Indie game developer Koonsolo just revealed some surprising sales statistics on the Linux version of their game. 7 months ago they released their game ‘Mystic Mine‘, and in that time the Linux version sold more copies than the version for Windows. Yet they get plenty more website visits from Windows users. Koen Witters, the founder of the company, explains: ‘For every 232 Linux visitors we get on our website, one of them buys our game. If you compare that to the windows users, we need 526 of them to get a single sale.’ So it seems Linux users are more eager to buy downloadable games than Windows or even Mac OS X users. This data definitely asks the question if Linux is a more viable platform for game developers than anyone currently assumes. The full statistical analysis can be found at http://www.koonsolo.com/news/?p=33.
Definitely something that should make game publishers think twice, and which reminds me there were similar results found about online purchasing frequency and amounts between Firefox and IE users. Really makes you wonder why Chinese websites (and online banking!!!) support for Firefox is still so poor!
wow we should spread it out to all game companies 🙂