Quoting: Eike

Quoting: stormtux

Quoting: Eike[...]but Half-Life (Alyx) sure does.

Are you sure? On the Steam store I do not see the Linux icon or the minimum requirements for Linux :huh: .
https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/ [External Link]

Oops!
I'm quite sure people played through it natively, but I'm very surprised that it doesn't have the icon!

It's weird. It has a native build (there's a depot), and it did have the Linux icon

Changelist #8453284
3 years ago · 15 May 2020 – 20:29:35 UTC

Added oslist – windows,linux

but I can't see where they've removed it, and it doesn't show in the store now. Interestingly, although "Steam Deck does not support VR games," they've picked the Windows build through Proton as the one that will be downloaded on the Deck (recommended_runtime: Proton-stable).

It also doesn't seem to be an automatic override from being "VR required;" the VR-only builds of Talos Principle and Serious Sam list Linux support on the store page.

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Tangentially related, Paradox went into lots of detail about their strategy, profitability, and whatnot, at a recent conference. There are details in this article [External Link] with (lots!) more detail in included links. Interesting if you're already interested in that kind of thing.

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Quoting: EikeCould you show the latter?

 
Year    Total   Linux   Proportion
2012      323      87      26.9%
2013      460     179      38.9%
2014    1,602     487      30.4%
2015    2,637     843      32.0%
2016    4,285   1,061      24.8%
2017    6,153   1,169      19.0%
2018    8,016   1,217      15.2%
2019    7,712     979      12.6%
2020    9,520   1,108      11.6%
2021   11,341   1,214      10.7%
2022   12,640   1,431      11.3%

What I'm seeing is even some developers with year long native support for Linux have given up on it (as well as our porting houses).

The market for third-party ports for developers that can't be bothered to do their own release has been definitively killed by Proton: why pay someone to make your Windows game work on Linux when Valve will do it for free? But that market was already dead prior to the release of Proton, with Feral just fulfilling existing contracts and everyone else having left the market. The remaining porters continue to take the approach of "I'll teach you how to make your game for Linux," and that's still viable.

The Linux-native market has been in freefall since the Steam Machines failed to take off. Proton didn't cause that, or make it worse (Proton released in 2018, for ease of reference). The things that have reversed that trend are the growing Linux share and the massive publicity of the Deck, and a big driver of the Deck's warm reception is that Proton breaks the lock-in to Windows of customers' existing games libraries. "Only 13.7% of your library will work on this device" is a very different value proposition to "this device will play most of your library." Once the device is in people's hands you get all the "Linux is great for gaming; Windows gives me a sad" coverage.

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If I'm ever tempted by any of these modifications I'm definitely just going to go to my local phone repair place and point them at the ifixit guides; let them have the stress.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis is the one thing you've said I can't argue with--partly because it's true, growth is there but not that high yet, and partly because what kind of numbers are exciting is pretty subjective. I can't tell you what you should be excited by.

I can tell you what I'll be pleased with (although I wouldn't go as far as "excited") - and it should happen quite soon - the Linux share being higher than "Windows earlier than Windows 10." That they're completely unsupported and yet have higher marketshare than Linux is a real drag. Passing that will be nice.

Passing Mac OS to be the biggest non-Windows PC gaming market will take a bit longer, and won't make too much practical difference IMO; Linux is already an easier target than Mac OS for those that are interested in a multiplatform PC release, so it also being bigger won't swing the needle much more.

Passing 5% would get me quite excited, and passing 10% would make a big practical difference, I think, to the amount of game developer attention we can command.

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Quoting: adolsonIt's still early days, but so far, we're seeing the opposite effect due to Proton.

No, we aren't. The release of Proton had no effect whatsoever on the proportion of Linux-native games that are released. The growth in the Linux market has since caused an increase in the proportion of Linux-native games that are released.

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Quoting: mylkayes. and where do they get their survey? on the go WITHOUT internet, or maybe at home on their windows PC?

They don't get "their" survey at all. The hardware is what's being sampled. All the hardware.

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Quoting: MohandevirHad the surey on mine, this week. It was just a notification? I tried clicking on it and nothing happened.

You get the notification and then you can go into Notifications to confirm that you're OK with being included in the survey.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAnd yet the point stands--in a random sampling of machines, a machine used full time has twice the chance of being polled as a machine used half of the time.

The machine just needs to be logged into Steam during the month that's at least a year since the last time it was surveyed.

The Deck does come with a (random?) delay "SurveyDateSteamDeckDelay" before it gets included in the survey - I had my Deck nine or ten months before it got the survey popup. I expect that Valve don't want everyone's unboxing experience to be full of "would you like to fill out this survey?" spam.

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Quoting: mylkajust because someone has a steam deck, does not mean, that they are not playing on WINDOWS PC anymore
so a lot of deck owners count as windows PC

It's a hardware survey, not a user survey. The Deck counts as a Deck, a Windows PC counts as a Windows PC and a Linux PC counts as a Linux PC.

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