Feral is probably the most prolific Linux developer in the gaming industry today, and I'm thrilled with the games they've brought to our humble platform. Without Feral, we'd probably have never seen games like XCOM 2, Tomb Raider, Shadows of Mordor, Total Warhammer, Mad Max, and others on Linux. Aspyr has similarly contributed to the growing Linux gaming catalog, and there are probably one or two other smaller porting houses that I'm unaware of. I know some developers (particularly the smaller indies) produce their own in-house ports, but when it comes to big-budget, high-profile games, we're almost entirely dependent on porting shops.

While I love the fact that I've been able to nuke my Windows partition without having to give up AAA games, a couple things do concern me: there are far more developers than there are porting houses, so the porting houses will never be able to keep up with the games coming on the market. Secondly, since porting houses have been willing to pick up the slack for Linux, developers have less incentive to develop their own in-house Linux expertise to give us 1st-party Linux support.

So have 3rd-party Linux ports really been good for Linux gaming? It's a good start, I think, but we need developers to start treating us like valued customers instead of an afterthought.