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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.
I suggest you peruse the actual lists once in a while:
https://steamdb.info/linux/
Although "big-studio" games are largely absent, an awful lot of top-end indie games are there. Indie doesn't always mean shite in a bundle, by the way.
Killing Floor, X3, Civ, Bioshock, Trine and all kinds of other games are well worth the money.
And there are definitely more of them lately, and bigger titles are getting more attention since Valve started their Linux port.
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.
Just wondering looking at this positive news, could we be looking ahead at 2016 as the year Linux charges onto the desktop mainstream?
Damn it man, and we were really hoping you'd get behind it. Because you're a really important player in the Linux/gaming scene.
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.
I went through the entire list basically just scanning titles and found about a dozen games in the $10-$20 range I'll pick up without a second thought, and there are a few AAA titles that I mostly already have. Overall, looks good to me, no shortage of decent content.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
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.
Now all I can say is GO VALVE GO! I will happily ditch Windows if Steam and gog.com keeps up this pace.
As you say it's getting better for the bigger titles. Here are some of the bigger games you forgot to mention:
* Borderlands 2
* Borderlands The Pre-sequel (linux version on launch day!)
* XCOM: Enemy Unknown
* All the valve games (Half-Life + all addons, HL2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, counterstrike, portal 1+2, etc etc)
* KOTOR 2 got a port not long ago
* Shadow Warrior (the reboot/remake thing, it's awesome)
* Serious Sam 3
* Saints Row 4 (announced, I can't wait)
Also the ones you mention: Civ 5, Bioshock Infinite, X3, etc
Also the next Crysis engine will have Linux support, as does Unreal Engine 4 and the new Unreal Tournament (which is open source and community built! You can sign up, clone the git tree, and compile it now).
There are also a bunch of really great not-so-huge titles:
* Oddworld: New & Tasty
* Grim Fandango Remastered
* Postal 1+2 (available before steam)
* Duke Nukem 3D
* Shadow Warrior (original)
* Psychonauts (available before steam)
* Goat Simulator
* Spec Ops: The Line
* Kerbal Space Program (I think this just might be the best game ever made)
As an exclusive Linux user, I have a huge backlog of games I haven't gotten around to playing yet. It's awesome!