Heard a nice talk of Stillalive Studios at the Devmania in Mainz, Germany. The guys developed Son of Nor and spoke about the Linux support of their game. One core thesis that remained in my head is that after releasing the game it would have been better not to offer a linux port! Reason for that was that most of the bug reports and bad reviews came from driver issues on linux. Since most of the reviews and ratings get agregated in meta critics the reason that do of course not affect windows gamers gets lost but the bad rating remains.

Interesting! Getting aroused by the Humble Bundle thing, and Steam OS and so on, I always though that Linux is the perfect place to go multiplatform for, if you are by your heart a Windows PC developer. Especially because by the 1) the power of the underlying PC and 2) the big community in terms of IT support (even though I am a nerd to a whole bunch of people, all Linux people look like total nerds to me!), and especially because of 3) the appreciation of the port.

There was a saying from one of the Maxis guys, that when they ported The Sims to Mac, they got boosted sales - just because "its on Mac", and I heard similar things - especially in analytic revenue statistics across platforms - about Linux.

And heck, it's just easy to develop for Linux if you have a Windows PC.. just boot the 2nd OS and you are done ... when I would decide to go Mac... nah... I would have to buy one!

So.. about the driver thing one sure can say that the team has not done proper testing - in my company everyone feels challenged when talking about Linux ports just because of the native code lying underneath. And I believe - even though I don't know the game Son of Nor or Stillalive Studios - that chosing the right technology is key to a Linux port.

There is a wonderful quote from Shigeru Miyamoto which is true to the situation those fellas described:

They use Unity...

all the Untiy rant left aside - that's not so good news.

Hm, they used Unity and they failed for driver issue? Too bad!

The question is whether they (more or less meaning Unity) or the users failed...

That's a good question right there! There are lots of Linux-supported games powered by Unity out there, so I'm inclined towards poor testing, as HeelX mentioned. I'm not going to jump to that conclusion, though.

The game seems to have quite mixed/middling reviews regardless of Linux-issues, too.

I have that game on my steam wishlist, seems like a fun one. On the other hand, it would also not really suprise me if it would be buggy. Perhaps they use weird mechanics/work-arounds to make the spells/physics working? Just a really wild quess ofcourse.