Why being Cross Platform is Important
An important factor to consider when choosing a game engine is the platforms that the engine supports because this will determine which platforms your game will support. Net Applications reports that Microsoft Windows is run on over 90% of computer desktops, Macs make up less than 5%, and Linux less than 1%.
Other sources place Macs closer to 10% market-share. These numbers are frequently cited by independent game developers as a reason to not support Mac and Linux users. Developers question why they should put in a great deal of additional work into making their game available on additional platforms to increase their potential sales by what they believe will be maybe 10%. However, this logic is flawed for two reasons.
First, many game engines including Flash/Flex offer a way to write a game once and deploy on multiple operating systems and platforms. Flash/Flex creates a .swf file that will run on any platform that has a version of Adobe Flashplayer 9 or later, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Flash/Flex can also produce native binary executables for each of these platforms. Many other game engines offer similar “write once, run anywhere” functionality allowing developers to release games for multiple platforms with minimal additional effort or cost.
Second, Net Application and other operating system market-share metrics are largely meaningless to independent game developers because these statistics deal with the number of people accessing the internet from specific operating systems. Beyond accessing the internet, there is no indication of who is using a computer for any specific purpose. A better metric for independent game developers is to look at the sales data of other independent games, particularly those released cross-platform. Sales data varies greatly depending on the target audience of a game, the marketing a developer does or does not do, and many other factors; but in general it tends to indicate that supporting multiple platforms is beneficial for increasing sales of games made by independent developers.
For example, the game Tribal Trouble reports a sales breakdown of 31% Windows, 47% Mac, 11% Linux and 11% not specified. Wolfire Games reports 45% Windows, 50% Mac, and 5% Linux sales percentages for Lugaru. Koonsolo reports their game Mystic Mine had sales of 23.3% Windows, 42.72% Mac, and 33.98% Linux. Each of these sales breakdowns indicate that supporting the Mac roughly doubled the developer’s audience and sales, and Linux support was also more worthwhile than the <1% market-share indicated by Net Applications.
