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Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available
An anonymous reader writes: This week the Steam Linux client has crossed the threshold of having more than 1,000 native Linux games available while Steam in total has just under 5,000 games. This news comes while the reported Steam Linux market-share is just about 1.0%, but Valve continues brewing big plans for Linux gaming. Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?
...the bug that prevents me from having accelerated graphics in Linux, I'd be among that 1%. Until then? Reboot... reboot.... reboot... reboot...
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
Linux desktop/gaming/etc. They don't just have linux games. They're going to be shipping linux hardware! Nice hardware. I'm excited to see titles like Dying Light treating Linux as first class citizens.
Just like the year of Networking it will never happen. If it happens it will just keep creeping up until you notice it is everywhere and then look back and wonder when was the year of X.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sounds like it's high time for a Microsoft "exclusivity" bribe again.
After being on /. for several years, every time the question "Is /\d{4}/ the year for Linux?" the answer has always been no, so probably not.
I have a significant share of that 1,000 games.
I'm very disappointed when I see a Windows only game, but I can understand why the big developers do it.
I'm even MORE disappointed when I see a game that works with Windows and Mac but not Linux. Once it works with Mac or Linux making it work with the other is trivial. Don't give me the coca garbage - if it runs at full-screen you really don't have to mess with that a lot.
The indie guys are really leading the charge, and based on very visible results with the Humble Bundle "Triple Compatibility" seems to up the success of the bundle, and I heavily suspect it's why they tend to make the one or two Linux compatible games in a heavily Microsoft centric bundle the "Pay at least $10 to get" game.
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Nor is it the year of the Linux desktop.
It seems like Steam is enjoying some success where Loki failed. I'd guess PC gamers are subsidizing Linux development at the moment, an advantage Loki lacked. Has anyone put an Xtrek client up on steam yet?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?
Could we please stop this shit? Please?
My work here is dung.
There is your answer!
Tuxracer and xbill don't count as games anymore
GOG.com will get there with almost 1000 games and also a lot of games for the Linux platform! ;-)
Wasn't the Year of Games on Linux already in 2013? Why can't we settle with that? That year was the launch of Steam for Linux and the stream of games begun. We don't have to have every single game on the planet to be ported to Linux before we can celebrate.
....almost a game per user!!!
No. The answer is always going to be no.
Ever since they announced steam OS, I've believed that Valve should buy Canonical. In fact, I think Valve, Nintendo and Canonical should get into the whole game together, a good time to compete with Sony as a total home entertainment solution.
As for me, I've been waiting since Mandrake 10 for something. I'm just your average non-programming geek and I quite like the fact that Ubuntu basically just runs out of the box these days, but what actually looks most interesting on the horizon, for me, is Minecraft + Hololens. I feel like I'm eating dirty socks, but Microsoft under Nadella is kind of growing on me.
The point is, Steam and Canonical kind of both lost their opportunity to just "have my money" - I did the edge indigogo thing that failed, I've waited for Steam Box, and now I think I'll just wait a bit longer to see how that compares to whatever comes after Windows 10 involving this minecraft strategy. Quite frankly none really give a good enough service for me to want to spend any more money on electronics for a good 10 years.
Apple watch? No thanks.
Yes, 1,000 games is a good thing. Sadly, 985 of them suck ass, which makes this a meaningless statistic.
This is not a Linux problem mind you (nor is anything in this post related to Linux, so cool down fanboys), its a Steam problem. Or just problem in general when you lower the barrier to entry for creating something that can be sold. The Apple AppStore suffers from this same problem as well.
I'm all for making it easier for quality craftsmen to get into the trade, but for every 1 quality craftsmen, you get 2500 that shouldn't be doing it.
Steam Early Access only compounds the problem because you end up being able to purchase a lot more really shitty games that are no where near ready for any sort of public viewing.
So great, 1000 games, woohoo ... Not going to get you any switchers due to shear level of crap quality. Steam on OS X is worse still because it doesn't fucking run on case sensitive file systems! WHAT THE FUCK ... You can do it for Linux but not OS X ... AGAIN ... W T F
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Windows barfs on Civ V, but Linux runs it well!
Apparently Steam has made it very easy for develop cross-platform, so with great ease developers can target multiple systems. This is great for Steam and the end users who may have multiple gaming platforms.
So Steam is a game distribution service which downloads native applications to your computer, roughly in the same way that you would install a game from an optical disc.
Now there's more games than gamers!
Seriously, yes, I know -- or at least suspect -- there are more than a thousand Linux gamers on Steam out there, but really...when you've got barely 1% of the gaming market, it's a little silly to say 2015 could be the "Year of Linux Gaming." At some point you have to disconnect yourself from wishful thinking and hyperbole and just say "yeah, it's getting better, but it still has a very long way to go."
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Aren't most Steam games just flash (or HTML5, maybe) applications, which have worked in linux forever?
No. Actually that's not strong enough.
FUCK NO. Most Steam games are not flash or HTML5.
With my favourite game (football manager) coming to linux and available on steam - Its no surpried that I've purchased more games via Steam on Linux than I have with my PS3 in the last 18 months.
Steam on Linux:
Football Manager 2014
Wargame - European Escalation
Wargame - Air Land Battle
Football Manger 2015
Wargame - Red Dragon
vs
PS3:
Gta V
Nope, we're getting actual games now, and it's great! We're even starting to get newer titles rather than ports of older games. I've played Portal, Half Life 2, Gone Home, Octodad, plenty of Kerbal Space Program, and I'm looking at Cities: Skylines and Besiege.
It started with Civilization 5 last summer. It got me to install Steam. I ended up buying about eight games since. I'd probably buy a lot more games, if more of them supported Linux. We have money too, ya know.
It is a market blip.
