What a time to be alive and be a Linux gamer! Not too long ago I would have though this would have been impossible.
Steam top 10 as of this article
- Dota 2
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Team Fortress 2
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- Football Manager 2016
- Total War™: WARHAMMER® - Supposed to be coming to Linux/SteamOS
- Sid Meier's Civilization V
- Garry's Mod
- Grand Theft Auto V - Not on Linux/SteamOS
- Hearts of Iron IV - Day 1 Linux/SteamOS release today!
So, only one out of the ten current most popular games will probably never see a Linux release. That's an amazing bit of progress. I truly think it's amazing how far we have come as a platform. From the small trickle when Steam first released, to having some of the most popular Steam games on PC right now.
This again shows the importance of day-1 releases for our platform, as Hearts of Iron IV has shot right up into the top ten. It's not just enough to get the games, we need timely releases to prevent the cycle of people feeling they need to boot into Windows.
Top 50
Also, out of the top 50, 26 currently have Linux support with a couple more confirmed to be on their way to Linux. So even though we are still a tiny platform, we have over half of the top 50 most popular games on Steam with that number set to increase soon.
Remember when you feel gloomy about how things are looking, that this is a very healthy indicator right now.
We have a lot to look forward to this year and I can't wait to see how next year goes.
Here's to a continuing trend of getting awesome games! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Steam top 10 as of this article
- Dota 2
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Team Fortress 2
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- Football Manager 2016
- Total War™: WARHAMMER® - Supposed to be coming to Linux/SteamOS
- Sid Meier's Civilization V
- Garry's Mod
- Grand Theft Auto V - Not on Linux/SteamOS
- Hearts of Iron IV - Day 1 Linux/SteamOS release today!
So, only one out of the ten current most popular games will probably never see a Linux release. That's an amazing bit of progress. I truly think it's amazing how far we have come as a platform. From the small trickle when Steam first released, to having some of the most popular Steam games on PC right now.
This again shows the importance of day-1 releases for our platform, as Hearts of Iron IV has shot right up into the top ten. It's not just enough to get the games, we need timely releases to prevent the cycle of people feeling they need to boot into Windows.
Top 50
Also, out of the top 50, 26 currently have Linux support with a couple more confirmed to be on their way to Linux. So even though we are still a tiny platform, we have over half of the top 50 most popular games on Steam with that number set to increase soon.
Remember when you feel gloomy about how things are looking, that this is a very healthy indicator right now.
We have a lot to look forward to this year and I can't wait to see how next year goes.
Here's to a continuing trend of getting awesome games! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I'm with maodzedun on this.
Yeah @0aTT it might work for you and your GTX970 but only until Steam decides to drop this whole thing.
Which it might do if it turns out it can't break the vicious cycle of windows dependency.
Which it can't if people see a GTX 970 Linux PC that proudly gets presented as "Better than PS4 and XBOX (AMD card? Oh, you're shit out of luck then)" for any longer. The negative hype train is already starting to pick up speed.
So
1. We're not the target audience here.
2. Steam clearly has the better gaming OS on its hands but still can't do shit to reach its target audience because we all get fucked by crappy graphics drivers.
I see people talk about "Linux Exclusives" and whatnot, when it couldn't be more obvious that the drivers and significantly worse performance than Windows are all that's holding Linux back here.
And exactly that's where we're ready to hand out free passes because with top notch cards Linux might do better than a PS4?
Last edited by Caldazar on 7 June 2016 at 8:40 am UTC
Yeah @0aTT it might work for you and your GTX970 but only until Steam decides to drop this whole thing.
Which it might do if it turns out it can't break the vicious cycle of windows dependency.
Which it can't if people see a GTX 970 Linux PC that proudly gets presented as "Better than PS4 and XBOX (AMD card? Oh, you're shit out of luck then)" for any longer. The negative hype train is already starting to pick up speed.
So
1. We're not the target audience here.
2. Steam clearly has the better gaming OS on its hands but still can't do shit to reach its target audience because we all get fucked by crappy graphics drivers.
