Entry posted by DerRidda ·
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This was planned as a response to this thread in the micro blogging system (See: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/statuses/id/7596/) but look at the size of it and you will see why I made it a proper blog post instead.
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Here's a hard truth for indie devs: Your stuff isn't anywhere near popular enough that you could even consider the dynamics of the entire market as you do not have a snowballs chance in hell of getting that kind of traction for your product. You are not going to reach the clear cut and homogeneous entirety of the Steam user base. Instead you are probably going to reach a barely predictable heterogeneous fraction of it.
The majority of the market will simply not care so addressing an under served niche audience as well as the bulk of the market can be a very prudent choice.
There's a reason why all three big Mac port publishers (Aspyr, Feral and Virtual Programming) have collectively started rolling out Linux ports. They understand the dynamics of a niche market, they have done business in one for years, exclusively.
Check out these sales data articles (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/sales-statistics-from-developers-part-3.4090), they are mostly concerned with Linux but quite often include Mac data as well. While some of these numbers are silly low ( often owed to the fact that these ports released months after the initial Windows only release and if you look at Rust in article 1 and 3 they manage to catch up) both platforms combined can run anywhere between 6-15 percent regularly, significantly more in extreme cases. It's mostly the popular indie titles that have platform statistics more in line with total market share.
But be frank with yourself: How likely is it that your game is going to be the next Rust compared to the likelihood of it being any of these games you have never heard about before? Could you honestly just ignore around 10% of total sales? (Much more in percent if you look at it as an increase over a Windows only release.)
In essence you are running the Lemonade stand on the street so thinking like you were the CEO of Coca Cola doesn't exactly apply to you.
And while Mac's growth is certainly limited due to the nature of being based on premium products (Some people will never shell out this much extra for a computer while cheaper options exist.) Steam Machines could increase the size of the Linux install base enormously while having just about no chance of negatively affecting the Linux market share. The people that are already using Linux for gaming on desktops do not care whether or not console machines do well or fizzle into irrelevance.
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