I don't know. Do people that you primarily communicate with using mailed letters deserve to be called friends?

You've got a system that's simultaneously a detailed rolodex, a scheduler/calendar of events, a shared photo album, a mass e-mailer, an instantaneous communication system, and somewhere to make announcements that are visible to selected groups of people. For no direct payment of money. Oh, and it spies on you all the time and occasionally sells the results to its friends. Except for that last point, everything else is a useful feature. Whether the trade-off is worth it depends on individual preference, and the individual's acquaintances' preferences when it comes to communication.

Platformers, shmups, fighting games, lots of puzzle games, and many non-RTS top-down view games work better without a pointing device. Some of them work just fine with digital buttons, some are better with some kind of analog control (but still not a mouse).

Give a 2-minute editing window, and clearly mark the post as being edited if it was altered after someone else replied to it. Also don't let ACs edit their posts. Between those, it gets rid of a lot of the opportunity for trolling.

If you're going to make that argument, then you need to say "white male USA".

You could make the same argument that none of the ancient Greek city-states weren't democracies either, using that argument. Or that the Roman Republic wasn't a representative democracy/republic, although those are generally accepted as the classic examples of those forms of government.

On the other hand, if they weren't democracies, then the U.S. wasn't a republic either until at least when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the vote. The 14th and 15th Amendments were passed around 1870, giving all races the right to vote, technically (although it took the country almost 100 years to get serious about closing the loopholes).

I'd happily move to an Apple phone if they made a product that does what I want. I want a phone that I can develop for on an arbitrary brand of computer without paying anything for the opportunity. I want a phone that I can sideload unapproved apps on, use multiple app stores on, has a choice of browsers with different back-ends, and that uses a standard mini or micro USB power input. I want to be able to keep around old app backups and install back-level versions of software that changes in a way that I don't like. I want one that'll run my emulators, an ssh server, an FTP client, and Busybox.

I had an iPod Touch before I had any kind of smartphone. It was awesome for what it could do, but what it *couldn't* do influenced two choices for me. First, that I would get a smartphone. Second, that it wouldn't be an Apple, because it would be too much work getting it to do everything that I would want it to do. Nothing of consequence has changed in the balance there since I bought my first smartphone. In the meantime, I'm happy with what I've got, and I'm not going to begrudge the people that have different desires than I do, who are happy with what *they* have. Apple makes some great products. It's just my opinion that they aren't great for *my* uses.

So, Wine's decreasing the number of games that you can't buy, it's doing so without Valve or the other game developers having to do any work (or more importantly, pay any money), *and* it puts the onus of product support on the users themselves. You're not part of the demographic I've described. You're part of a demographic that still buys a percentage of the games that they would if native Linux ports were available, and where that percentage is growing on its own. They get sales, and you get the shaft because you don't really have any recourse for support from the company, if something goes wrong. "Ohhhh, we can't verify that problem's existence on Windows, and we don't support Wine. So sorry". As a software developer, support issues where I can say "That isn't a supported use-case" are quite welcome.

You and your friends aren't the "corner guy", you're another group, in between him and the group I'd consider myself part of. I'd *prefer* Linux games, but if they aren't available, I'll boot Windows instead. I tend to game in streaks of time on Windows and program in streaks on Linux (with "general use" being done on either), so I'll kind of switch off between primary OSes a couple of times per month.

The way I see it though, is that even with the assumption that *no* people that use Linux at all buy any games, and that they'd all represent part of a completely untapped market, they might make up 5% of the potential market (being generous, IMO). If there's already a MacOS port or the game was written in OpenGL anyhow, they may as well reach for that extra percentage. But of course, you've got the people that buy some Windows or consoles games anyhow (grudgingly or not), so that decreases the sales benefit of targeting that group.

I'm convinced that game developers will act in their own short-term best interests. 10% increase in dev costs to gain 15% of the market? Score! 10% increase in dev costs to gain 5% of the market? Even if there's a net profit, I think that they're worried about the percentage of the profit margin.

And all this doesn't even mention that "Linux" isn't exactly one platform. "Ubuntu" is several platforms, depending on the DE in use, and with frequent releases, it makes a kind of moving target. Add in all the people that want to use some kind of Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Arch, etc, and you've got a bigger mess than the dev issues deploying an app to Android. There are several fairly-solid reasons *not* to target Linux (favoring Windows, and Mac to a lesser extent), and comparatively-tenuous reasons *to* support it.

This site has an unusual demographic, compared to the general population. We're much more likely to be Linux users, for instance, so this site was the wrong place to take my hyperbole in that direction. I'm still not convinced that there's a sizable market for Linux games. I'd consider the Humble Indie Bundle packs to be the best-case scenarios, and there, you see Linux users paying more than anyone else (which speaks to a desire among the Linux users out there), but there're generally about 50% as many sales as Mac users, and closer to 5% as many sales as Windows users.

