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Linux Gaming Won't Find A Mainstream Audience Until Three Things Happen

posted by martyb on Friday April 05 2019, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the drm-as-the-elephant-in-the-room dept.

canopic jug writes:

Depending on how it is measured, the market share for gaming on GNU/Linux is less than 1%. Jason Evangelho writes at Forbes about what is holding back gaming on GNU/Linux. He outlines three problem areas. First, there is inconsistency across the distros in how hardware — especially the graphics card — is dealt with. Second, major titles continue to ban the accounts of those who join from GNU/Linux hosts. Lastly, he figures that the gamers need to pull behind a single distro and get support for just that one distro because vendors are using the existence of multiple distros as an excuse to support none of them.

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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:52PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:52PM (#825030)

    Gaming on Linux isn't mainstream because Linux on desktops isn't mainstream. Even if Linux was a single distro, there still aren't enough Linux desktops users to make going after their business worth the effort. (I'm assuming very few people want to play games on a Linux server machine.)

    Besides, there's a very simple way to play games if you have a Linux machine. Buy a console. You don't expect your Linux box to be a dishwasher, why expect it to be a gaming machine?

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @10:23PM (#825155)

    You don't expect your Linux box to be a dishwasher, why expect it to be a gaming machine?

    278 native Linux games in my Steam library is why.

    Linux is an excellent gaming OS, just not for those who demand to be played by all the latest $60 day-1 DLC AAA gambling skinner-boxes on release day.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:17AM (#825224)

      Like I said, define "mainstream". Steam has Apple games on it too, and that still doesn't make it mainstream.

      Look, the article is from Forbes. They don't care about gaming, they care about large companies making large amounts of money from gaming. That's their definition of "mainstream". Linux isn't going to meet that criteria anytime soon, but of course that doesn't mean there aren't Linux games out there.