I know numerous people, including me, who hold on to Windows because we are avid gamers of a wide variety of games which are not supported on Linux. If game support became a “killer feature” for Linux, then Microsoft would likely receive a significant reduction in users of their OS and Office suite.
And most of it is shovelware.
I have over 240 steam games. Not one of them is a flash based game. Many of them are the same games you get on a console. Why in the world would you think they were flash games?
AKA, the number of people who use Linux as a desktop.
I kid, I kid.
But seriously, Steam makes bank on Windows. They can throw money down the Linux hole all day long as a result.
Loki? Loki had to rely solely on full-priced Linux ports, six months to several years after the Windows versions were in the bargain bin for $5.
Obviously there might be more that would run the games under Linux or SteamOS.
I personally have one full desktop machine running Windows _only_ for games. If I could run SteamOS instead, or Linux, I would.
But thanks to Steam in-home streaming, I now have more computers running Linux because I can stream from the heavy desktop. Like the NUC running Mint (Kodi, Firefox, Steam) in the bedroom.
HL3 will be linux only.....
A more relevant data would be:
- % of total sales of games that support linux. Ignoring the OS that the buyer actually uses, just if the game supports linux or not.
- % of the sum of playtime of games that are supported on linux. Ignoring the OS the gamer is actually using during said time.
With these two datapoints we could reach a conclusion that a buyer could use linux/steamos as opposed to windows and still have a decent game library available.
A thousand of crappy games (and steam is chokefull of those these days) is not relevant at all.
http://www.dragonboxapp.com/
How do I know how many people would be interested ? Where do I reach the nerd crowd ?
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
just came out on windows, Linux and mac.
out to be enough for anybody.
Valve has done an awesome job of making Linux a viable gaming platform. I have over 200 games in my Steam collection, about half of which run on Linux now.
The only thing keeping me booted into Windows most of the time is that my primary game is World of Warcraft, taking up about 70% of my total gaming time. If Blizzard would step up and embrace Linux* I'd gladly get rid of my Windows partition.
* Yes I know WoW can run in a limited capacity under Linux, that's not good enough for real raiding/PvPing
News agencies all around the world are reporting about the astonishing event of the default wallpaper of Ubuntu being purple in color. Will Cooke, the Ubuntu Desktop Engineering Manager at Canonical, today posted the official Ubuntu 15.04, codenamed the Vivid Vervet, wallpaper. Even more shockingly, he also posted the official alternate wallpaper. As Ubuntu is extremely buggy, the announcement of the new wallpapers was reported as a bug too.
I would love to play my Steam Games on GNU/Linux, but sadly, I have AMD :-(
Nothing like playing L4D or Starbound at 5 frames per sec.
Part of me asks why are we still beating this dead horse, the other part likes to think it is only a matter of time as mobile platforms become more prevalent.
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But I don't agree to the terms and conditions, especially the one letting them change the agreement on works already purchased and agreed to. At the minimum, refund the paid cost of the games if you refuse to accept the new terms. Otherwise, it's plain old theft.
It's quicker because the OS is faster for Linux. Many game paths are either optimised for general hardware, in which case OpenGL will be a good fit, and no harm from the interpretation, or it's a Windows only game, and the translation cost from DX to OGL is minimal.
Generally, Windows is inefficient. Please note that Windows doesn't include all the win calls either. This is why you have to run various forms of "compatibility" and MS give you a Virtual Machine to install older OSes on so that you get the OS win calls there.
Yes, Win7 includes ALL the Win7 library calls, by definition, but it doesn't include all the WinXP calls. Especially if it's a 64 bit system and you run a 32bit XP game.
Why? It costs almost fuck all to include those customers, and the competition for the market means you will gain a bigger slice. And not having to be on the Windows treadmill means more money to spend on games. Or do you think they should not care about losing customers? Because that's the only reason why they insist on piracy being bad: potential loss of customers. So if you figure that they really don't care about losing customers, please let your congresscritter know.
Ironically, I finally gave up running Linux on my main home machine about a decade ago so I could play Left4Dead, which was one of the first "big" Valve titles ported to Linux. Now I'm sorta addicted to World of Tanks, which works under Linux with wine/PlaysOnLinux but isn't a very good experience.
I have 2 kids, though, and I'm not going to buy them each a Windows gaming PC, so I set them up with a multiseat Linux box for their minecraft:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Steam works pretty well, so my son has started playing other stuff... TF2, War Thunder, and I think I'll gift him my extra copy of Portal 2 and Goat Simulator.
So yeah, maybe still have one Windows PC as the gaming box for the "Windows exclusive" titles, but Steam on Linux will certainly open a broader market for them for secondary / multiplayer LAN setups.
Is there money in FreeBSD games? Because the PlayStation 4 runs Orbis OS, based on FreeBSD.
Exclusivity bribes are on the wane even in console gaming land. Modern development costs means that the size of the bribe needed to provide the game's publisher with confidence it can still turn a profit despite locking out part of the market is getting ludicrous.
Sometimes a smaller company needs to promise to produce one or more exclusive or timed-exclusive games for a console as a condition of becoming a licensed developer on that console. That's how "Pub Fund" on PlayStation family platforms works: Sony provides a devkit to an indie studio in exchange for exclusivity.
I think the complaint is that having to load 64-bit libraries, a 64-bit desktop, 32-bit libraries, and a 32-bit game will make the system hit swap sooner than loading 64-bit libraries, a 64-bit desktop, and a 64-bit game.
Let me know when mobile platforms have something other than a flat sheet of glass as the standard-issue input device. Not everybody wants to carry a MOGA clip-on gamepad or a JXD tablet in addition to his phone. Or let me know when a viable control scheme for something like Mega Man is made for the touch screen.