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Steam Has Brought 1,600 Games To Linux In the Past Three Years (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Today marks three years since Valve's Steam client went into beta on Linux. In that time over 1,600 games have become natively available for Linux. Going beyond having many new Linux games, Phoronix recaps, "we've seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG). Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2. We've seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, and Valve has been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API. They have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more." The three-year anniversary is coincidentally just days before the release of Steam Machines.
Anyone will follow it.
Jeeze! How many variations of Tetris is there?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now if they could just stop calling Linux "SteamOS"
As trivial as this might seem, having games for linux might help bring in more of the youth crowd. Their comfort level with linux will increase and out of that user stream you'll develop more hardcore linux users. I doubt Steam thought about it that way but in the long run, it is really a smart thing for the future heath of the linux fan base.
I'll have to check this out later. interesting
Just wondering looking at this positive news, could we be looking ahead at 2016 as the year Linux charges onto the desktop mainstream?
Give it time. When the big names port their games to Linux it'll run circles around Winbloats.
The hero we didn't deserve, but the hero we need.
that's well and all, but they need more than that. more "triple-a" (whatever is left of the so-called "triple-a") developers need to get on board.
I don't think Tetris® was ever officially ported to GNU/Linux. The original designer of Tetris is in fact on record as an opponent of free software. He said free software "should never have existed" because it "destroys the market". It makes me wonder why the Free Software Foundation hasn't been sued yet for one of the .el files included with Emacs. The closest to Tetris for Linux is probably EA's port to Android.
"EA's port: It's in the game."
Is there a better term than "GNU/Linux" if you're referring to the stack that isn't Android or a special-purpose embedded distro?
Unless Valve wants to pull a little "Chromebook" move, say a switch that swaps between console mode and desktop mode and suddenly you have an alternate desktop for basic use.
Last time I checked, SteamOS had exactly such a switch: Exit to GNOME.
How many of these are wine-wrapped, and slightly broken, games, much like the catalogue of Aspyr ports on OSX?
I have a game on the list powered by Unity3D 5.2.1f1. On my Ubuntu 15.04 + Radeon HD 6310 + open source video driver setup, my game runs fine. After installing the Catalyst 15.9 drivers however, the game will briefly turn the screen black on startup, then crash back to the desktop every time.
I proceeded to build a minimal "Hello World!" Unity3D app and deploy it, and got the same crash.
From what I've gathered, other people are having crashes with other games under similar circumstances...I could just say "try using different drivers" and send them on their way, but I really want to know the "why." The log file generated from the game hasn't turned up anything helpful that I could see.
I'm not as seasoned in the *nix way of things like most of you are; has anyone encountered this before or otherwise have some advice I could run with?
Which is also good of course. If you've bought your machine primarily for gaming and it's a Mac? You've bought the wrong machine. But for people like me who don't game all that much anymore but still like to sit down once in a while? Very handy.
Decades out? Vulkan will finally be able to chase Direct X, but the problem is the number of game companies who explicitly refuse to ever support Linux. Activision / Blizzard, for instance, has some Android games, but no Linux games proper, and definitely doesn't port their AAA titles away from Windows and OS X, and newer games aren't even getting OS X clients it seems.
Every large company seems to be fighting Linux compatibility with their games. It's almost a conspiracy, except there's still plenty of reasonable explanations for it... for now.
MMO on Linux when? AAA title on Linux when?
Whether the user knows the Android system he is using is Linux is irrelevant to the fact that it is Linux and not one of your precious paytard OSes.
You have been forced into attacking with semantic word games after having been entirely routed on the technical front by open source. Pitiful.
This is the end of Windows...
But only the beginning of the end.
You're right about MMOs, but there are AAA games on Linux, e.g. Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor, Witcher 2. What is more important, quality of ports increases steadily.
I've recently reached the point I can live without Windows-only games as I have enough to play on Linux.
Before breaking out the champagne, it might be wise to look at the numbers:
OS Version
Windows 95%
Windows 7 64 Bit 26%
Windows 10 64 bit 26%
Windows 8.1 64 Bit 17%
OSX 3%
Mac OS 10.10.5 64 Bit 1%
Mac OS 10.11.0 64 Bit 1%
Linux 1% [0.95%]
Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 64 Bit 0.23%
Ubuntu 15.04 64 Bit 0.17%
Linux Mint Rafaela 64 Bit 0.11%
What you see is a very small and very fragmented Linux market. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: October 2015
It will take a hell of a lot more than pretty background pics and games to get people to convert to Linux.
Number 1 on that list is all the devs from the million other linux dists/clones coming together, stop the in-fighting, become organised (like canonical) and be under 1 leadership developing 1 product.
And number 2 is to fix the disaster that is the ever-changing UI and incompatibility between every damn app, which reinvents the UI wheel.
Bryan Lunduke has been correctly highlighting these issues (in "LFNW" or "Why Linux Sucks") for many years, and yet it always seems to fall on deaf ears.
So in short, the GPL is at fault here, along with all the messy politics coming from people behind linux.
There's only 1 great example of an organised and well-structured open-source project - and that's Mozilla!
It's popular because there's no politics and in-fighting and the million different clones of their products.
I honestly believe there are people out there, people like me, who are desperate to move off Windows and especially due to spyware in Win10, but can't because Linux is such a mess. And it has been since the very beginning when the hot-headed kid Linus went against the masters of OS design (Professors like Tanenbaum et al)
WoW is already OpenGL so it would be less difficult to port than some. Perhaps it will finally make it to Linux via Steam OS.
Whenever Fallout 4 is released for Linux, Windows is done.
Many organizations use Linux, be it for cost, security, privacy or usability reasons. But these count for far less installs than the general public.
Every time one of these claims come out, it turns out a good percentage of the games just don't work, on Steam.
The reality is that Steam beat Microsoft to perpetually licensing income for both their OS and "their games".
Available means I can "buy" it and run it on my hardware & OS without paying a continual fee/tax, etc.
....does it run Windows games? Oh. Still, it might be cheaper...oh.
Repeat times a number of millions.
You know, until recently I never considered using Linux as a general purpose desktop OS and I didn't like Steam. That was until Microsoft released the malware and adware ridden Windows 10 and tried to cram it down everyone's throat.
---- while only 0.95% of Steam users run any flavor of the Linux OS.
Three years and 1600 Linux games hasn't budged the needle in a way that you could see even with a magnifying glass. Steam Hardware and Software Survey: October 2015