I also have less trust for professional reviewers than "ordinary people" commenting on games. Which isn't to say I particularly trust "ordinary people" commenting on games--rather, I trust most professional reviewers so little that my lacklustre opinion of average-people reviews looks good by comparison.
I like Shamus Young, though.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe biggest problem with Linux gaming at the moment is that there is no compelling reason for someone who is happy with Windows to switch to Linux. All they see are fewer games with worse performance. Now there are many good reasons to kick Windows to the curb, but try explaining that to your average user who will then proceed to viciously defend Windows.

While you're quite right about this, I see it more as a glass half full. There are various non-gaming reasons to switch from Windows to Linux. Until recently, gaming has been a hideous reason not to, quite enough to override many people's frustrations with Windows and induce them not to switch. The situation was so bad that even for a casual gamer it was just prohibitive. But now, if someone who plays games some but isn't an avid gamer who follows all the latest releases says "Well, I'm interested in Linux, but can I play games?" the answer can to a fair degree (similar to Mac, say) be "Yes." That was never true before. And so far, it's just continuing to get better.

So certainly, if your main reason for using a computer is that you're a serious gamer, there is no reason to switch to Linux and still good reasons not to. But if your main reason for using a computer is to browse the web and do some spreadsheets or whatever, but you also like to play a few games, Linux may now be viable where it never was before.

The future has some bright spots even on the hard core gamer front, though. With the advent of Vulkan, it seems as if graphics card drivers will be simpler and there will be little reason for them to perform worse on Linux than on Windows. At that point, speed will become a question of which OS is more efficient in other ways. Currently, it's unclear whether Linux is fundamentally faster on a gaming load than Windows--graphics card effects generally dwarf such differences if there are any. But it may well be, and it may soon get faster still under such loads--I've seen articles recently about problems with the Linux scheduler under multiple cores which may lead to speed improvements. More generally, I trust the development model and general nature of Linux over Windows. If people want Linux to run games faster, it will be changed to make games run faster. Windows, not so much. So, crossing fingers, but there are reasons for optimism.

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We can pretty much assume that anyone who uses Linux and plays games on it (and isn't strongly committed to completely DRM-free games) is on Steam, and has been since fairly early in the Steam Linux gaming push. So basically, all growth of Linux on Steam has to come from either new people using Linux, or people who use Linux but didn't play games on it before deciding it's workable to play games on Linux (which probably means, switching from using Linux part time to full time or nearly so).

Growth of Windows users on Steam presumably does not come mainly from new adoption of Windows, since it's already a monopolist. So either it comes from people beginning to play games on PC at all when they previously didn't game or gamed exclusively on consoles, or it comes from people who already gamed on Windows shifting from other ways of getting games (buying boxes in physical stores, for instance) to using Steam. Mr. dmantione may have a point that some sort of saturation has to be reached eventually, limiting this growth.

So yeah, if that first trend of increasing Linux numbers that we presume are from actual Linux adoption continues, and the second trend eventually stalls out, then we could expect the percentages to start going up eventually (even aside from Steam Machines, which as near as I can make out don't currently show in the statistics at all).

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When it comes to these 4X space games, you know what I'd like to see? I want a game that just goes crazy on the tech tree. Too often you get all these technologies and they'll have awesome sounds-crazy-advanced names and they do something like increase industrial production 5% or make ship components very slightly smaller or give your missiles +1 damage, woo hoo. Everyone wants to be careful, and systematic, so they keep the impacts of technologies balanced, and predictable, and incremental, and kinda boring.
To heck with worrying about balance (or maybe have an optional "tame" tech tree), just make with the super science at the upper levels and if the implications of a tech let you totally break all feeble opposition if you use it unscrupulously, so be it!

I'd play again and again just to try different game-breaking technologies and gloat as I used them to sweep aside my foes and dominate the galaxy.

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NATO? Shooting at ISIS? Kind of unrealistic. Shouldn't it be either the Syrian Army, Russians, or maybe Hezbollah, manning that machine gun?
Maybe there should be a NATO espionage game about carefully siphoning weapons, money and trainers to ISIS.

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Quoting: jo3fis

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KimyrielleNice to see it outperforming OpenGL (was there any doubt that it would btw.?) But the much more important question is...will it outperform DX12? Because if it doesn't devs will go "Why would we add a Vulkan render path for these 1% that use Linux?" To succeed on the market, being the second fastest API won't be good enough when the fastest one already controls 90% of the market.

Definitely an important question. Seems like so far we're looking at rapid improvement, so good sign there. From what I've heard about how similar they are, though, I have this feeling they'll end up at rough parity.
I'm thinking if I were making the decision of DX12 vs Vulkan as someone wanting to sell a game (once Vulkan is properly off the ground), it would come down to "Do I want DX12 for Windows and Xbox, or Vulkan for Windows and (everything else)?" And probably my answer would be "I'll just use an engine that does both and get all of the above for almost free."

This to me is the answer. Whatever will reduce development time and give them easier platform options. Linux might be only 1% but android on the other hand...

Well, and correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall hearing that PS4 will run Vulkan . . .

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Quoting: KimyrielleNice to see it outperforming OpenGL (was there any doubt that it would btw.?) But the much more important question is...will it outperform DX12? Because if it doesn't devs will go "Why would we add a Vulkan render path for these 1% that use Linux?" To succeed on the market, being the second fastest API won't be good enough when the fastest one already controls 90% of the market.

Definitely an important question. Seems like so far we're looking at rapid improvement, so good sign there. From what I've heard about how similar they are, though, I have this feeling they'll end up at rough parity.
I'm thinking if I were making the decision of DX12 vs Vulkan as someone wanting to sell a game (once Vulkan is properly off the ground), it would come down to "Do I want DX12 for Windows and Xbox, or Vulkan for Windows and (everything else)?" And probably my answer would be "I'll just use an engine that does both and get all of the above for almost free."

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It's odd . . . I am not a programmer. Like, at all--I took one, one-hundred-level programming course in university and a couple in high school; Pascal and Basic. And yet somehow, my hanging around paying attention to Linux issues for a fair number of years made even me think "Oh dear, I think that wasn't the way to go" a few times while reading that writeup.

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I'm getting the general impression that Vulkan must genuinely be fairly clean and simple, thus easy to make the drivers, since overall it seems like development of this stuff is happening faster than I was really expecting.

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Certainly sounds like the game's a pile of Bullshot.

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