Linux has always been the other, other OS. By that I mean it’s never really gained any prominence amongst the mainstream consumer. Sure, Ubuntu has paved the way to a better, more user friendly OS, but, by and large, the average consumer would still prefer Windows or OSX. Of course, many Linux users probably prefer it this way; after all, if Linux were to ever become as popular as Windows/OSX then it’d need to become more like them… more “dumbed-down” so to say.

Of course, being such an elite OS comes with drawbacks of it’s own, namely gaming. Gaming on Linux is a difficult process and even if a game does work, it still requires a few tricks here and there to get it fully up and running. This may be one reason why indie gaming has the potential to do so well on a Linux system as long as the game was made for it.

I recently stumbled upon an intersting article by the developer of indie game Mystic Mine, which was made available as a download purchase to Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux users. The game was configured to work with each with little hassle or struggle. What became intersting is the stats that followed.

Apparently Windows users were visiting the site the most, followed by OSX, and then Linux. It makes sense, after all, considering the popularity of each by consumer OS follows that exact same order. It would only make sense then that there would be more Windows users visiting the site. The exact breakdown is as follows:

1. Windows – 40.29%
2. OSX – 30.36%
3. Linux 22.58%
4. Other – 6.77%

However, when you look at the sales totals it broke down like this:

1. OSX – 42.72%
2. Linux – 33.98%
3. Windows – 23.30%

As you can see Linux users are clearly beating Windows users despite having nearly less than half the total amount of visitors to the site. One can also derive from this data that Linux users are also the most likely to actually buy the game with 1 out of every 232 Linux visitors buying the game. With Windows it was 1 out of every 526.

So does this mean Linux is a successful distribution platform for gaming? Maybe… and maybe not. It’s always hard to discern data from a single example and certainly it’ll take more than this to convince the bigger gaming companies to release their wares on Linux. What this does, however, is provide a strong argument for indie devs considering releasing their game on Linux.

[via Koonsolo]