SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by isostatic on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:29AM (1 child)
I've been linux since 2000, having first started in 98/99. The first few months, or even year or so was difficult -- X didn't have a driver for my SIS6326 or something -- all I had was 640x480 and a wierd cursor. I couldn't get internet access either as all the information about using minicom and pppd was via webpages that were only accessible via rebooting into windows. And that's with a hardware modem, not a "winmodem".
So yes, Linux was clearly harder in the short term. However my experience 20 years later can't compare - I have no real idea how hard linux is, because it simply isn't hard - at least for me. It just works.
Windows on the other hand, on the rare occasions I touch it, is terrible.
But my experience isn't "normal".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:50PM
Hahhaa jesus I did it in 94 aside from getting sound working this shit is exactly the order of problems... and solutions, lord hhahah pppd and minicom.
No shit it took me like 8 months to get pppd working. Lucky for me I had a dialup shell account and a kludge to use it as a http proxy.
By the time I had ppp working I'd recompiled the entire kernel and whittled it down to a fraction of whatever was stock of the day. I learned with glibc was and recompiled that, I did the same thing to the xfree86 s3 driver.
I know that gentoo provides modest speed improvements in modern day but I'll tell you linux ran a lot faster moving from generic i386 builds to optimized pentium builds.
That would make me a modern linux guru but fucking pppd was the great satan. I had to read tcp/ip illustrated, man pages, howtos, check the source code and get help on irc (along with ridicule for being a pleb with no network stack)
No shit I went in the military after I became an adult and ended up screwed in a life of hard labor and combat. I hardly touched a computer I was so busy. I even saved up and bought the sharp zaurus so I could have just a little access to a coding platform in my pocket.
When I got out that knowledge carried me for years. As a civilian I landed an IT job in a few months after not touching a real computer for 4 years. I didn't know it but this wasn't the sort of place where people learn new things but that time with the shitty years of linux taught me enough about computers and networks that I was able to coast on that learning, at a windows shop, for like 5 years until I finally realized the place was a career dead end that would rather drop 100k on a one time consulting fee or support contract than trust their guys to do anything new. Except for the boss he spent all day working on pet projects with high visibility and unusually transferable job skills compared to everyone else.
Fuck that guy was a prick. I'm happy to have since learned that he can develop web apps all day and nobody will give him more than he makes right now as a nobody manager for it because his basics are lacking shit he doesn't even know he doesn't know. I can so tell it was his goal to launch a new career or get into real management after his kids were in school.
Moving up higher in management isn't going to happen for him. He has a hard on for 'customer service' which of course pleases the people who depend on his department but it was a manly industrial sector employer and like a whore that sucks the cheese from between their toes the upper management liked and praised his "you're always right" attitude but didn't respect him for it. He also had zero push back against bad ideas from non-technical executives, the place had 20 years of tech debt from it's old mainframe ERP solution. Now they probably have 30 years of ERP tech debt and another 10 years on the windows side.
All the other tech management will be well prepared to jump ship or retire when the mess topples over. But not that guy he started on the helpdesk and went well out of his way to kiss the Chairman's ass. It got him a position that would keep him around for setting up tvs and speakers and wifi at the guy's house when he needed it but nobody was going to put him in charge of something more important without a college degree or extensive knowledge of their industry and warehouse operations.
His one trick pony of kissing the chairman's ass stopped working before I even worked there but word is he's still humping it to this day even as the guy's health is deteriorating.