First of all Happy New Year to all!
2012 what year! Has been full of ups for Linux this year and I think easily one of the most important years for Linux gaming, this is aimed to be a small roundup of 2012 with a reminder of interesting news, my thoughts on the year and so on.
Major News Reminder
Steam now in Open Beta
Unity3D now supports Linux exporting
Too many crowdfunding games to list in the reminders...
What has come along this year?
So this year has brought us things like Unity3D's Linux export option, Steam (With Team Fortress 2!), Masses of indie games thanks in part to Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Humble Indie Bundles and it won't stop there! We have also seen some of the first games released from crowdfunding since it really hit off and we all started paying attention with games like the awesome FTL being released.
I imagine it does make Desura feel a little uneasy since Steam launched on Linux and it now has Greenlight as well to get even more indies on board with Steam, although I would still like to see Desura stick around, that said I don't think they will be going anywhere any time soon!
The folk doing the open source client Desurium have released RC3 of Desurium 0.8 which is quite a jump from the rather buggy official build Desura has for Linux on their website so hopefully 2013 will be the year Desurium get's some more polish!
We also had the very first Unreal Engine 3 powered game come to Linux thanks to Icculus's porting skills - Dungeon Defenders in the Humble Indie Bundle 7. This does make things interesting for 2013 since it means even more games could come along like Red Orchestra 2 and many other games using the engine.
Problems we face!
We still have quite a ways to go it's not all going to be smooth sailing, there are still masses of publishers who may never bring their games to Linux. We need to be sure we support the developers and publishers who do bother to bring their games over.
It seems we do still need to convince developers and publishers that Linux gamers WILL pay for games and software, we don't expect everything to be free (open source is a different argument I won't make this time around). I have personally seen this year multiple developers still thinking we expect everything for free, so be sure if you see anyone like this to not just jump in and argue the points with them - educate them, don't argue with them. We have more than enough examples now with HIB and Steam, considering the amount of people that wanted in on Steam's closed beta (they stated over 60,000) it shouldn't be hard to see there is a larger user base for Linux games than those percentages of user base that we keep seeing thrown around.
Graphics drivers under Linux can still be a pain, recently Nvidia's updated drivers have vastly improved frame rates for certain games and in certain situations like working with Compiz, let us hope AMD can follow suit to remain relevant on the Linux desktop and make a bigger push as well.
I look forward to seeing how good the open source drivers can become after another years work, the work they do really is impressive.
Hopefully in 2013 we will not see any Windows only bundles from Humble Bundle to push Linux out again, we can hope but my personal thoughts is that it will become more common just based on how much money was gathered by it.
Next Year!
Next year we will no doubt see at least 1-2 more Valve Source games released like the highly anticipated Left 4 Dead 2 (which was supposed to be before Team Fortress 2) although I am much more hopeful they will bring out Dota 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive since both are truly great fun (Although Dota 2 can get very frustrating!). I am sure by 2014 we should at least have 1 more source engine powered game available to us.
We should also see an influx of games released from the funding of the mentioned websites Kickstarter and Indiegogo since many of them had their releases slated for this year.
2013 should be a very, very interesting year for Linux gaming and I of course will be following everything I can closely to bring you the best possible news I can find. As always if you find news before we do send it to us so we can inform everyone possible!
Lastly remember we are also on Indiegogo looking to gather funds to secure more months worth of web hosting (the funds I have already received has paid for another 3 months already!), please think about donating and telling your friends about us! If you cannot/will not pledge because of money issues then just spread the word of our website so we can get a bigger reach and that will help towards everything!
Have a great 2013 everyone! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
2012 what year! Has been full of ups for Linux this year and I think easily one of the most important years for Linux gaming, this is aimed to be a small roundup of 2012 with a reminder of interesting news, my thoughts on the year and so on.
Major News Reminder
Steam now in Open Beta
Unity3D now supports Linux exporting
Too many crowdfunding games to list in the reminders...
