Slashdot Mirror
PCGamingWiki Looks Into Linux Gaming With 'Port Reports'
AberBeta writes: PCGamingWiki contributor Soeb has been looking into the recent larger budget game releases to appear on Linux, including XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Borderlands: The Pre–Sequel produced by Mac porting houses Feral and Aspyr. Soeb reports that while feature parity is high, performance could be a bit better. Performance differences aside, the games are finally arriving on Linux — now the userbase needs to expand to make a virtuous cycle.
I'm not much a gamer so I probably need to rely on other's insight to have this issue clarified for me. Has anyone by chance read any piece by Bennett Hasetlon on gaming? I wouldn't mind his insight before I make up my mind. He's a frequent contributor.
... not complaining, as I am a Linux user, but Steam OS is going to be the game changer, and the back catalog working on Steam is arguably more important than two AAA titles.
The Seismic Event would be Newell confirming Half-Life 3... and saying it's coming to Steam OS (Linux) first.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Indie games were already being made for Linux before Steam came along. Legacy games were also available. They're a non-moving target, so they are relatively easy address with wine or dosbox.
It's the AAA titles where the real gap was.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's no market incentive to make exclusive content. There's a market incentive to grow the market though, sure. In 5 years it could be worth something. Not now.
... if you can be bothered to reboot. I have a perfectly good Windows installation for gaming on my multi boot PC. I just can't be bothered to use it so I play whatever's available on the "other operating systems" natively and whatever works fine in Wine. At this point, I think only Witcher 3 is capable of making me reboot.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
You mean the end-user experience must improve before gamers consider swapping Windows for Linux.
Right now, the hot topic in gaming is the ability to stream your experience for other people to see. The Linux version of OBS has yet to appear.
Once we have the trinity of playing-communicating-broadcasting/recording, at feature parity or better with the Windows equivalents, people will be able to migrate over without missing anything.
It's the AAA titles where the real gap still is.
FTFY
Indie games were already being made for Linux before Steam came along. Legacy games were also available. They're a non-moving target, so they are relatively easy address with wine or dosbox.
It's the AAA titles where the real gap was.
More games on Linux isn't going to change the dynamics much. The average port quality is going to suck as much or worse than on a Mac.
People game on Macs because of the native hardware/software niceties, and to have at least some games on it is a nice-to-have.
If the primary purpose of your PC is gaming, why would you play bad ports? Answer: You'd have to really want the non-gaming bits of that flavor of system. If there isn't a strong desire for Linux as-is, then games will not change that. Games on Linux will have to provide a better experience than on Windows before anything dramatic happens, AND Microsoft is not actually that far away from console-quality gaming experience if they chose to do work in that area. Lets just agree they are far closer than Linux is anyhow.
This is all about Valve's hate-on for Microsoft, folks and selling gaming PCs, and selling games. Linux, the system, is just stuck in the middle.
Anyone at this stage in this game that does't understand where Linux's market position is where it is just does't understand how to sell stuff. If lowering the price to $0 doesn't work, you can only point fingers at yourself.
The Seismic Event would be Newell confirming Half-Life 3... and saying it's coming to Steam OS (Linux) first.
I know that is a popular idea, that if we just had some good games on Linux, people would start to embrace it.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but that isn't going to happen.
I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.
I have no compelling reason to move to Linux. I have no compelling reason to move anyone else to Linux. It doesn't offer me anything worth the trouble of moving.
------------
Note: I first installed Linux on a 486 back in the 90s, I've tried it a few more times since then. I'm not debating the technical benefits of Linux, they are indeed there. But they don't matter to the average user. Windows is "good enough" and it is missing some of Linux's rough edges.
Let's be honest, SteamOS is done. Steam got exactly what they wanted from Microsoft and dropped it like a hot potato (so sorry, you'll never get to use that cool controller).
Consider that for decades Microsoft has not allowed anyone, anyone to touch the user experience. Even after Netscape's antitrust lawsuit over active desktop, even after BeOS withered and died hoping someone would sell a windows computer with dualboot, or hell just a windows computer with a "Setup BeOS" icon on the desktop. Steam is facing the Microsoft Store and a real threat that the Microsoft Store will become the way to buy programs (see also: iOS). Steam trots out SteamOS, and Microsoft snickers. The hype train builds up, and Microsoft sweats. Games start to port and Microsoft snaps.
Alienware ships a Windows 8 PC that boots to Steam instead of Metro.
