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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?
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.
The problem is that the OP of the bug report has only tested on nVidia binary drivers, by the look of it, and has not managed to reproduce on nouveau. Only an nVidia engineer has said that it was an X bug, nobody else, and that's hardly gospel.
Maybe it's just a cock-up in their binary driver? Who knows? And it doesn't look like an awful lot of people have the same problem.
Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?
Could we please stop this shit? Please?
My work here is dung.
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. If a developer/publisher expects that a platform will generate enough sales to be worth the porting costs, the general rule these days is that they will do the port.
Valve is notoriously secretive about its sales figures, but it's increasingly clear that the Steam platform is a direct and significant competitor to Sony's Playstation platforms and, more crucially, Microsoft's Xbox platforms.
Valve are not in a happy commercial place for so long as they are dependant upon their platform sitting on top of one of their competitors' products. They had a bad scare with the Windows 8 app store (though it turned out to be essentially a false alarm on this occasion). So it's entirely unsurprising that they are encouraging alternatives to Windows.
Hard to say. It could be broken like the nvidia engineer says, and everyone else just allowing something to work that the spec says shouldn't.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
And my experience has been pretty much the opposite. Generally speaking, indie developers focus on Linux last and so it ends up invariably being the latest version of the code base. And as for not being tested properly, I've had very few issues** with most indie games (a few mouse control issues) which seem to be about the same level of issue with games in Wine under Steam (so, either it's a hardware issue or it's a general programming issue).
On the other side, a lot of games for Wine simply don't work. This is a combination of a lot of things, no doubt, but even under the best of circumstances it's a very convoluted process that basically demands installing dotnet and DirectX native libraries--both of which have install issues that require either a complex issue of installs or simply copy/pasting files to fill in gaps. And even then, obviously, there's issues*.
Honestly, though, as someone who owns 210 of those SteamOS/Linux games, I've had very few issues with Linux gaming.
* DirectX setup now crashes on me, which unfortunately happens on Steam during the first run (and possibly subsequent runs) of a game. The solution is to move/remove the dxsetup.exe from the game's folder, which is obviously a bad hack.
PS - A short list of Windows games that work under Wine in Steam (with DotNET 4.0 and DirectX files installed):
The 11th Hour, Alien Swarm, BlackSoul Extended Edition, Blockland, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, Cinders, Coldfire Keep, Company of Heroes, Crazy Taxi, Crow, The Darkness II, Darkout, Deadlight, etc
Obviously, a lot of Bundle games (in fact, they're the only ones I own through Steam). And not obviously, in the same span of game about 33% Windows (possibly Mac too)-exclusive don't work. But so many games are for Linux as well, that 49.52% of my collection is for Linux. And a good many of those are DRM free and merely listed in Steam for convenience sake (ie, they're not installed through Steam). So, yea, I'm not sure what your anecdote really amounts to.
** One counter example is EvoLand which apparently requires the 32-bit version of Google Chrome's flash (32-bit Chromium flash if you change config.js might work, but I wouldn't know since this is a 64-bit system and I don't have some of the other required 32-bit libraries). So, yea, apparently they didn't adequately test that. But, then, EvoLand on Windows is apparently a mess as well. And I ended up going with a 32-bit Wine prefix because so many games seemed to not work in Windows 64-bit, but that might just be a Wine deficiency.
>> Once it works with Mac or Linux making it work with the other is trivial.
>
> Are you for serious? Maybe if your middleware supports Linux yea, otherwise not so much.
Of course he's serious.
Once you get past coding for DirectX only, the gap between that and the next thing is MUCH smaller. That's why Mac companies are doing the most interesting Linux ports right now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.