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?

Comments

Year of the...

[MacDork]

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.

Re:Year of the...

[MacDork]

outdated by November 2015

LOL, you didn't even read the specs did you? 6th gen intel processor. Not haswell. Not new 5th gen broadwell. 6th gen skylake. If anything, it's so cutting edge, I'd worry about it shipping in time for xmas given Intel's lousy track record with broadwell.

Also, 970m isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's going to be early/mid 2016 at the soonest before Pascal GPUs ship out of nvidia.

Also(!) Zotac tends to ship barebones systems in addition to full systems. Don't like the RAM/disk provided? Get a barebones and choose your own.

It will never be the year of Linux Gaming.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:If Xorg would fix...

[ledow]

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.

I'm a Member of That 1%

[eldavojohn]

The summary maybe should have mentioned something more important: SteamOS is basically Debian Linux with Steam libraries. Valve likely wants to release SteamOS hardware and is pushing for ports/originals that target that platform. If this takes off, it's great news for gaming in Linux as it's just a matter of installing the right packages to be able to run these games. In fact repo.steampowered.com already has packages that you can install on 64 bit Debian to be able to select SteamOS as a session on your Ubuntu or Debian box. But you don't even need to go that far -- if you're running Ubuntu and have a steam account, please try this: apt-get install steam. It's that easy and like the article says there are many great titles. I highly recommend Faster Than Light.

Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?

Could we please stop this shit? Please?

Re:I'm a Member of That 1%

[armanox]

It's equally easy on Fedora (I think you need to enable RPMFusion first) - 'yum install steam' and you're good to go.

Re:I'm a Member of That 1%

[waspleg]

it's not just likely, they already have a bunch of companies releasing stuff in November.

There is also a Steam community group where they post announcements, with a DIY section. It's also meant as a console/htpc replacement not as a desktop replacement.

If and when it's stable/good enough I might eventually actually be able to run Linux as my primary desktop with some SteamOS packages on the side (Windows 7 Ultimate at home, because I'm a gamer). I'm glad they chose Debian instead of Ubuntu in the end because that's not what they said they were going to do early on.

However the assholes spamming every game thread with "When will there be a Linux version" then often being very snarky, rude and arrogant about it aren't helping the cause much.

Re:Redolent of the past.

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:If Xorg would fix...

[armanox]

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.

Re:Thanks to the Humble Bundle

[jedidiah]

>> 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.