獨立遊戲創作者推出 Linux 版的好處

標題不知道怎麼下,大概就是這樣...

Hacker News 首頁上翻到的,以這個 upvote 數量來看,應該會收到今天的 Hacker News Daily 上:「Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux (reddit.com)」。

作者是一位獨立遊戲開發者,在兩年前推出了「ΔV: Rings of Saturn」這款遊戲,並且也發佈了 Linux 版。

作者先就數字來比較,他賣出了 12000 套,其中 700 套是 Linux 玩家;另外他收到了 1040 個 bug report,其中大約 400 個是從 Linux 玩家回報的:

As of today, I sold a little over 12,000 units of ΔV in total. 700 of these units were bought by Linux players. That’s 5.8%. I got 1040 bug reports in total, out of which roughly 400 are made by Linux players.

That’s one report per 11.5 users on average, and one report per 1.75 Linux players. That’s right, an average Linux player will get you 650% more bug reports.

看文章時可能會覺得「Linux 玩家真難伺候」,但實際上作者講到,這 400 個 bug 裡面只有 3 個 bug 是平台相關的 (只會發生在 Linux 上),其他的 bug 其實是所有平台都會發生:

A lot of extra work for just 5.8% of extra units, right?

Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.

Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone[.]

原因是 Linux 社群在參與各種 open source project 養成的習慣,會盡可能把各種資訊講清楚,並且找出可以重製問題的方式:

The thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

But that’s not all. The report quality is stellar.

與一般玩家的回報方式完全不同,Linux 玩家很習慣就會附上基本的環境資訊,系統紀錄,甚至有時候還會包括 core dump 與 reproducible steps:

I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed.

And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.

不知道有沒有遇到回報 GDB 資訊的...

很特別的分享 XDDD

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