John Carmack: Linux is not a competitive platform for selling games

On Habré there were several articles about porting games to Linux, and John Carmack paid attention to this topic at the recent QuakeCon conference.

John Carmack is a well-known supporter of open source software, and he has publicly released the source code for Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 and Doom 3.
But in his opinion, Linux has not yet become a suitable platform for commercial games and the company's attempts to change the situation have failed.

It’s good that there are people who support an open platform and deliver content, but it's hard to sell.

Based on the experience of id Software, Carmack believes that the promotion of Steam for Linux Valve will not achieve much success. The reason is simple - there are many enthusiasts in the world of SPOs who are ready to play games, but there are very few people who are willing to buy games.
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However, he noted that the graphics stack in Linux is getting better, and added that he would like to work on optimizing the open source Intel drivers with free time.

Also in id Software they decided not to release games such as Rage and games based on the id Tech 5 engine for Linux (such as Doom 4).

Almost four-hour video from QuakeCon 2012:

As for Linux, Carmack began talking about him in the 46th minute.