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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: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:22PM (13 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:22PM (#810771) Journal

    In essence, yes, it's like a prisoner's dilemma. But I think you have the costs figured wrong, especially for the case where neither party switches.

    OTOH, given the last EULA I read (none of the GPL, the MIT, nor the BSD license count as an EULA), the costs for not switching are also a lot higher than your estimate.

    FWIW, I generally find Linux a lot easier to use than MSWind, and lately even than Apple. Admittedly I avoid Gnome3 window managers, but mate, KDE, LXDE, and xfce are all good choices. Currently I'm using mate, because I want a particular screen saver that KDE won't support. But I'm using a lot of KDE applications, e.g. I prefer the Dolphin window manager. In my experience (admittedly a bit dated) you *can't* get that kind of flexibility on either MSWindows or Apple.

    Now as for games...I won't pay money for games I can't buy. If the game requires access to some server out on the internet, then the group operating that server is the one that owns "your" game. So steam hasn't seemed that attractive to me. (Actually, I'm still playing Loki games on a virtual machine that runs on a very old version of Linux.) I don't want to get attached to a game that just suddenly stops working because someone else decided it was time.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:50PM (3 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:50PM (#810780) Journal

    Now as for games...I won't pay money for games I can't buy. If the game requires access to some server out on the internet, then the group operating that server is the one that owns "your" game. So steam hasn't seemed that attractive to me. (Actually, I'm still playing Loki games on a virtual machine that runs on a very old version of Linux.) I don't want to get attached to a game that just suddenly stops working because someone else decided it was time.

    Just in case you didn't know, that's not *always* the case with Steam. One of my personal favorites (Factorio) I always play through Steam largely for the Steam controller support (that thing is AWESOME) -- but they integrate Steam purchases with the store on their own website, so I can go download a standalone, offline, DRM-free installer any time I want directly from the game's publisher. I could ditch Steam tonight and have no problem continuing to play that game, without losing anything except the gamepad support.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:45PM (2 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:45PM (#810838) Journal

      Factorio's real good too. The devs obviously work so much harder on improving their product, and informing their users about their work than I ever have as a dev.

      • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:11PM (#810870)

        Factorio?

        Great, thanks you guys. That's my weekend messed up.

        I had things to do too. Mrs Zombie will not be pleased.

        • (Score: 2) by Webweasel on Thursday March 07 2019, @09:59AM

          by Webweasel (567) on Thursday March 07 2019, @09:59AM (#811095) Homepage Journal

          You know Factorio got a major update just a few days ago? Up to 0.17 now, lots of changes.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:20PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:20PM (#810829)

    I tend to feel similarly about "renting" games, what swung me (partially) around was the convenience that Steam provides, and the fact that, if you're interested in older games, you can often "buy" the cream of the crop from a few years ago for pennies on the dollar, and a couple bucks to "rent" a game for the indefinite future is actually a good deal.

    Besides, good luck finding *any* mainstream game these days that doesn't rely on an online server for copy protection. If the big studios are only going to make their games available to rent, then that's their choice - but I'm not going to pay for them until the price falls to something reasonable for a rental.

    I figure I go to concerts, the theater, and rent movies for home viewing (not to mention occasional heavy/specialty equipment). Not really much difference to renting a game. I don't have to own everything, provided the rental fee is fair.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:36PM (4 children)

    by Snow (1601) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:36PM (#810856) Journal

    What screensaver?

    I'm curious what's so awesome that you would spend a considerable amount of time to have on display.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @01:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @01:44AM (#810966)

      Its (tastefully) lewd.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:58AM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:58AM (#811024) Journal

      The one that displays images from a selected folder. I think it was originally from BSD, I know the earlier versions of Gnome and KDE supported it, but they dropped support from screen-savers that aren't specifically written for their more recent systems. (I think "from" is better than "for" in this case, because they killed screen savers that had been working.)

      FWIW, I display pictures of my deceased wife. That's worth more to me than any improvements that KDE offers, and Gnome3 is, in my experience, sufficiently worse that I'd avoid it anyway.

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      • (Score: 1, Troll) by Snow on Friday March 08 2019, @03:50PM

        by Snow (1601) on Friday March 08 2019, @03:50PM (#811561) Journal

        Awwe, that's sweet. I'm sorry to hear about your late wife. She must have been a great gal.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:47AM (#811037)
  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:09AM

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:09AM (#810933) Journal

    I've got games my computer (laptop) that won't run unless I go 'down' to i3, due to low memory.
    THAT is one of the things I appreciate about Linux: flexibility.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:10AM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:10AM (#810934) Journal

    Now as for games...I won't pay money for games I can't buy. If the game requires access to some server out on the internet, then the group operating that server is the one that owns "your" game. So steam hasn't seemed that attractive to me.

    I don't mind online verification when it comes to PC games, simply because somebody will invariably come out with a patch to defeat it. On any platform that's not easily patched, though, I agree.

    I also refuse to buy download-only copies of games for similar reasons... If the original is deleted from disk, the buyer is dependent on the publisher continuing to offer it for download, and even then it might turn out to be an altered version. A post I saw over on Reddit [reddit.com] made the point nicely: the Make-a-Wish Foundation is struggling to find a Playstation 3 that has the formerly-downloadable "Marvel vs. Capcom 2" installed on its hard drive, because apparently the game was removed from the service: even people who'd paid for it in the past can't re-download it. Similarly, when I went to look up a quirky song last night that had been featured in a game I enjoyed, I discovered that the song was recently deleted from the hard drives of everyone who had legally downloaded the game, so only those of us playing off the disc can hear it in-game.

  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:57PM

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:57PM (#811284) Journal

    I highly recommend GOG.com. They do have a program called Galaxy that is similar to Steam, but you can just as easily download the standalone installer from their website. The games offered are 99.9% DRM-Free with a few instances of 3rd party EULAs for multiplayer. Otherwise, they're what I would call the "perfect" game store. Sure, it can always be better, but they are really, really good. They've worked with publishers/game owners to bring back multiplayer for games that lost it due to GameSpy's demise. They include cool things with the games like original artwork, walkthroughs, wallpapers, etc. Some of those things were even created by/for GOG. As far as gaming platforms go, you really can't get better than GOG. Reasonable pricing, easy Steam like access, DRM-Free, and the ability to backup your collection on physical media. Sure, you're losing out on the resale option, but most people are happy enough to trade that for the ease of use. Otherwise, you're very nearly stuck with only Consoles for modern games. Since, most store bought PC games just give you a steam key.

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