I see people talk about "Linux Exclusives" and whatnot, when it couldn't be more obvious that the drivers and significantly worse performance than Windows are all that's holding Linux back here.
And exactly that's where we're ready to hand out free passes because with top notch cards Linux might do better than a PS4?
Last edited by Caldazar on 7 June 2016 at 8:40 am UTC
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Quoting: Caldazar(AMD card? Oh, you're shit out of luck then)
You are quite right in your statements but there are some missing details, and this particular quote requires more care on your part.
AMD has been neglecting their whole *NIX driver architecture for years. From the moment Steam and gaming on Linux became a thing, things started to change. First, they are actively working on their OSS drivers, something no other vendor achieved before them. Yes Intel have OSS drivers, but they've been way behind for many years and AMD was the first to get some OpenGL 4.x support on OSS drivers.
I might even consider switching in the coming years if things look that good.
You can't complain when you see people putting that kind of hard work. It's a matter if time, but things are getting better.
About your comments on Caldazar's GTX 970, I play on a GTX 660 and everything runs in High/Ultra in full HD. Things are bottlenecked but they aren't unplayable. People don't care to play at 130 FPS. Uber geeks do, but that's another matter.
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The "negative hype train" has never made me think I should be using Windows, but maybe I'm just not the hype-swallowing type. Sure, a large part of the game-consuming public is interested solely in games, not operating systems, and will play on whatever platform gives them the means to play whatever they want. And that's completely understandable. It's perfectly natural to think in black and white, but personally I like the shades between these absolutes of "everything" and "nothing" just fine. Settling for "enough" is not a sign of weakness, contrary to common belief and the holy tenets of consumerism.
Somehow I get the feeling that the doom-and-gloom types among us tend to be people who still spend a lot of time playing games on Windows and are trying to convince the rest of us that they have no real choice, or maybe that their choice is the right one and that the rest of us should see how justified they are in doing so, because "oh noes, if they don't agree with everything I say and do as I do they must think they're better than me!". Welp, who cares. Back to work.
Somehow I get the feeling that the doom-and-gloom types among us tend to be people who still spend a lot of time playing games on Windows and are trying to convince the rest of us that they have no real choice, or maybe that their choice is the right one and that the rest of us should see how justified they are in doing so, because "oh noes, if they don't agree with everything I say and do as I do they must think they're better than me!". Welp, who cares. Back to work.
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Quoting: CaldazarI'm with maodzedun on this.
Yeah @0aTT it might work for you and your GTX970 but only until Steam decides to drop this whole thing.
Which it might do if it turns out it can't break the vicious cycle of windows dependency.
Valve just making money. Every little helps. Why should they give up? In 99% the publishers (even big ones like SEGA or Warner) port there games to Linux. Valve have just the costs for SteamOS which have set a standard environment for all Linux Games. Runs on SteamOS, runs everywhere. This have make it very easy to port Games to Linux and this was the main reason for SteamOS.
The biggest mistake of Microsoft, Sony and others it has always been that they strive for world domination rather than simply making money. Valve instead will never give up a functioning business. No matter how small it is. But if Valve would give up, GOG would cheer and the Community would fork SteamOS. But Valve will not give up because they make money with it.
Because of his arrogance Microsoft has already slept away the Internet and the mobile market. Now they missed the Linux gaming market while they already port MSSQL-Server to Linux, include the Linux shell into Windows and payed billions for Minecraft.
Linux is unstoppable, because its free. Valve will just wait and make money meanwhile. A very clever tactic.
Last edited by 0aTT on 7 June 2016 at 9:36 am UTC
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I have been watching the list of most popular games as well and noted before that Linux had a high share there. Also in the top 20 the Linux share is still high.
Another statistic that I am monitoring is the "popular new releases", because those are the games people buy and lack of availability pushes people away from Linux.
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularnew&sort_by=Released_DESC&os=linux
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularnew&sort_by=Released_DESC
13 out of 30 games ~ 43%
Also a really promising share!
Another statistic that I am monitoring is the "popular new releases", because those are the games people buy and lack of availability pushes people away from Linux.