Now, let's step back a second and look at the big picture here. At the time, windows 8 adoption is absolute total shit, swirling the drain of a public restroom that hasn't been washed for years. The last windows evangelists are all hanging on imploring people to just try it out, just give it a chance, and oh by the way install Start8 to fix metro. Think about that. PC vendors are on the verge of revolt, their customers refuse to buy their goods, and all for the want of installing a $5 program to fix the metro experience. Best Buy is probably screaming at Microsoft, begging them to allow them to remove the metro experience so they can move their inventory. Hell, they're probably begging them to let them advertise their Geek Squad services to "optimize" the experience and install that $5 program for $100. But no, the Microsoft Experience is inviolate, the holiest of holies, eternally immutable. No matter how much hatred it gets, it Must. Not. Be. Changed .
And then Alienware ships a Windows 8 PC that boots to Steam instead of Metro.
SteamOS's job is done. When no-one was looking, Steam took Microsoft and snapped it like a twig. We'll never know exactly what dark magicks were invoked here, but in the blink of an eye, Valve routed Microsoft in a war that nobody even realized was being fought. When Japan makes an anime out of this event, GabeN will point at Steve Ballmer, say omae wo shindeiru and Ballmer's head will implode, without GabeN throwing a single visible punch.
Steam OS will probably putter along, we'll probably see a few things be trotted out to keep the dream alive, after all the hype train did build up a lot of steam (pun not intended). Eventually a few of these AAA developers will say "it's really just not ready for the prime time" and we'll go back to getting a few wine ports and indie games from hardcore dedicated guys who just really love Linux.
But the masses will probably never get to hold that controller.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If by "not actually that far" you mean "really far away" in the meaning that it beats them handily, yes. The "next gen" consoles are roughly equivalent to mid to high range 2009 pc specifications. And they are using x64-based architectures.
Although I don't have the careful performance charts of the link in the OP, I've been perfectly satisfied for years with Linux performance on the large-budget games I've played recently: Lord of the Rings Online, EVE-Online and Minecraft. My frame rate has been very smooth on the desktop and fat laptop, and quite playable on my 2GB RAM Acer C720 Chromebook running Crouton... around 20-40 fps on the latter for LotRO and EVE. For LotRO it seems to crash less than running it natively on Windows. Although I don't play it myself, I installed WoW on the Chromebook as a proof of concept for an interested Croutoner, and again it was quite playable... at least through the "kill 10 rats" style intro.
So from my viewpoint there's more to main-line game life on Linux than these reported ports or Steam.
Let's be honest, SteamOS is done. Steam got exactly what they wanted from Microsoft and dropped it like a hot potato
I completely agree with you... Steam saw the threat, needed to create their own threat...
Microsoft saw that and countered...
Mission accomplished...
Both of these games are based on the unreal 3 game engine. Porting the unreal 3 engine to Linux was the heavy work. Just like in the old days, when idtech 3 was ported to Linux, so a variety of games could be ported over.
I never stopped to think of it, but increasing game engine complexity, leads to fewer game engines, and more games per engine. The game engine itself seems to become the platform.... It would take the place of the Desktop Environment, if given proper driver support. If you could just get Frostbite 2 & 3, and Unreal 3 engines ported over...
I also game under Windows and OSX, but I'm trying to stay on Linux more and more for my gaming. Most of it is in Steam, with a couple under Wine as well. I'm used to occasional graphical or sound glitches, or really laggy input problems (I'm looking at you, L4D2).
Not entirely true. Load up Steam on a Linux box, and you'll see quite a few games that don't list Linux as a compatible OS, but they do list SteamOS as one. Steam is a big enough player that even the potential release of something like a Steam Box is enough for lots of companies to spend the extra bit of resources and add SteamOS support.
The SteamOS game list is bigger than you might realize (and I'm not talking about indie stuff).
I do not think SteamOS is of any relevance today. And it wont be important next year.
I do not think Steam 4 Linux is a perfect alternative to windows. And at best it will be a acceptable although rough alterantive to windows next year.
But I do now that Steam 4 Linux DOES deliver. Not big time but every month a little bit bigger. I bought over 200 games for Steam and even though I did care little about running games on Linux I still have over 60 games running on linux.
I did not expect that when Steam 4 Linux was announced.
