"Its great that people are enthusiastic about Linux as a gaming platform but there are not many people who are interested in paying for a game and that seems to be the reality."
I might add that in all humble indie bundles linux users have paid the highest. To be fair, I don't think linux right now is a prime target for games but I do believe that it will be.
Humble Bundle typically features a set of 5-8 well known and high quality products. Windows users pay roughly $1 per product and Linux users pay $1.50 per product. Individual devs for a wildly popular bundle may see as much as $50,000 from Linux users. It is yet to be seen how many Linux users are willing to pay full price for new releases.
Linux will be prime time if Valve releases their long rumored Linux console box. Until then the year of Linux will always be "next year" just like always.
The demise of Loki was informative for a variety of reasons none of which should lead you to conclude "how few Linux users will buy full priced games". The first lesson to gather from Loki was that in order to get people to buy your games, you need a solid well-oiled distribution network. Stocking a few titles in Electronic Boutique is not a recipe for success. Steam is different as it puts Linux titles on a level playing field. I don't have to schlep to a store and hope that they will have the title I'm looking for as I can see it right there on Steam. And I don't have to worry about a store stocking just the big name stuff as Steam will stock it all and all the time.
Another issue that Loki contended with was the fact that most of their games ran at a lower framerate than the Windows counterpart. Most serious gaming fans want to use their hardware to its maximum potential especially the FPS multi-player twitch gamers. Valve has a lot more leverage in this regard than Loki ever did. We all know (because they said so) they are working with the major GPU players to get better drivers made. But also, they don't just port games, they make them. The Source engine is very popular and they have already tweaked it significantly so not only is it competitive with how it runs on Windows but it actually surpasses it in maximum frames per second.
Another thing Loki dealt with was Linux users were a bit more idealistic in the 90's. We still held out hope that AAA game titles would just "appear" on Linux. Fast forward to the present day and I doubt many actually believe this. The problem back then was that if you expected Free top tier games to just appear you had less incentive to actually buy. I think Linux users are a bit more pragmatic now and are much more willing to pay for a proprietary binary as it's pretty clear that that's the only way you're going to play. So this is a psychological barrier Valve doesn't have to overcome anymore.
Basically, I think Valve is approaching this with the same methodical precision that Tesla is approaching the electric car space. Look at the problems that exist in an objective way and devise solutions one by one until you achieve success. Valve may still falter but it won't be for ignoring any lessons Loki could have provided.
He pretty clearly was talking about their experience with QuakeLive there. Many people have said a lot of times that the Humble Bundles cannot be taken seriously if you think about Linux and its users paying for games. The bundles have a hype around them, people try to make Linux look good, etc.
I know they paid the highest, but how many of them were there? That's the key metric he's talking about. Was Linux 10% of Humble Bundle sales? 20%? What was it?
Eyeballing H.I.B.'s revenues by platform, they were more like 25%, which isn't bad at all.
Even though I prefer Windows (use & dev), I welcome cross-platform compatibility - more competition, more likely to be usable on future platforms, not locked out myself when I switch platforms, etc.
I've been wondering for a while how much of that is due to the public chart of Linux/OS X/Windows donations. Does anyone know if Linux users donate at the same amount when that information isn't made available? (ie has there been a sale where you can't see donations broken down by OS during the sale, but the figures get released later?)
The effort Valve seems to be putting into bringing the platform up to speed, including hiring a lot of Linux talent and cooperating with driver vendors, seems to imply that there is a (hidden?) agenda here that goes beyond selling a few game licenses to the set of today's Linux desktop users.
(Especially when you consider the recent gaben statements about win8 being a "catastrophe", and the windows app store stepping on steam's toes)
I think Carmack's response misses the mark. Valve ain't targeting Linux as just yet-another-platform.
Make no mistake: Steam and the App store are competitors for selling digital applications over the Internet.
It tomorrow MS and Apple "force" people to pay using their App store, they need some alternative.
MS was a great competitor destroyer. You will compete with them, for example with compilers, like Borland or Lotus or Wordperfect or Netscape and they will destroy you first going against your income generators and they will care about the product later, when there is a monopoly.
MS could destroy steam just using their OS control to make steam perform badly, they did it in the past with companies like DR-DOS, with media encoders-decoders(making them use code that they slowed down on purpose so their badly programmed software looked better) and so on.
Also, with their next "flagship" title, Dota 2, it seems like they're going the free-to-play route anyway, so people who are willing to play for the game itself is going to be irrelevant.
I might add that in all humble indie bundles linux users have paid the highest. To be fair, I don't think linux right now is a prime target for games but I do believe that it will be.