14 DAY TRIAL // Garry Newman, the developer behind the famous Garry's Mod and the survival MMO Rust, has made some very interesting comments about the lack of Linux players and why his studio doesn't really care about the open source platform.
Garry Newman is very famous, and he always speaks his mind, and this is why most of the time the stuff he says is categorized in under "crazy things Garry says." Most of the time people forget and move on, but it's not likely that Linux users will forget his latest rant anytime soon.
He's quite active on Twitter, and he responds to a lot of questions. Someone asked him about a particular problem with Rust and explained that Linux had too few Linux users, and it's not a priority for them (Facepunch Studios), albeit this is just paraphrasing.
This is not the first time he talks about the Linux platform, but we assumed that he was kidding. Soon after Steam for Linux was released, people were asking when Garry's Mod would be ported to Linux, and he said that it wouldn't happen too soon since there were very few users, and he didn't want to. Just a few weeks later Garry's Mod lands on Linux, and people figured that he was kidding. He doesn't seem to be joking right now.
Garry's Mod and Rust are selling very well on Linux
We don't have access to the same numbers as Garry does, but one thing is clear. If you check the top-selling games for the Linux platform, chances are that you'll find Garry's Mod and Rust among them. It doesn't make sense to say that there aren't enough players, but it's possible his statistics are much better.
As you can expect, the Linux community has reacted to the comments made by Garry and many users took it as an insult. He got a lot more attention than he bargained for, although if the Linux numbers are so low, he won't care either way.
@ramma_gaming @KittyMeowGames Linux is a second class citizen, we don't run it internally because only 17 people use it
— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) June 28, 2015