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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?
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.
Well, this is open source, so when bugs are found, they are fixed quickly.
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 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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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.
Tuxracer and xbill don't count as games anymore
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
I'm not going to argue that every one of those games is fantastic, there is certainly a lot of questionable quality in there, but the problem isn't nearly so bad as you make it out to be.
Steam lists 1001 games that run on Linux and have enough user ratings to give it a score, and 791 of them have good user ratings (defined by 70% or more of user reviews being positive for the title). 168 have mixed reviews (40%-70%). 42 have bad reviews (0%-40%.