What has come along this year?
So this year has brought us things like Unity3D's Linux export option, Steam (With Team Fortress 2!), Masses of indie games thanks in part to Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Humble Indie Bundles and it won't stop there! We have also seen some of the first games released from crowdfunding since it really hit off and we all started paying attention with games like the awesome FTL being released.
I imagine it does make Desura feel a little uneasy since Steam launched on Linux and it now has Greenlight as well to get even more indies on board with Steam, although I would still like to see Desura stick around, that said I don't think they will be going anywhere any time soon!
The folk doing the open source client Desurium have released RC3 of Desurium 0.8 which is quite a jump from the rather buggy official build Desura has for Linux on their website so hopefully 2013 will be the year Desurium get's some more polish!
We also had the very first Unreal Engine 3 powered game come to Linux thanks to Icculus's porting skills - Dungeon Defenders in the Humble Indie Bundle 7. This does make things interesting for 2013 since it means even more games could come along like Red Orchestra 2 and many other games using the engine.
Problems we face!
We still have quite a ways to go it's not all going to be smooth sailing, there are still masses of publishers who may never bring their games to Linux. We need to be sure we support the developers and publishers who do bother to bring their games over.
It seems we do still need to convince developers and publishers that Linux gamers WILL pay for games and software, we don't expect everything to be free (open source is a different argument I won't make this time around). I have personally seen this year multiple developers still thinking we expect everything for free, so be sure if you see anyone like this to not just jump in and argue the points with them - educate them, don't argue with them. We have more than enough examples now with HIB and Steam, considering the amount of people that wanted in on Steam's closed beta (they stated over 60,000) it shouldn't be hard to see there is a larger user base for Linux games than those percentages of user base that we keep seeing thrown around.
Graphics drivers under Linux can still be a pain, recently Nvidia's updated drivers have vastly improved frame rates for certain games and in certain situations like working with Compiz, let us hope AMD can follow suit to remain relevant on the Linux desktop and make a bigger push as well.
I look forward to seeing how good the open source drivers can become after another years work, the work they do really is impressive.
Hopefully in 2013 we will not see any Windows only bundles from Humble Bundle to push Linux out again, we can hope but my personal thoughts is that it will become more common just based on how much money was gathered by it.
Next Year!
Next year we will no doubt see at least 1-2 more Valve Source games released like the highly anticipated Left 4 Dead 2 (which was supposed to be before Team Fortress 2) although I am much more hopeful they will bring out Dota 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive since both are truly great fun (Although Dota 2 can get very frustrating!). I am sure by 2014 we should at least have 1 more source engine powered game available to us.
We should also see an influx of games released from the funding of the mentioned websites Kickstarter and Indiegogo since many of them had their releases slated for this year.
2013 should be a very, very interesting year for Linux gaming and I of course will be following everything I can closely to bring you the best possible news I can find. As always if you find news before we do send it to us so we can inform everyone possible!
Lastly remember we are also on Indiegogo looking to gather funds to secure more months worth of web hosting (the funds I have already received has paid for another 3 months already!), please think about donating and telling your friends about us! If you cannot/will not pledge because of money issues then just spread the word of our website so we can get a bigger reach and that will help towards everything!
Have a great 2013 everyone! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments
2013 will be interesting indeed :)
I am still not sure about steam to be honest, they call it open beta but only release a .deb with so much hard coded ubuntu lines in there I do worry a bit about that. Desura may not be perfect, albeit I have had no real issues with it, it by far is more linux distribution friendly then steam right now. That is one of the reason I am not yet buying a Linux game on steam itself as I have no idea how long I can run it on opensuse, to me it feels more like steam for ubuntu then steam for linux. However the success of steam on linux depends on a lot more then valve games, others will have to join them else I think most new linux games on steam will come from HiB launches.
