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As of Tonight, 1900 Steam Games For Linux (phoronix.com)
New submitter KGIII writes: "After a recent Steam change, there were more than 1,900 Steam Linux games listed as Valve ended up including yet-to-be-released Linux game ports. That total including unreleased Linux games is now up to 2,009! But in terms of released Linux game titles available for download right now, the 1,900 threshold was crossed tonight to end out February." It's getting there. All of you gamers might just be able to make the choice to move to Linux soon. It looks like there are quite a few more games coming down the pipe. This is a good thing as it gives gamers more options for their operating system. I imagine this bodes well for the SteamOS project and for the dedicated SteamOS devices.
Steam carries a lot of good games for linux now but there are still a number of big franchises that haven't made it across. I don't think they will make the move until they move to their next major engine release.
That said I suspect that game developers are going to be watching microsofts movements with their push for a windows store again and won't want to be stuck in windows if microsoft starts putting in over the top requirements.
If you are a gamer that wants to know you'll be able to pick up the Big New Thing on Linux... we aren't there yet. That day may come soon-ish, but we aren't.
But if you are someone who is primarily interested in--or at least sufficiently satisfied by--the wide indie game market, Linux has been there for a little while now. Hungry indie game studios generally build with tools that make building for Linux easy, don't build games that hit driver edge cases, and they are hungry for the money the smaller Linux market provides.
I know one minimally technical gamer who uses Linux exclusively for work and games. He's very satisfied by the indie game market. He's an exception... but he's a sign of times to come.
> basically the same performance as on Windows.
This isn't true at all. Windows 10 has been mopping the floor with Linux in terms of game performance - this has been shown again and again with SteamOS. It's also why Vulcan is such a big deal - it has the potential to level the playing field for titles that embrace it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Impressively, X-COM Enemy Unknown not only manages to melt my squad into zombies, but also melt my laptop into slag under linux but not windows with AMD proprietary drivers. Otherwise, I am quite happy with the performance of games on linux. Most seem more than acceptable.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
I often get snooty comments from work colleagues about how I'm playing Triple A, or Double A (or some such arbitrary designation of gaming quality) late. Then when some AAA game comes out on Linux I get comments along the lines of "well you haven't got (insert arbitrary game) on Linux"
I am happy with my game collection (177 of 210 games in my library play natively on Linux) and with quality ports coming from companies like Feral on an increasingly regular basis and newer engines like Unreal 4 (and I assume Source 2) supporting Linux natively things can only get better.
I have more than enough quality games still to play I'm currently playing XCom2 and when I want to take a break from that I'm part way through Alien Isolation, SpecOps: The Line and Metro Last Light. When I finish them I'll have Saints Row 4, ARK: Survival Evolved and I may replay Bioshock Infinite since I've got a better graphics card for XCom. I'm sure by the time I've worked my way through those there will be more games available.
Also browser statistics show that Linux slowly but surely makes gains on the desktop. Windows 10 will drive quite a lot of people to Linux.
Wasn't Vista also supposed to drive people from Windows to Linux in droves? According to the Steam hardware survey, Windows has 95.39% of the market, while Linux is at 0.95% (I'm sure that used to be higher). It seems that the combined forces of Vista, Windows 10, SteamOS and greater number of Linux games still haven't provided that platform with a boost in usage.
Even if Linux managed to double the number of users, the corresponding drop would barely register on the Windows side of things. And given that a third of Steam's users are on Windows 10 (and is just about to surpass Windows 7 64bit as the most used OS on Steam), it seems that once again reality doesn't match the hopeful proclamations of the Linux supporters.
The biggest problem is getting people to move from Windows not with Steam, but with the two largest publishers having their own distribution platform (Uplay and Origin), and neither of those support Linux. The reason why Linux gaming has grown so much on Steam is because Valve foresaw the loss of the AAA market to the publishers' own services and turned it's attention to the small, indie market that used to be at home on the likes of Desura and ShinyLoot. It is much easier to convert the tiny games (often made with cross-platform development systems) to Linux and Mac OS X than it is to do the same with the AAA titles.
And if the AAA games make such a mess of their ports to Windows (eg. Batman: Arkham Knight), how bad do you think the Linux versions of those games would be?
I don't actually think it's primarily gaming that will switch people to Linux because Windows has that locked down. I think people will only seriously consider switching when Linux becomes more user friendly and superior to Windows for novice users (it's already superior if you understand ssh, bash scripting, systemctl, CLI, etc). Apple were smart enough to know they couldn't compete on gaming so focused on other areas like UI, use ability, security, iTunes and cornered certain professionals one by one (music production, desktop publishing, graphic, video, etc).
Windows looks like it's going down a bad path at the moment and of they continue with their gimmicky OS's and don't return to the solid Windows 7 type system then they'll accelerate the migration. Also improved virtualization may eventually mean you can run Windows games in Linux at pretty much native speeds. And virtualization seems to be the big thing everyone is concerned about at the moment.