Ok, so for the time being we seem to grow in lockstep with the overall market, adding absolute numbers to our community, but we're not taking away any market share from competing OSes.

The first part of this finding is is good - A larger absolute target group means that devs (particularly indy ones, who seem to be the most sympathetic to us) will look at a large enough target group to warrant releasing ports with some hope for them to be profitable. After all, even 1% of a large enough group can be sufficiently large enough to deserve being catered to.
The bad news is that is as long as we are not growing relatively to the other OSes we will always be "that tiny minority" larger studios will be inclined to ignore, because in the big picture 1% doesn't matter, regardless of how large the base group is. I am pretty sure Bethesda could have made a profitable Linux port of Fallout 4, since they sold so many copies of it that even 1% of the total sales would have easily recouped the porting costs. But they obviously didn't care about having 1% more profit. I dare saying nobody who doesn't want to support Linux for the sake of supporting Linux does. They will continue to tell us to "just boot Windows if you want to play our games" (as said by Blizzard's CEO).

For the time being, we seem to be doing well, but in the long term we still need to grow in terms of market share, at least if we want to see more AAA games on our platform.

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Quoting: Mal

Quoting: KimyrielleNot sure why game devs would want to support two rendering paths when one of the already is supporting every single platform they could possibly want to support in the long run

Cough...

UWP...

cough cough...

Tbh, I cannot really see major developers basically submitting whatever business leverage they have to Microsoft and be forever at their mercy, even if that's exactly what MS has in mind. EA wants to keep Origin and Ubisoft wants to keep UPlay because that gives them direct no-middleman access to the market. I don't have a crystal ball, but I cannot see UWP monopolizing gaming anytime soon.

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Glad to hear that. Particularly the part when Vulkan and DX12 are similar enough to support both. Not sure why game devs would want to support two rendering paths when one of the already is supporting every single platform they could possibly want to support in the long run, but it means that existing DX skills are easily transferable to Vulkan, which from a business perspective is awesome to hear coming from a dev.

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Quoting: throgh

Quoting: KimyrielleHandling graphics drivers in Linux is still an absolute pain and is probably THE single biggest obstacle for the average user to get a Linux based system ready for halfway serious gaming. Both AMD but also NVidia have to get their act together eventually and release something that installs with one click, you know...like in Windows. Right now we're a far cry from that. And no, NVidia isn't much better. Optimus. 'nuff said.

Interesting: I have no further problem running the driver installation. You want a one-click-installation? Stay with Windows. Simple as that. :D

Well, if we ever want Linux to become interesting for the 99% of the population -not- tech-savy enough to wrestle with complex command-line based installation procedures, we better DO become a bit more user friendly. No, I haven't had a real problem either. But I don't think the average person would be able to get NVidia drivers to run on an Optimus card (which is the most common NVidia based architecture on laptops if I am not totally mistaken.)

And yes, the person who said that GPU drivers should be installable via the distro's package manager from its standard repository is right. I don't really get why installing a GPU driver has be a completely different process than any other package either.

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Handling graphics drivers in Linux is still an absolute pain and is probably THE single biggest obstacle for the average user to get a Linux based system ready for halfway serious gaming. Both AMD but also NVidia have to get their act together eventually and release something that installs with one click, you know...like in Windows. Right now we're a far cry from that. And no, NVidia isn't much better. Optimus. 'nuff said.

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It is indeed a long haul thing and as far as I can tell, things are moving in the right direction at exactly the speed we can reasonably expect them to move. Windows didn't build their near monopoly on PC gaming overnight either. Actually the PC didn't, because computer gaming for the longest time was Amiga. It took the PC -years- just to be viewed as a viable alternative to the Amiga and then more years to become the leading platform. Linux gaming started in earnest only a couple years ago. We can't reasonably expect having a 20% or whatnot market share at this point, yet the usual doom and gloom writers who said "The PC will never be for games" in 1990 are out all in force again and people believe them again. Why, I do not know. At this point it's quite obvious that Linux will have a future as a gaming platform. SteamOS will be a fairly good gaming distro one day. Valve will likely continue kicking NVidia and AMD butt so that installing and handling GPU drivers one day won't be a complete PITA anymore. And Vulkan will eliminate any real or imagine performance gap Linux games still have compared to Windows. Most publishers won't be able to ignore Linux. Except they don't want to deploy on mobile platforms at all anymore, where Linux (well, the distro called Android) has all but thrashed its competition lately and now looks at a 80%+ market share worldwide.

Even my personal journey to Linux gaming is a long haul. I have been using Linux since 1998, and even in 2016 with those 1,900 games available, I haven't yet reached a point when I could safely delete my Windows partition and live happily ever after. I am building my Linux games library and if a publisher wants to sell me a game these days, it better supports Linux. Because chances are that I am not buying a game that doesn't. I am doing that for over two years now, but there are still entire genres of games not available for Linux at all. Such as MMOs (the total number of AAA MMOs available for Linux is zero). Platforms just don't become great gaming platforms over night when their focus was anything but games for like two decades. It takes time. More time than the two years the doom gloom writers gave the platform before trashing it in their underinformed postings.

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It was inevitable. Apple's success is to no small degree based on the vendor lock-in on the App Store. It allows them to control every single aspect of the market for extra profit, as they gain revenue from every single piece of software sold for their system. I am sure whenever they met for a coffee, MS executives went "Gah, why didn't we lock down our OS while we had the chance? People take that crap from Apple and every gaming console ever made, they would have taken it from Windows as well!". And since ever then they are looking for ways to move in that direction. It doesn't take a crystal ball to foresee the future of Windows, which will be just as locked down as iOS one day. Win 10 was a great step in that direction already. They took away people's control over their systems and can remote patch whatever they want now without people having a chance to decline. With Secure Boot, they technically control what OS a PC can still boot. Gabe Newell isn't a seer and doesn't need to be, he's just a guy who understands how corporate CEOs tick, because he's one of them. The "Open PC" was a fluke of history we need to be grateful for, and it happened only because IBM didn't realize that who controls the OS controls the platform's entire ecosystem. No corporation these days would do it that way again, and if the PC doesn't survive as a computing device, we will never see an open technology platform ever again either. We will have locked down computers, locked down consoles, locked down phones, locked down tablets and locked down cars. In such a world there is no need for companies like Steam and Gabe knows that.

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1. Fallout 4,
2. SWTOR,
3. Skyrim,
4. Any other AAA MMO
5. Rise of the Tomb Raider

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Exclusives are a thoroughly evil and wicked form of marketing, and I really wonder when people start to realize that it doesn't do any good for customers. The word literally means "locked out". In that case from certain games that are not available on your platform of choice for no good reason other than a goon company throwing big money at a studio to exclude you and make you feel bad about not buying THEIR product. How again is that a good thing? I am glad that SteamOS doesn't do them. We can leave being evil to Microsoft and Sony.

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Having seasonal weather patterns would have been awesome, but this is still a great addition to the game. *runs off to buy*

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