Brian Hook, former developer for id Software, Sony Online Entertainment and now the president of Pyrogon Games, has taken some time to sit down with the Curmudgeon Gamer and answer a few questions. The lengthy interview covers a wide variety of topics concerning his time in the industry, where it's going, and supporting other platforms like he plans to do with Pyrogon titles.

jvm: I reviewed Pyrogon's Candy Cruncher on Linux, but it's been ported to several platforms. Could you give us an idea of how well has each platform's version sold?

Hook: All combined platforms other than Windows maybe account for 5% of our sales, if that. Part of that is simply because we have much broader distribution of Candy Cruncher on Windows via RealArcade and GameHouse. But even with our OS X ports, we're seeing maybe 1-3% of the sales on those platforms.

It's hard to judge the biggest success, but probably the least successful has been the Zaurus port, because that's such a small market. The Linux and OS X ports are successful for different reasons. The Linux version really got us some mindshare with people who would normally never even think of buying this kind of game.

Supporting Linux is a "right" thing to do technically, and I think the Linux crowd respects that. We even price it a little lower for Linux. Another thing we like is that we've partnered with Linux Game Publishing, and they're doing actual physical copies of our games -- a feature that isn't even available on our Windows versions! This is a nice feeling because we have a DVD case version of Candy Cruncher, which is cool.

The OS X version probably got us more exposure than anything else, because we supported OS X early in its release. We're big proponents of OS X and think it's a great operating system and platform, and we like to think that we might be able to be a big fish in a small pond with it.

I'd also like to give props to SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Library, which has made porting to these other platforms almost trivial and is a great example of what open source can do for you.

Curmudgeon Gamer's Q&A

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