In the Windows world there is steam but also Desura, GoG and many other distributors. I don't see desura go away on linux and the games on there will benefit as much from all the new gfx drivers updates as those on steam. I do wonder how Gameolith will venture, news games keep getting added but there is little exposure of Gameolith in the big media, especially compared to GoG who offer a similar service.
As for gfx drivers, when I first made the step from Windows to Linux one of the things I used most was Wine/Crossover, during that time I found out how bad ATI cards where supported so I went out and got a nvidia card, downloaded the blob and never looked back, be it using Wine or linux in general. I don't see that change in the near future, ATI/AMD are much more open software friendly I totally agree but in the end what counts is if it works and on a desktop with a none-integrated gfx card nvidia seems to be the ticket for a near future. As gfx card performance becomes more important how will X be able to handle that, how will the kernel guys react when nvidia/amd will be looking for more performance and wanting their blobs to do more then the kernel license allows them ?
Talking about Wine/Crossover, I do wonder how they will fare in 2013, games are one of the biggest reasons people use wine and as soon as new games come out they features not working are added to the bugzilla and often very quickly fixed, that will change once people can get native games for linux but on the other hand Crossover might get more busy with making packages like they did for Limbo. I don't mind to much if I d/l a game if it 100% native or not, what matters if it works or not.
Many kickstarter games should appear in 2013: Banner Saga, Double Fine, Forsaken Fortress, Legends of Aethereus, Legens of Eisenwald, Leisure Suit Larry, Nekro, Planetary Annihiliation, Project Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Two Guys Spaceventure, Wastelands 2, Xenonauts.... But with Kickstarter attracting the "bigger" companies I think it will be harder for the real indies to stick out as the masses are slowly expecting AAA quality stuff from kickstarter or else they won't bother.
Looking back I would personally think that kickstarter was more exiting then steam in 2012, but yes 2013 will be an interesting year
I am still not sure about steam to be honest, they call it open beta but only release a .deb with so much hard coded ubuntu lines in there I do worry a bit about that. Desura may not be perfect, albeit I have had no real issues with it, it by far is more linux distribution friendly then steam right now. That is one of the reason I am not yet buying a Linux game on steam itself as I have no idea how long I can run it on opensuse, to me it feels more like steam for ubuntu then steam for linux. However the success of steam on linux depends on a lot more then valve games, others will have to join them else I think most new linux games on steam will come from HiB launches.
In the Windows world there is steam but also Desura, GoG and many other distributors. I don't see desura go away on linux and the games on there will benefit as much from all the new gfx drivers updates as those on steam. I do wonder how Gameolith will venture, news games keep getting added but there is little exposure of Gameolith in the big media, especially compared to GoG who offer a similar service.
As for gfx drivers, when I first made the step from Windows to Linux one of the things I used most was Wine/Crossover, during that time I found out how bad ATI cards where supported so I went out and got a nvidia card, downloaded the blob and never looked back, be it using Wine or linux in general. I don't see that change in the near future, ATI/AMD are much more open software friendly I totally agree but in the end what counts is if it works and on a desktop with a none-integrated gfx card nvidia seems to be the ticket for a near future. As gfx card performance becomes more important how will X be able to handle that, how will the kernel guys react when nvidia/amd will be looking for more performance and wanting their blobs to do more then the kernel license allows them ?
Talking about Wine/Crossover, I do wonder how they will fare in 2013, games are one of the biggest reasons people use wine and as soon as new games come out they features not working are added to the bugzilla and often very quickly fixed, that will change once people can get native games for linux but on the other hand Crossover might get more busy with making packages like they did for Limbo. I don't mind to much if I d/l a game if it 100% native or not, what matters if it works or not.
Many kickstarter games should appear in 2013: Banner Saga, Double Fine, Forsaken Fortress, Legends of Aethereus, Legens of Eisenwald, Leisure Suit Larry, Nekro, Planetary Annihiliation, Project Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Two Guys Spaceventure, Wastelands 2, Xenonauts.... But with Kickstarter attracting the "bigger" companies I think it will be harder for the real indies to stick out as the masses are slowly expecting AAA quality stuff from kickstarter or else they won't bother.
