What's this?

As a consumer who really doesn't know much about the industry I'll say that this particular pasta was pretty convincing.

I knew it was bull when I actually read through it xD tonight is REALLY not my night

To add to that, a fun fact: a few months ago, the AMD linux drivers couldn't run the idtech3 engine on more than 50-60fps on my PC (as opposed to 250fps on windows).

Is it just me or is the amount of people that use Linux & Mac users incredibly small?

According the August 2013 Valve hardware survey, Linux users only account for 1~2% at the most, .40% using Ubuntu. Mac users only account for 3.81%, so between Linux and Mac users, we're talking about maybe 5% of users on Steam use something other than Windows for Gaming.

Now I'm all for diversity and competition, it's the foundation of capitalism, but from a business standpoint, does it make monetary sense to make games cross OS compatible? Does the extra work it takes to get Mac & Linux builds working properly justify the amount of profit that will be gained from those users?

it's gotta be worth it, at least for Valve, or they wouldn't do it.

Right, but I meant more like companies making games. Like Awesomenauts for example. It has builds for all 3 OS types, but 2 of those builds are only going to be used by 5% of the Steam population. According to the hardware survey that is.

So is the 5% Mac & Linux going to provide enough returns to justify the hours put into making it available on those 2 OS?

Most of games created on pre-built engines like Unity/Unreal Engine/etc and for example most of Unity developers never had runtime source code because it's licensing are expensive. It's mean all platform-dependent code is writted and supported by engine developers and game developers are never even care about it much. In Unity you just press the button and Linux version is here. There still might be some minor issues, but they're always handled by engine developers. So cost of porting of these games are pretty cheap, sometimes just totally free.

Everything is much harder and expensive for games with custom built engines like PA where developers need to deal with every issue on their own, but if game engine build to be cross platform from start it's much easier to support many platforms in future. And I'm not only talking about Linux and Mac, but also about Sony/Nintendo consoles and Android/iOS.

Unity is kind of amazing in that regard. It lets people with much lower technical skills get games up and running quickly and with surprisingly high quality. For the most part, Unity "just works". Part of it is because computers (and mobile devices) have gotten so fast people can be fairly loose with their code and content, and part of it is Unity has spent a lot of time getting the engine to do a lot of work for you. If you're a developer using Unity it almost doesn't make sense to not support as many platforms as possible.

For us, linux users are probably a tiny fraction of those who are playing, but it might be worth it in the end because of SteamOS and Steam Machines. At the time we started work on PA there were already talk of Valve's "Steam Box", so it made sense for us to try to support linux. Only time will tell if the investment was actually worth it for us overall. I'm sure our current linux and OS X users are happy we did though.

Yeah I'm really happy that I can play on my preferred platform without any extra problems.
I'm think I'll still like the game anyway, but I doubt I ever spend any time on alpha/beta version of Windows-only game just because It's always mean problems which are pretty hard to fix.

If you want to see the real numbers from the lions den itself, go here:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Mac accounts for: 3.56% of all players on Steam. Roughly.
Linux accounts for: 1.03%

Obviously, we still strongly feel those audiences are worth supporting. Hopefully, they'll only continue to grow. But the actual numbers (4.5 in 100 gamers) means that it takes a lot of determination to support those audiences, because at least near term, a casual business analysis would say "don't". Of course, that's short term thinking. The landscape may look quite different 5 years from now, which is why you should be looking down the road, not just at the hardware survey for today.

Just curious - Does it count those that use Linux but still use a program to mimic windows so they can run Steam (even though it's not necessary anymore)?

Honestly J, no clue how it handles that. I assume there is some amount of weirdness going on there with virtualization, so it's not "holy script", but a good baseline to go off of.