It seems like every year someone proclaims that the time of the Linux gamer has finally arrived, and tomorrow we will all wake up to an open source wonderland where the rivers overflow with shell scripts and the Super Users rule the world. Unfortunately, it does not look like that techie Utopia has arrived yet, and even a few of the game developers who actually support Linux do not really see much value in it.

This includes Pillars of Eternity developer Obsidian Entertainment, a gaming studio with more geek cred than most thanks to its veteran game creators who trace their lineage back to Black Isle Studios.

“I don’t think it was worthwhile developing for Linux,” Pillars of Eternity lead producer Brandon Adler said in response to a Twitter question for an interview with PC Gamer. “They are a very, very small portion of our active user base—I think around one and a half percent of our users were Linux.”

Pillars of Eternity was a Kickstarter darling that raised nearly $5 million on the developer’s promise to “recapture the magic, imagination, depth, and nostalgia of classic RPG’s that we enjoyed making – and playing.” The game was a PC-only exclusive that released for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

“[Developing for Linux] wasn’t a huge drain on us,” Adler continued, “but there were a lot of problems.”

Linux, which shares a lot in common with Mac OS thanks to their shared foundation from Unix, does have a lot going for it. It is stable, highly customizable, and flexible enough to handle just about any role you can think of, but outside of enterprise applications, it controls a nearly insignificant portion of the PC market.

While there has been a moderately successful push for more Linux support for games thanks largely to Valve Corp’s Steam Client and SteamOS, the numbers just aren’t there to justify the effort involved for many studios. Even Steam, which boasts a generally more tech savvy audience than most marketplaces, sees a miniscule user base for Linux, which often hovers around only 1 percent of the total Steam user base.

“Overall, if we had to do that one again, we would think a little bit harder about it,” Adler admitted.

Image courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment