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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 urza9814 on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:00PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:00PM (#810784) Journal

    I've been running Linux for about 15 years, and I very much disagree about it being harder in the short term. Maybe in the *very* short term, like a couple of weeks, but the benefits hit you right away; the stability, the speed, the updates ... OMG the updates. How people put up with Windows amazes me.

    Ehh, the updates can be a recurring pain as well. I had an issue just last week trying to get the OBS v4l2sink plugin working with v4l2loopback. There was even an issue raised on the git page for that plugin, the original dev had tried to get enough information to provide a fix but couldn't resolve it either. Turns out there's a bug in the version of v4l2loopback that's packaged in the AUR repository. Of course, there's another newer, unstable version in the repo which fixed the issue, but it took two days to figure out what the problem was and get that thing updated. I did post that solution to that git thread though, so hopefully I've improved the situation just a tiny bit -- the issue has been sitting there unresolved since last October...

    With other OSes you tend to get one big monolithic package with everything packaged together. You aren't trying to run stuff with whatever random version of the dependencies which may or may not be the same as whatever the developer was using at the time. The downside is that it means the dependencies often never get updated and never get patched...the upside is that the dependencies never get updated and never get patched :)

    There's a reason so many people are so excited about appimages and such...and one of the main benefits seems to be avoiding updates...

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