So while Steam 4 Linux does NOT replace my windows game machine - a massive tower costing â1000 and eating 400W to give me bleeding edge results - it gives me two great bonuses:
I now have 60 games running on my el cheapo Notebook with Ubuntu which did cost me â300 and uses 30W. I can run another 140 games through Steam Remote gaming as long as my windows system is also running. I am planning to buy an el cheapo Nettop based on AMD Beema for â100, converting my Big-Screen TV into a gaming station. And I will get another one of these for my bed room.
There will be more games.
There will be better support.
Maybe we will see Steam directly installed into smart TVs. So I would not even need to add some el cheapo nettop box.
This will be slow like it has been for two years but maybe suddenly in five years I will say "ok lets play something different" and find it surprising that this game does not run on linux. Maybe I will even find it surprising that this game does need a extra computer instead of running directly on my TV.
Then I will open my Steam inventory and see that 80% of my games are available for Linux and are running natively on my TV. Then I will just wonder why I should bother for the other 20%. I will start to ignore these 20% and keep an old Windows system in the attic next to my Amiga and my C64 just in case I want to play these 20% again. Which I wont like I never played most Amiga games ever again.
Mission accomplished.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Very interesting viewpoint and overall great post to read.
Quick question for you though: How many years ago did you last do LSD?
If a game runs on SteamOS, it runs on Linux. SteamOS is Linux. And not in the way that Android is Linux, SteamOS is just another Linux distro. Based on Debian, specifically, but booting into Steam's UI instead of GNOME. Which is still included.
> If lowering the price to $0 doesn't work, you can only point fingers at yourself.
Yeah. It's not like there are no other factors involved like a 30 year entrenched monopoly or zero companies that are doing any real marketing for the product or the fact that the company that "does everything right" can't manage to get past 10% market share.
Although none of that really matters. I just care about the AAA titles that play as well (or better) on Linux as they do on Windows. I don't have to put up with an inferior monopoly product just to play a cool game.
If Gabe feeling threatened by Microsoft can cause the 20+ year association between WinDOS and games to shatter then that's a win for all of us.
I know gamers that would dump Windows tomorrow if they could.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.
I have known plenty of people that use Windows because they think they are forced into it. This idea goes all the way back to the 80s.
They would still think that way if not for tablets. Tablets look just different enough to the untrained eye to get people off of their "must be DOS compatible" fixation.
That wedge helps undermine the longstanding FUD that average people need to run WinDOS so they can run unecessarily bloated applications that are really meant for professional secretaries.
Windows is still a malware magnet. This is enough of a motivation for "average people" to seek out alternatives.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The difference is that Steam offers all those indie games in the one place and takes care of the payment process.
Honestly, I'd have switched to Linux 10 years before I did if the games had been there.
Games on Linux will have to provide a better experience than on Windows before anything dramatic happens
Not quite necessary. Games on SteamOS providing a better experience than games on PS4 or XBOX1 is all that's needed.
Anyway my PS3 YLODd, which means even if I fix it it's on its last leg, and I have no interest in the PS4, and I actually DO hate on Microsoft, so It'll suck to have to buy the presequel twice but I'm jumping on, personally.
Someone had to do it.
Wait, there's such a thing as a cool controller?
"Anyone at this stage in this game that does't understand where Linux's market position is where it is just does't understand how to sell stuff." -- Anonymous Coward, to Valve Software
I've played all the Half Life games recently and found them to be shallow, repetitive, and boring. The second Half Life games were even more shallow than the first. The first had a bit of story, but were extremely repetitive and the levels with the little platform train and tracks were unnecessarily long. The second Half Life games also had unnecessary long and repetitive levels coupled with no stories. Granted, the engines and physics were revolutionary at the time. But the game play was and is nothing special.
There is no reason to believe that a sequel to the series would be any different. I think you HL fans that invoke the HL 3 meme are suffering from the same selective memory nostalgia that makes you think the original Star Wars series was the best thing ever. They were poorly written and poorly acted garbage.
You pick an apple, I pick an orange... there really is little difference...
So if we weren't using Windows, we'd be using OS/2, or GeOS, or OS X, or something else...
Same difference...
Linux has had 20 years to prove itself, clearly it is not the right solution, or it would have made some traction at this point...
You assume that we must all leave Windows at some point... Why? I don't see anything to push people off their desktops and laptops any time soon. Google has tried with Chrome OS, and that is a nice idea, but it hasn't sold enough to make a dent.
Tablets? Nice toys, great media consumption devices, but they aren't replacing computers, just adding to them.