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularnew&sort_by=Released_DESC&os=linux
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularnew&sort_by=Released_DESC
13 out of 30 games ~ 43%
Also a really promising share!
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Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: EikeOf course, that's a biased top ten. League of Legends e. g. would be in there if it would be on Steam. But it's still great.This is not about games outside of Steam though, this is directly looking at Steam.
Right. It's not like there's anything wrong with the article, it's just that nobody should confuse that with
"8 out of the 10 current most popular games support Linux".
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Quoting: ShabbyXCompletely true. A few months ago some apparently famous guy was showing equal performance between vulkan opengl 4.5. Opengl is very powerful, it's just terribly used. Vulkan is just a more modern reimplemention of the same stuff as opengl.The problem is that most of opengl engines are object-oriented where the rendering loop does look something like this
render()
{
for entity in entities
{
glBindTexture(entity.texture);
glBindFramebuffer(entity.framebuffer);
glBindVertexBuffer(entity.vertexbuffer);
glUseProgram(entity.program);
glDepthFunc(entity.depth);
...
glDraw(...);
}
}You will notice that there a lot a state changes done by the driver for every object. To avoid that, we need to get rid of OOP to make our engines data-oriented (not to be confused with data-driven which is a different thing) where you sort/pack data in the following order
framebuffers -> global states -> programs (shaders) -> textures -> vertex buffer
The rendering loop then looks like this
render()
{
for framebuffer in framebuffers
{
glBindFramebuffer(framebuffer);
for global in framebuffer.globals
{
glDepthFunc(global.depth);
glEnable(...);
for program in global.programs
{
glUseProgram(program);
for texture in program.textures
{
glBindTexture(texture)
for vertexbuffer in texture.vertexbuffers
{
glBindBuffer(vertexbuffer);
glDraw(...);
}
}
}
}
}
}Now, Vulkan has real advantages over OpenGL: Finer control over memory consumption, clean api, same api on mobile, less bloat (you only implement what you need), SPIR, ...
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Quoting: 0aTTThe biggest mistake of Microsoft, Sony and others it has always been that they strive for world domination rather than simply making money. Valve instead will never give up a functioning business....
Interesting thought, I do wonder if these businesses could have survived had they done it differently. I guess you could look at apple as a great example of a computer manufacture thats happy to make profit rather then dominate market share, but its a really different approach to business, I wonder if MS would have survived going that route.
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Quoting: HalKadoInteresting thought, I do wonder if these businesses could have survived had they done it differently. I guess you could look at apple as a great example of a computer manufacture thats happy to make profit rather then dominate market share, but its a really different approach to business, I wonder if MS would have survived going that route.Apple would love to dominate the market (well, any market). It's definitely not for lack of trying. They've got the smallish but extremely lucrative hipster and yuppie markets in their pocket though, so they do just fine.
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There's a reason why Apple doesn't dominate the market: the 90s were a terrible period for Macintosh sales, and the failure was such that Mac sales still suffer from this.
On another hand, they almost dominate mobile phones market, on the past 5 years they were tied with Samsung. When you look at how they manage their smartphone business, you clearly see they are not willing to give up on their position as leaders, with a very aggressive communication.
Also some computer marketshares, like laptops, are still pretty much Apple-friendly. When you know a bit about Jobs and other important Apple people, you know Apple is always looking for more audience, and more profits (since around 2004, and the switch to Intel processors). Their failure to do so with computers is not intentional, it was due to poor management. Today it is better handled, but I don't think I'm their target audience any longer. They gave up on the enthusiast market to tackle the luxury market.
On another hand, they almost dominate mobile phones market, on the past 5 years they were tied with Samsung. When you look at how they manage their smartphone business, you clearly see they are not willing to give up on their position as leaders, with a very aggressive communication.
Also some computer marketshares, like laptops, are still pretty much Apple-friendly. When you know a bit about Jobs and other important Apple people, you know Apple is always looking for more audience, and more profits (since around 2004, and the switch to Intel processors). Their failure to do so with computers is not intentional, it was due to poor management. Today it is better handled, but I don't think I'm their target audience any longer. They gave up on the enthusiast market to tackle the luxury market.
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