And I wish that was true for me, as well. The last time it was, my time sinks were Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003. Warcraft 3 worked passably in Wine without much futzing, and so did Alpha Centauri (I didn't know, at the time, that AC had a native Linux release). Ah, wait, that's not right. I played a fair amount of Minecraft a couple of years ago. Still, most of what I'm interested in isn't available on the platform I'd like it to use it on. I don't think that's going to change, because I just don't believe that a big enough market exists to justify the dev+support costs.

I usually keep the desktop booted into Windows, and the laptop booted into Linux. Steam's network streaming feature comes in handy, with that setup. There's no reboot involved, but I *do* end up using two computers at once. Good thing the wife has her own laptop...

My point wasn't that your demographic doesn't exist, just that it's nowhere near low-hanging fruit. Being generous, it's the intersection of gamers and people who use Linux in any form. Realistically, the demographic is more nuanced, something like "Linux users who have an x% likelihood to buy a specific Windows-only game, and an increase of y% that they'll buy it as a Linux port". There's a point where the splinters of markets get too small for a lot of developers to worry about, where it becomes a question of spending 5% more in development to gain an extra 2% in sales, and it doesn't make sense any more.

I'd expect Humble Indie Bundle numbers to be fairly high, in terms of Linux user representation. I know that I've marked "Linux" as my OS of choice every time I've purchased one. Out of 4,998,506 purchases, 332,944 have been Linux (6.7%), 616,596 are OSX (12.3%), and 3,962,890 have been Windows (79.2%). Linux users generally pay nearly double what Windows users do, so there's that in their favor.

~20% of the market may be worth it, depending on how much more work it takes to get there. ~5% may not be, based on the same factors. Most of the large developers seem to be taking the gamble that enough of the people that are "Linux users" will still buy a Windows-only game (or buy the same thing on a console). And while there are exceptions, they seem to be mostly right. From the dev's perspective, losing a few percent of your market is bad; spending a disproportionate amount of your budget to pick up a few extra percent is worse.

From a technical viewpoint, OSX is more similar to Linux than Windows, true. It's a Unix OS with OpenGL as its 3D graphics API, and OSX ports are an important stepping stone to making Linux ports more likely.

From a marketing an pop-culture viewpoint, OSX is more similar to Windows. It's a larger market, and it's a mainstream product. It's actually available in stores and viewed as something that "normal people" buy. As an example, my fairly non-technical parents would consider (and have considered) buying an Apple computer. That is why I "casually lumped [them] together". The technical hurdles aren't the problem, IMO. Not the biggest barrier to seeing more games on Linux, anyhow.

Glass houses, and all that.

Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and the Unity engine both have Linux versions already. So does Valve's (obviously). EA's Frostbite engine has an OpenGL version, so that's part of the way. There's no market. Not a significant one, anyhow. Most people that are in the market to buy games either have a console, handheld, or a Windows/OSX PC. The vast majority. Then you've got the people like me, who dual boot all of their systems (so we're already customers, anyhow).

Then, over in a tiny little corner, you've got the Linux users with a gamer-grade PC, no OS but Linux, no console, and pockets lined with cash earmarked for games if only publishers'd release them on their OS of choice! Except it's "user", not "users". Yeah, that one guy standing in the corner. That's the market: people that want to buy games, want more than the (mostly Indie) games that have been released for Linux already, but won't (or can't) switch to a platform that has a larger selection.

I've got one of those. I call it a "PC".

A better comparison might be that the Nintendo DS has 4MB of RAM and two ARM CPUs (one ARM9 running at 67MHz, and one ARM7 running at 33.5MHz). The Raspberry Pi's got the 700MHz ARM11, 256MB of RAM, and a GPU that handles 1080p video decoding and 3D performance similar to the first XBox game system. Interface it with some buttons and a display (or two), and something like the model A+ could potentially make an excellent little game system, provided that someone decides to write the software for it.

I taught myself BASIC in a matter of weeks during high school. In a sense, I "could program", and I had a great deal of fun making little computer games, "password protection" programs, and stuff like that. Then I went to college and learned how little I knew. Then I went to work and found out how much I still had to learn.

With the right drive, anyone can learn to program. Similarly, anyone can learn how to draw. There are places for simple carnival caricature artists in the world, and there are places for coders who get a start in a 3 month program. I'm very grateful to them, since they help make places for people like me, fixing the problems caused by copy+paste coders that don't understand some of the details that I do.

Nothing that I can think of, technically. However, Viewmaster was something that I remember using for maybe 2-3 hours over my entire life. I'd believe hearing about a kid using a 3DS for 2-3 hours per day for long periods (and longer, if their parents allow it). If Oculus were more widespread, I'd expect something similar to happen there.

The next question would be how much exposure it takes to damage a child's visual development.