As a gamer, I disagree with your last sentence. Windows is far more than OS that runs games for me. First and foremost, it's OS that runs everything I need, including games. Second, it runs it efficiently. And third, it requires minimal technical know-how, so when I don't want to be a system admin much of a time but just a user enjoying the game, I can do just that.
Linux has a long way to get anywhere near parity on these important issues. As a result, gamers aren't looking to "dump windows" any time soon. Even Vista didn't get us to dump it, nor did 8. Microsoft will have to stumble all over itself a few more times in a row before most gamers will even consider switching to something they don't know.
And that gets me to my last point. Overwhelming majority of gamers never used linux. At all. And I'm not talking in the "oh, all gamers including social gamers" nor even "all hardcore gamers". I'm full on PC master race here. Vast majority of them have never touched linux in their lives, and have zero interest in doing so. Windows is great for them.
There are simply no benefits from switching to linux for a gamer, and a massive amount of disadvantages. This has been a fact for a long time, and it's not going to change any time soon unless Microsoft does something really stupid with windows, like move to apple's store-style closed ecosystem with windows software.
I have some of Loki releases from back when they were producing Linux titles. I think that they had trouble selling their games into a user community used to getting everything for free. I wonder if my HOMM3 box still works on a modern linux?
Yes . . . and it has. Hell, even demonstrated by the article in question here, or does "a big enough audience to justify day-one releases of AAA games" not count somehow?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Yes . . . and it has.
Linux has about 1% of the overall desktop market...
It has held that number for a long time now...
It isn't growing...
Perhaps you just have a different viewpoint, or perhaps you view success differently, or... well I'm not sure what...
Linux is a success in the server market, but an abject failure in the desktop market. That is simply not likely to change.
But no, the Microsoft Experience is inviolate, the holiest of holies, eternally immutable. No matter how much hatred it gets, it Must. Not. Be. Changed. And then Alienware ships a Windows 8 PC that boots to Steam instead of Metro. SteamOS's job is done. When no-one was looking, Steam took Microsoft and snapped it like a twig.
Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why don't you go bitch at Nintendo and Sony for never forcing the companies that make games for their platforms to make Linux ones. Why is it always Microsoft's fault. Microsoft makes an OS, they spend a lot of time (like Nintendo and Sony) making SDK's that other "game development companies" use to "create games" that people want to play. Go scream at Rockstar Games, see where that gets you.
I have known plenty of people that use Windows because they think they are forced into it. This idea goes all the way back to the 80s.
Well, of course you do! You're a known Linux zealot. You sourround yourself with likeminded zealots both on and off-line. You're entire worldview is polluted. You don't know "average people." You have absolutely no connection with them. You just think you do, because it makes you feel good to think you're not as unpopular as you really are. Kinda sad if you step outside the box and think about it.
How many years ago did you last do LSD?
Purple cow.
I have a stack of Loki games. All but the last two were paid full price (those were during the shutdown). The problem was the delay. Shelf life of most games is shorter than the porting delay. Of course, now the libraries needed by the games are incredibly obsolete, although LD_LIBRARY_PATH helps.
The Linux userbase has been a great supporter of indie games these last few years. That fact should be celebrated more than any big title releases IMHO.
I was skimming quickly through the news and got excited thinking it would be a site that analyzes the quality of console->PC ports.
Dang.
Don't worry, they'll point you to the port of L4D2 valve did many years after the fact with a huge amount of tweaks and advancements and actually ran faster than a years old engine version of it and say 'see, linux is the future, all the gamers will switch'.
This isn't a day one release of a title. It's using 99% exact same code as a previous game. This was low hanging fruit they didn't have to do work for.
Do they keep patches in sync with the Windows version? How long before I can no longer play with my Windows mates?
yesish... If they use API calls that depend on other window managers toolkits (since SteamOS is a Debian with GNOME fork), you would at least need a dependencies package and sometimes even that doesn't work. I remember having such issues with metacity (GNOME 2, this was replaced with Mutter in Gnome 3) dependencies when running a different window manager, I think Enlightenment. I pretty much needed to kill Enlightenment, start GNOME, and then could run the program. I had a lot better luck with GTK apps running in KDE, which was my primary desktop for a long time (more because my work provided it than personal preference).
Games generally don't know or care about the window manager; they're doing their own interfaces in OpenGL. And any APIs specific to Steam aren't an obstacle, because Steam isn't restricted to SteamOS (although they only package it for Ubuntu). Heck, some games don't even require X.