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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 06 2019, @04:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-playtime-alive-for-tux dept.

Engadget posted a look at the state of Linux gaming in 2019, and it's not that positive. The writer posits that Valve's Steam is solely keeping Linux gaming alive.

Fast-forward nearly six years. Steam Machines puttered out as an idea, though Valve hasn't dropped its support for Linux. It maintains a Linux Steam client with 5,800 native games, and just last August, Valve unveiled Proton, a compatibility layer designed to make every Steam title run open-source-style. With Proton currently in beta, the number of Steam titles playable on Linux has jumped to 9,500. There are an estimated 30,000 games on Steam overall, so that's roughly one-in-three, and Valve is just getting started.

However, the percentage of PC players that actually use Linux has remained roughly the same since 2013, and it's a tiny fraction of the gaming market -- just about 2 percent. Linux is no closer to claiming the gaming world's crown than it was six years ago, when Newell predicted the open-source, user-generated-content revolution.

[...] The industry's lack of Linux love is just one reason Epic Games felt free to launch its new digital store -- the first true competition to Steam in about a decade -- without support for open-source operating systems. When the company unveiled the Epic Games Store in December, Linux fans immediately had questions: Would the marketplace work on their distros? If not, were there plans to support Linux down the line?

The most concrete answer came from Epic Games director of publishing strategy (and a creator of Steam Spy) Sergey Galyonkin on Twitter in late December: "It really isn't on the roadmap right now. Doesn't mean this won't change in the future, it's just we have so many features to implement." Epic Games didn't provide an update on its plans for this story.

[more...]

[...] "The pro of supporting Linux is the community," Super Meat Boy Forever creator Tommy Refenes said. "In my experience, Linux gamers tend to be the most appreciative gamers out there. If you support Linux at all, the chances are they will come out of the woodwork to thank you, offer to help with bugs, talk about your game, and just in general be pretty cool people. The con here unfortunately is the Linux gaming community is a very, very small portion of the PC gaming market."

Refenes breaks it down as follows: "If I were to list how Super Meat Boy has made money since the Linux version dropped, starting with the highest earner, the list would be: Windows, Xbox, Playstation 4, Switch, various licensing agreements, Mac, Playstation Vita, WiiU, merchandise sales, NVidia Shield, interest from bank accounts, Linux."

[...] "My hope is Steam's Proton project really takes off and Linux support is invisible to me," he said. "In an age of three consoles, PCs with millions of different configurations, and a market that is getting increasingly crowded by the day, the last thing I want to do is take time and money to support Linux when historically this has offered no marketing or financial advantage. But if Steam does the heavy lifting, then that's a win for everyone."

I've seen several video game developers outright cancel native Linux ports of their video games since the announcement of Steam's Proton over the past few months. Does this mean that there will be even fewer new native Linux video games in the near future?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday March 06 2019, @04:36PM (9 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 06 2019, @04:36PM (#810750) Journal

    M$ shills always make a lot of noise and smoke to distract from problems. Take a look at all the squawking and see where it leads and then follow it 180° back to what they were trying to distract from. In this case the M$ shills are probably trying to draw attention away from the fact that gaming is about the only thing keeping a lot of people locked into Windows. Sure, more just accept what came with the machine bought at the big box store and, sure, corporate environments are rife with Bill Gates worshipping managers calling the purchases. But those two cases aside, the rest are basically gamers and they'll follow the games even if it grates on their nerves to do anything else with the machines. M$ Vista10 is not well liked and many would be switching in a heartbeat were it not for the AAA titles keeping them locked into a dead OS.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:40PM (6 children)

    by black6host (3827) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:40PM (#810777) Journal

    I happen to still be running Win 7. For the games. I've seen a couple of games that say they are Win 10 only. If the trend continues, and it will I'm sure, one day I'll be forced to make a decision: Upgrade Win 7 to 10 or find another OS. Apple is too expensive for my taste so that leaves Linux as a contender. Perhaps, as more people face that decision, and they will eventually, we'll see a greater adoption of Linux. If so, the numbers game for the developers will start to change. I can only hope.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:25PM (4 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:25PM (#810797) Journal

      The wife is also still on Win7. We made the effort to avoid MS forced updates, and it paid off.

      Of course, she has an installation CD - errrr, DVD I guess it is. If she had ever been "upgraded" behind her back, she could always re-install Win7. Most people don't have that advantage.

      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:53PM (3 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:53PM (#810841)

        > If she had ever been "upgraded" behind her back, she could always re-install Win7

        Don't count on it - when you upgrade to Windows 10 you migrate your license from Windows 7, so you no longer have a valid win7 license. You have the disk, so you could reinstall it, but you could no longer activate it. Not without jumping through some very annoying hoops, that don't always work.

        • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:20PM (2 children)

          by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:20PM (#810848)

          If it is a relatively recent Win7 that came pre-installed there is very probably an OS reset/recovery partition, which will take you straight back to factory install.

          If it is a retail Win7 with key then you can use MS media creation tool (if you don't have media) and install from that.

          Online activation may fail (some of the MS support pages on this subject warn of that too) and you may have to use the phone, but that happens regularly for random unexplained reasons anyway if you are doing a lot of installs.

          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:45PM (1 child)

            by Immerman (3985) on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:45PM (#811139)

            >and you may have to use the phone

            And that *usually* works. I have a couple times come across computers that, despite the fact that I'm reading the number directly off the tamper-resistant proof-of-license sticker, are flagged as pirated. And I've never managed to get Microsoft phone support to re-activate such a computer, even if it was working fine with no piracy warnings the previous day.

            • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:19PM

              by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:19PM (#811176)

              Well I admit I've yet to see that one happen, and it would be a PITA if it did...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:05PM (#810869)

      one day I'll be forced to make a decision: Upgrade Win 7 to 10 or find another OS.

      January 14, 2020 [bt.com], for most of the world concerned with security issues. YMMV.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:58PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:58PM (#810819) Journal

    M$ shills always....

    Yeesh!

    I don't know about anybody else but I stopped reading there.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:24PM (#810833)

      M$ shill spotted!