Looking back I would personally think that kickstarter was more exiting then steam in 2012, but yes 2013 will be an interesting year
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For me the potential value of Steam will be demonstrated if I start seeing games that were ported to Linux for Steam become available through other services or directly from the developer. If there is one place where Humble Bundle was always a problem it was with the fact that many games disappeared after being in the Bundle; ironically enough many of these missing games may come out on Steam now. But the problem for me still persists as I want to play games on Linux and not games on Steam (which I could in theory live with) or especially Steamworks (which I can't). I have heard people assure me that this will happen and we will see something of a trickle down (to use a rather noxious metaphor) of titles appearing at other places, but 2013 will be the time to prove it.
I am glad for Liam commenting on the future of free drivers, but to be honest for me the free drivers have been fulfilling my needs for over a year. Every title I have thrown at them except Bastion (which I need to look into again) has been running great and this is all without Marek's recent awesomeness upstream or OpenGL 3. And this includes games like Trine 2, Amnesia, Torchlight, and Rochard which may not be the ultimate in graphics (well, except maybe Trine 2) but certainly are not leaving my hardware alone. For me it is Nvidia that is irrelevant, with great experiences with both my AMD hardware and my brother's Intel GMA on proper in-kernel drivers. I am certainly not interested in going back to the blobs anytime soon.
Thankfully Desura does seem to be more appealing in many ways to traditional Linux developers so it has an advantage there. It is great to see Runesoft putting in such interest for instance, and I hope that will be a relationship that developers want to continue. Desura has also not burned as many bridges as Valve has, and while Greenlight has been soothing some wounds, I do hope Desura can leverage that to keep it successful. It has certainly not been doing a bad job for itself, the need for a new proper client release aside.
We will see how many Kickstarters succeed but I honestly have no idea what will happen there. Things could go so many different ways.
So while not being all that enthused about things going in the next year, I can consider myself to be vaguely comfortable about things as matter stand.
I am glad for Liam commenting on the future of free drivers, but to be honest for me the free drivers have been fulfilling my needs for over a year. Every title I have thrown at them except Bastion (which I need to look into again) has been running great and this is all without Marek's recent awesomeness upstream or OpenGL 3. And this includes games like Trine 2, Amnesia, Torchlight, and Rochard which may not be the ultimate in graphics (well, except maybe Trine 2) but certainly are not leaving my hardware alone. For me it is Nvidia that is irrelevant, with great experiences with both my AMD hardware and my brother's Intel GMA on proper in-kernel drivers. I am certainly not interested in going back to the blobs anytime soon.
Thankfully Desura does seem to be more appealing in many ways to traditional Linux developers so it has an advantage there. It is great to see Runesoft putting in such interest for instance, and I hope that will be a relationship that developers want to continue. Desura has also not burned as many bridges as Valve has, and while Greenlight has been soothing some wounds, I do hope Desura can leverage that to keep it successful. It has certainly not been doing a bad job for itself, the need for a new proper client release aside.
We will see how many Kickstarters succeed but I honestly have no idea what will happen there. Things could go so many different ways.
So while not being all that enthused about things going in the next year, I can consider myself to be vaguely comfortable about things as matter stand.
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Desura is still more interesting than Steam from my point of view :
- Desura is Linux distribution friendly (I have OpenSUSE and I don't plan to move to Ubuntu)
- Some games are available in Desura, not in Steam (RuneSoft games, for instance)
- Desura is Linux distribution friendly (I have OpenSUSE and I don't plan to move to Ubuntu)
- Some games are available in Desura, not in Steam (RuneSoft games, for instance)
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The Steam distro friendly stuff will come soon, some of the fixes for their next build helps towards supporting other distros.
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