This post reminds me of an idea I've been mulling at.
I think so far it's quite plausible that Linux ports of games are on average not moneymakers, not directly at least. And yet it's happening, and seems to be happening faster and faster. I see two basic reasons. First is Valve, which gave a major impetus and made the whole notion seem sane and acceptable. But the reason it's kept on so far even though there's still no signs of a Steam Machine to create large scale Linux sales, the reason it seems if anything to be accelerating, is cultural.

Basically, desktop Linux here is clearly piggybacking on Everywhere Else Linux. The desktop at this point is about the only significant computing space where Linux is not prominent or even dominant. Linux rules supercomputers, dominates webservers, reigns over the cloud, takes names in embedded, enhances the enterprise, pervades hobbyist computing. So anyone involved much in programming probably is involved in Linux culture some way. It runs their clever raspberry pi device, or they cut their teeth on the LAMP stack, or whatever. Even if they're not directly involved, there's an awareness that Linux is deeply intertwined with programmer/nerd culture in a way that Mac OS is not even though it has a bigger desktop share. You can see in this post, that general enthusiasm for Linux as an idea and a hacker thing rather than as a vehicle for gaining sales. So give game developers, collectively, a respectable reason why it's not insane to port to Linux, and lots of them really want to do that. All they needed was an excuse and an atmosphere where they're not reflexively mocked for the very idea. Valve provided that, and now it's feeding on itself--every game released for Linux just reinforces that it's a normal thing to do.
How long it can last if actual market share doesn't shift (eg. Steam Machines are not released or tank on arrival) remains anybody's guess.

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If you have a game about exploring space that everyone at NASA plays, you have to be doing something right.

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As to the percentages having nowhere to go but (someday) up, while I certainly hope that's how it plays out it's not the only way it could go. If Linux were to stagnate on the desktop with no love, what could happen is that new computer users/owners would not start using it and so as older ones died out (or in the case of Steam surveys, just stopped gaming), the share would erode even if nobody actually stopped using Linux. This is a worry, especially since some of the early ideological enthusiasm that propelled Linux to many desktops despite a fair amount of inconvenience back in the day has waned.

Be really nice if the Steam Machines really get released and hit some success.

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Quoting: Beamboom(and before anyone ask: No, "user reviews" are not reviews, just like personal blogs are not and will never be serious news sources)

Leaves us between a rock and a hard place rather, since most serious news sources aren't serious news sources either--more like propaganda outlets.
In a similar vein, reviews are for the most part arguably not reviews either. One might make a claim then that there are no actual reviews of anything . . .

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I remember when this was a board game. It was kinda fun.

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That sounds like it might be cool, I'm a big 4X fan, and Arcen Games is a class act. Will buy pretty much for sure.

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Quoting: Von

Quoting: DamonLinuxPLValve was right that the studio removed the game from their store ... can not be threaten others.

I disagree. They've pulled the plug not on one person, but the whole company (what, 2 or 3 more people in there?) It's an ugly overreaction and a statement “we can do what we damn want with your games, deal with it.”

Gotta say if I ran a company and someone dealing with my company threatened my life, I would stop doing business with that person. And you know, I don't have a responsibility to do business with anyone I don't want to. If I'm willing to take the hit to my profits, I can stop doing business with people because I don't like their tie. Now that might be an overreaction, but cutting someone off because of a death threat? No, that's even good business--it's bad if everyone else you might do business with thinks you're a pushover who lets people treat you like that.
But good business or not, money or no money--no. Too bad. A death threat?! Mess with me like that, I don't do business with you. Why would this be a controversial concept?

Some people here seem to be under the impression that Steam is a public utility. While that might be nice, it isn't, it's a private outfit that gets to decide who it does business with.

One key difference between Mr. Dawe and Mr. Dork is that the latter quit because he sinned and the former quit because he was sinned against. Coming back because you conclude you have more fortitude than you feared and can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous trolls a bit longer is not wrong. Coming back because you unilaterally decide there's no need for penance after all is a bit skeezy.

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Quoting: BeamboomWhat worries me more than the technical hurdles is our market share. Cause with less than 2% of us being on Linux how can you possibly argue that devs should spend a lot on Linux optimizations?

To put it simple: We NEED SteamOS to do the magic on those numbers, or we'll remain a smaller gaming platform than Mac. It's just how it is.

This. We've always had a chicken/egg problem with gaming and game-related graphics performance issues (and some other issues) on Linux. That is, nobody would port games to Linux or make Linux be good for games because our market share was small, and we couldn't grow our market share because no games and to the extent there were games, there were bottlenecks when it came to making them good.

There are signs of this deadlock breaking thanks mainly to Valve and their determined efforts of late to move gaming to Linux. But it's not dead yet. There remain a group of technical issues--mostly drivers, development tools, X being obsolete, OpenGL's ability to compete with DirectX. And there remains the market share issue. Now some of the new engines make porting, or rather developing a game to be cross-platform to begin with, so easy that when using them it would actually be well worth it to make sure the game ran on Linux even if it only meant 1% more sales; the "porting" potentially costs well under 1% of overall game development costs. But even if this leads the majority of games coming out to technically run on Linux, that won't by itself create market share or momentum. And if the market share does not increase, the technical issues likely will not be fully solved and may even get worse as technology on other platforms moves forward while Linux lags.

To solve the market share problem, which in turn is very likely to lead to sufficient effort being spent on the technical problems to make Linux a competitive or even superior gaming platform, right now what we really, really need is a successful launch of the Steam Machines. If they come out and take hold, that would be a lot of users using Linux specifically to do graphics-intensive stuff for which they pay money. It would be an increase in critical mass from an open source development standpoint, and it would vastly increase the field of companies and people with a financial stake in the graphics side of Linux. I mean, Linux is already big, even dominant, in many fields, but few of them require it to make topnotch use of a PC graphics card. Server-related problems in Linux get solved; desktop ones, let alone gaming ones, not necessarily.

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Quoting: Metallinatuslol It looks extremely fun :P
I wonder what the SJWs must think about it!

. . . Serbian Jehovah's Witnesses?

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Quoting: Hamishthere are an increasing amount of people actually playing games on Linux with more than one head, although still probably not enough to truly justify adding it to the survey as of yet.

Not surprising that people with more than one head would use Linux; I expect they're used to thinking differently about things, not going with "the herd" and so forth.

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