story
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).
Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.
- The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much hidden gotchas that they do a poor job of explaining ahead of time.
- Making a cross-platform Electron app that behaves well and up to to snuff on Windows, Mac and Linux is not even close to easy. The fact that JS theoretically works on all three platforms buys you way less than most people think.
Source: I'm making a cross platform Electron app that supports Linux.
You also don't need to support every distro on the planet. Just focus on Ubuntu. With proper planning and choosing your game engine wisely it's not the biggest deal to build for Linux.
You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.
Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.
A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos
Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales-stat...
[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/president-of-blizzard...
I have personally used hundreds of dollars on linux compatible games.
