly detailed bug reports because it's the only way to get things fixed without coding the fix yourself.
I don't think gaming on Linux is comparable here.
If those bugs are only present in the Linux port, then yeah, Linux users cost more to support. But if a significant amount of these bugs affect all platforms, then you could argue that a Linux user is much more valuable to them than a non-Linux user because they provide better feedback. Assuming they actually care about fixing their product.