Actually it does. Everytime someone bothered to give actual numbers for games released on windows vs linux on equal footing, sales numbers represented barely a few percent while support requests represented 50+%
1. I was trying to focus on the development cost, but a few percent of 50 million dollars can get you a good support team.
2. Isn't the topic at hand mac?
3. Are you sure you want to cite that kind of number? The most prominent one says this: "Though only 5.8% of his game's buyers were playing on Linux, they generated over 38% of the bug reports. Not because the Linux platform was buggier, either. Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific, that is, would only happen on Linux." "The bug reports themselves were also pretty high quality, he said, including software and OS versions, logs, and steps for replication." That's free QA, not a burden.
Unfortunately this is not how many managers see it. They just see it as more work because people are "discovering" more issues that they now have to fix. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or in this case, the squeaky community is considered annoying and gets neglected.
Not to say it's all positives, I'm sure a big title has a lot of linux users in the annoying 'enthusiastic youngster' phase a lot of school-age PC gamers go through. But the kind of spreadsheet math that doesn't even classify support interactions is lazy.
I've worked with multiple companies on projects with large support infrastructure and teams. I've seem many foreseeably-bad business moves called "data driven decisions" based on support metrics. Metrics aren't insight, but they do let a business team justify the decisions well on paper. I'll avoid writing a whole rant about supporting a call center, but I will say their cost and ancillary nature makes iterating with the data coming out of them (or just iterating on the design on the support system itself) poorly prioritized and full of noisy signals.
I could be wrong, but maybe Linux users are more persistent (by necessity), and thus more likely to file bug reports, where your average Windows user is more likely to just go "F this" and stop playing your game.
