Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux

An anonymous reader writes: The Steam Store crossed the threshold this morning of having 1,500 games natively available for Linux. Timberman, a 0.99$ video game was the 1,500th title, but while there are a lot of indie games available for Linux, in the past three years have been a number of high profile AAA Linux games too. What games (old or new, free or paid) would you like to see available for Linux systems?

Comments

Open world city

[jones_supa]

What games (old or new, free or paid) would you like to see available for Linux systems?

This is kind of obvious answer...but some big open world "dicking around in a city" game like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row or Sleeping Dogs would be nice to see.

Re:Open world city

[Anonymous Coward]

Super Tux Kart is really shaping up very well these days. After they get network support into maturity, a possible next step could be larger open world style gameplay.

FreeBSD

[unixisc]

Dear Valve

Can you work w/ the FreeBSD project to make this available on the BSDs as well? I'd love to play Civ V on this laptop running PC-BSD

Steam has been great for Mac too!

[Zobeid]

I can't remember ever seeing a Linux game on Steam that didn't also work on the Mac. I think if you use Valve's tool set to create Linux games, Mac compatibility is a "freebie". This has been huge for Mac gamers. Before Steam, Mac gaming was a wasteland. Now it's viable.

Re:Not good enough

[Kjella]

Not that I'm going to really dispute anything you said, but never is a very long time. There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX, so even ignoring Steam and the PC there's a solid future for OpenGL. And with Vulkan doing significantly less there's hope that Linux support in general and open source support in particular will be much better. I mean, Valve has already written an open source driver for Intel, it took two developers two weeks and is ~27 kLoC - though I assume they generously copied bits and pieces from the mesa driver. The GLSL to SPIR-V compilation comes on top but it's generic and already written, it's only the SPIR-V to target that is unique for each card. Android has already picked it as their next-gen API, that's certainly not a bad ally.

If Vulkan can become a first party rendering target for Source 2, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and CryENGINE which I assume they will since they don't want to lose the smartphone/tablet business, the hurdle to produce an AAA game on Linux is that much lower. Maybe the bar still won't be low enough, but lower than it is today. Particularly if Valve paves the way with a good first party title or two, if a year from now Half-Life 3 launches with same day Linux support a lot could change in the next few years. Then again, it might also be just wishful thinking...