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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?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday March 06 2019, @07:47PM (1 child)
>So, despite the fact that I adopted Linux more than a decade ago, there are STILL things I don't know.
As someone who does do IT work, I'm willing to bet that even if you had stuck with Windows, the list of things you don't know about Windows would be at least as long. At least with regards to a "typical" Linux install - the broader Linux ecosystem is far vaster than Windows.
That breadth of ecosystem is both it's strength and it's weakness. It's basically impossible to write software "for Linux" - you have to write it for a specific distro and the system libraries it includes. You can try to support at least a few of the major distros, but the differences can quite rapidly become almost as bad as those between Linux and Windows.
If you want Linux to be simple to use, then you have to stick with a mainstream distro that's designed to be simple to use, well-tested, and broadly supported by developers. Which for cross-platform, non-OSS software, particularly sophisticated games, seems to pretty much mean Ubuntu. The further you get from a vanilla Ubuntu distribution, the more compatibility problems you are likely to encounter. You probably weren't stymied by "a simple installation", you were stymied by a installer that was either NOT simple, or was inadequately tested before release so that it was broken on your computer.
Stick within walled garden that's almost as confining as in Windows, and you can get a similarly simple experience. The difference with Linux is that the garden is easy to leave - but it's a fool who blames the surrounding forest for not being as well-tended as the garden.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:05PM
I have used linux since before the kernel had loadmodule support, I learned POSIX and operating systems from professors who had developed SysV unix for bell labs. I've read most of the classics on the subject except for maybe tannenbaum. I've used windows for longer than that, when I was a boy I had taken deep dives, I was picking apart the kernel api and I could even tell you how to save tons of memory on a fresh windows install down to which fonts you could remove.
I still learn new things about linux but linux has changed very little since windows XP
Windows 10 is a massive butthole and I fucking hate it. I have used it on my gaming machine for 2 years and it's still a massive amorphous blob of ever shapeshifting beer-shits. I used to curse that linux had mutated into thing where perfectly acceptable unix habits of the day could send the system into a shitstate (#1 example editing a config file by hand because you don't even know there is a new gizmo that's supposed to do it for you)
My windows 10 gaming machine is by some measures the fastest machine I have. I like to keep some dev tools and other shit on there because it's nice.
Fuck that. Any hack, tweak, enhancement, or even fucking new feature delivered by wsus can make the whole shitpile turn into a slowly decaying mess of bugs and crashes.
Now days I don't install anything on the fucker but steam, basic drivers (no shit GUI crap), vpn(not even tor!), cheat engine (no kernel module, I usually install gdb and dll snoop, resource editor, and wireshark for cheating but nope fuck that!), some emulators, Xming, an ebook reader(i forget the name but it's paid for), vlc (I want kodi but it has smells so I won't risk it!) vnc, notepad++ (not my first pick but probably the most stable-least integrated native text editor that knows what \n means) and putty. This time I decided not to install NFS drivers, and instead turn on CIFS/smb on my servers and no extra MMC snap ins. It's game related or it's a client to get to a linux machine.
I know all of this off the top of my head because I'm working to automate the set up so that when things go to shit. I can dependably hit a system restore point and have steam import all it's games off local backup but I'm running into headaches where everything is going to expect to draw a million updates. So this weekend I'm going to have to start over and get everything else installed, updated, stable, and then install steam on top of it with, image the entire drive, import the games backup, get all the updates and then back them up to storage. Revert the drive image, install steam fresh, configure steam to import all my games off storage next boot. Take the system restore point, and then reboot the machine and let it complete set up on it's own.
Theoretically this should get my system in a state where everything works and I don't have to redownload 80gb of doom4 and who knows how much for "windows creators update for people" whatever the fuck that is.
It makes me rage angry to have to install motherfucking windows telemetry updates and use IE but I guess I'll have to experiment with blocking them at the network level. I can just use xming and docker and my linux k8s cluster for my actual web browsing, document writing, coding.
I just want to play a game microsoft. I remember why I liked playstation now.