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FTFY
Yeah, no shit, they like making money. More platforms means more sales. They were just quicker on the uptake about that than many other companies in the mid 2000s. I think if Ubisoft hadn't claimed 93-95% of all PC gamers are pirates, lied and then doubled down on claiming they did not downgrade their graphics, have misrepresented their games' graphics on a routine basis, and a leak indicated that they intentionally downgrade PC versions of their games in order to maintain console parity, the opinion of them on the PC would be much better. The point is, they have a history of dishonesty and passive-aggressive resentment towards the PC that they need a lot of time to overcome first to really gain good will from PC gamers. They're not as egregious as a company like Microsoft towards PC gamers, but they're not in a position to expect high fives from them given their history.
At a certain point, you're basically refusing to accept reality. Linux has a lower marketshare than Macs for gaming and Mac gaming has been a joke since... forever. If Linux had 40% or more of the PC gaming market and Ubisoft was refusing to make Linux ports, yeah, that makes them look like the problem. At less than 1% of the gaming market, the burden to run the games on Linux falls on Linux, not the devs.
Congrats on missing my point. The things you provided links to are even things I acknowledged. I didn’t say anyone should be patting them on the back. I just said they’ve been consistently bad to the PC market while still releasing their games.
Oh there's been many more games on Linux, but it sure as hell hasn't led to an explosion in marketshare. While it saw a small uptick during Valve's big Steam push, if anything, it's dropped for Linux in the past couple years. And yes, Windows has become fragmented because Windows 10 is a dog of an OS. That still leaves Windows 7 with a far greater marketshare and developer support by a few orders of magnitude than Linux has ever seen, and that's from a dying OS and that's even if you don't factor in the Chinese. You're trying to spin this as a positive, but you're basically arguing my point. An 8 year old OS from Microsoft is still better for gaming today than a modern Linux distro is in basically every metric. Compatibility, support, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's a GOOD thing; I don't like it either, I'm just not in denial about the state of Linux for gaming compared to Windows.
Steam says otherwise, how? I'm seeing 98.2% of users on Windows, 1.4% on Mac, and 0.26% on Linux. Where's the marketshare on Linux for a publisher worth billions to take it seriously as a platform it should expand to?
They are competing with the thousands of games already available for Linux. No Linux = No buy.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. Here, look at it this way: The PC accounted for about 18% of Ubisoft's sales in 2017. Now let's look at the Linux marketshare on Steam hovering at around 0.25%. So that means just from marketshare numbers alone:
Sure seems to make business sense for all the companies that are either creating native or porting titles....if Ubisoft can't figure it out that is their issue.
Even on platforms that support Linux, it's a small minority of sales. There's a series of self-reported figures from various developers here, it's currently hovering at around 2% of sales, a number that's down from previous years closer to 3-6%. In terms of marketshare (not number of titles supported, those are two different metrics) Linux gaming had its surge during the aftermath of SteamOS, but it's dwindled since then. So if your engine supports porting to Linux easily, then sure, 2% more is 2% with basically no additional support costs, why not port to Linux then? If you're a multi-billion dollar company where that number is going to look more like 0.045% of sales as a best-case scenario with way more overhead costs, then it doesn't make business sense at all.
