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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: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday March 07 2019, @03:22PM (2 children)
Ummm, no.
Openness alone provides very little innate protection against malware, you also need auditing. And do you really think anyone has exhaustively examined the code base for Tux Racer or Aisle Riot, much less obscure niche utilities, searching for obfuscated malicious components?
What keeps Linux secure, is that it's generally speaking a very secure and well-audited operating system. The applications... not necessarily. Not even if they're OSS.
In general, regardless of operating system and development model, you can't trust arbitrary applications. And unfortunately, both Windows and mainstream desktop Linux uses user-based access control - i.e. any program you run, has full access to anything you have permission to do. Contrast with something like the OLPC OS, or many Android derivatives, where you can restrict access on a per-application level. It doesn't matter how malicious an application is, if it can only access it's own data files. And for many games and utilities there's not really any need for any greater access than that. Heck, even for office applications - in principle you could tie file-access permissions to the OS open/save dialog box (and file browser associations). If the user didn't explicitly request that Program X can access File Y, the program should have no way to tell if that file even exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @01:02AM (1 child)
Auditing by anyone is made possible by respecting people's freedoms. Few people have the freedom to audit Microsoft Windows, for example, which means that problems are less likely to be discovered, and especially so for problems that are desirable to Microsoft but undesirable to the people who allow themselves to be used and abused by Microsoft (so-called "users").
So, no one with any knowledge is going to claim that Free Software is absolutely secure. But, at the very least, the fact that it's Free Software and that anyone can audit the code means that there are probably fewer issues. And this is especially the case when you compare Free Software to software developed by malicious, abusive entities such as Microsoft, Apple, etc.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 08 2019, @04:24PM
As with so many things, the reality depends on scale.
When you're talking applications or core Linux components used by many, they've probably been audited. Not exhaustively obviously, but better than most. And most importantly, by people with no shared loyalty with the developers.
As you depart from the well-beaten path though... most open source projects have trouble even attracting community contributions - you really think they're going to attract good auditors?
That said, I do tend to trust open source more than proprietary software, at least after having done a little research to make sure it isn't one of the malware-infested forks of a legitimate program.