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.

Comments

Re:Should help Linux in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

Distros that help Linux in the REAL WORLD.

Linux Mint (Desktop)
SteamOS / SteamMachines
Ubuntu (debian -> ubuntu -> ?)
CentOS (back office)

http://futurist.se/gldt/

This shows graphically the distributions in the Linux world.

This is how I base my decision on distros, by the commitment and origin base.

Re:Should help Linux in the long run

[Kjella]

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.

They people running "SteamOS" for the most part won't give a shit about Linux as a desktop and never look under the hood. The primary advantage is that you'll get a lot more developers to write OpenGL games and support the graphics/multimedia parts of the stack that the server community don't care about and Android has only partly touched. 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. There's been so many failed incarnations of WebTV and friends though that they probably won't do that until it has a heavy presence as a console.