Steam continues to get bigger with another milestone being reached! Yesterday Steam shot passed 18 million concurrent users online.
The exact number was 18,528,722 according to the official Steam stats page, which was hit around 3PM UTC. Around that time, over 7 million people were actually in-game as well—nuts!
If we think about how many Linux gamers that could be, it might be around 79,673 Linux gamers online if we use the current Linux market share on Steam as reported from December at 0.43%. Likely highly inaccurate, but it's fun to think about.
It was only in November of last year when it hit 17.6 million, so that's some rather quick growth. Less than two months to pull in that many more people is just insane, although it does seem like it's fuelled by PUBG which hit another all-time peak itself in the last day. It will be interesting to see what happens when the mass-hype around PUBG fades.
As of right now, from Valve's top 10 games having the most players online eight of them support Linux, which is pretty damn good. The list fluctuates of course and it would be better if PUBG supported Linux, but sadly that feels like a dream right now. Even without PUBG, there's plenty to look forward to this year for Linux gaming.
Thanks for the tip Joe!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: XpanderQuoting: TheRiddickFor a company making crazy amounts of money, you'd think they could hire a army of programmers and problem solvers at least short term to sort out the performance issues and porting it to Linux... They must be spending a fair bit on blow and hookers or something... a common developer success trap.
Well its hard to find developers who are willing to move to new location, i remember ARK devs had (maybe still have this issue) problems finding good engine developers who know the code. These days there are so many game engines where you don't need to know much about coding to make a game, but when it gets big and needs special optimizations you need someone with more skills to optimize it.
In gaming it looks like it isnt a common practice to hire programmers to do homework in another cities or countrys.
It could help a lot of devs
Kimyrielle Jan 7, 2018
Yes, I know that there is the issue of support costs, which according to some sources we don't look good at, compared to Windows. I really, really think dev studios need to be more drastic and flat out refuse to even look at support requests for distros other than Ubuntu and maybe SteamOS, to keep these costs down. Because this issue seems to be holding us back.
slaapliedje Jan 7, 2018
Tibia use that antibot system.. i doubt that its a problem to port to linux.
Valves Surveys are just wrong.
Quoting: KimyrielleI really, really think dev studios need to be more drastic and flat out refuse to even look at support requests for distros other than Ubuntu and maybe SteamOS, to keep these costs down. Because this issue seems to be holding us back.
Yes, this would be my advice too. But unfortunately (part of) the Linux community can be very vocal when a gaming studio or publisher does not support a certain pet project or ideology. I guess preventing shit storms can be reason too to stay away from Linux.
Quoting: gustavoyaraujoThey could just give the SteamOS users better offers, some discounts if you buy a game and play it on Linux. I think that would be a big step to make the platform more attractive.
That would probably be really, really easy to work around.
A different way to do things might be to cut down on or eliminate the first $X of royalties or whatever that a developer pays to Valve if those sales go towards the Linux platform.
I dunno.
Kuduzkehpan Jan 9, 2018
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