I'd like to share with you some stats that 2D Boy published after the big sales they had for the 1 year birthday of World Of Goo (WoG for short). The point was that you had the choice in the price of the game, from 0.01$ to whatever you want. 2DBoy released the results of the first week of that event: they sold a lot of copies of the game, but most of them at 0.01$, which means 0$ because this all goes to PayPal for the transaction. So they tried again for another week and the game kept selling good but this time, at a much better average price, certainly due to people knowing that 2DBoy don't really get any money under a paid price of 1$.
But what I'd like to highlight, is the results per OS. It's a well know fact that if you wanna play games on a computer, you must have Windows, otherwise your choice is very poor (extremely poor on GNU / Linux). Developers and publishers don't care much about the other platforms and I bet they think the market is not big enough on these systems. But if you look at the market shares of WoG, you get a surprise:
During those two weeks, only 65% of copies of WoG were downloaded for Windows! This is far from being an undeniable domination of the market! GNU / Linux gets 17% of sold copies and Mac OS gets 18%. In these days where the iPod and the iPhone are real hits, Apple is regaining a fair number of shares of the desktop computer market, so the Mac score is quite understandable. But it's a bit more surprising for Linux. It seems obvious then that the fans of the penguin crave for games on their OS. It's easy to say that people don't play on Linux, when in fact there's just no game to play. So that's one myth busted. Note: last christmas, the guys from Wolfire got to the same conclusion and wrote a nice article about why developers should support Mac OS and Linux.
Another myth is that Linux users (and more generally open source fans) are cheap people, that they always want everything for nothing. Well guess what, here's the graph of the average price paid for WoG, per OS:
I say: myth busted
What system do you use? Do you play games on it?