as I see it, it really all doesn't matter right now. buy whatever you want where ever because there's a lot of things up in the air about how the trends will go. but as it stands linux users only make up a small minority of users as-is and Feral and Aspyr understand how their money works when it comes to being a niche company. they are looking at the possible future of gaming as much as the rest of the development community. i'm sure in the coming years they will reap the rewards.
The coolest thing about many of these linux games is that they will be backwards compatible for a long time, and people years from now will continue to buy these games. Since there is no shipping and manufacturing costs involved, Steam is the premiere platform to publish games on for the long term money flow and ease of distribution.

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looks like they were dead set on the quality over just producing another RCT game. Steam workshop support plus many of the newer technologies found in many games. The editor looks insanely good. if this is getting day one linux support then I'm all for it. i've been wanting to play a new RCT game for a long time. This looks great.

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all in due time, if and when steam OS gains more momentum in the market we may see more development. but until then might as well just sit back and relax and enjoy the games. for now there's a lot of development to be had in other areas first before we start seeing tools ported to Linux on a regular basis.
I wished all this would come to fruition sooner as well but it's not realistically possible. Windows has had decades of developer devotion to game development. all this is just getting started for Linux, yet I've seen leaps and bounds already. so we just have to wait and see over the next couple of years what will happen. I think Valve still has a few surprises up their sleeves that will come out over the next few months.

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Quoting: loggfreakreasons linux gaming is not popular
Drivers, hardware support: yup
OpenGL: yup
Vendor lock-in: yup
Misconceptions about the platform: yup
Ease of use: yup
More games: yup
basically everything except advertising

this is true, but drivers won't be much of an issue once Vulkan is publicly released and added to Linux standard of distros. Valve will pretty much handle the vendor lock-in and advertisement if all goes well.
Ease of use is something DEs are working on all the time, which if the platform gains enough popularity, which wouldn't have to be a lot, because of the work Valve is doing, we could end up with more developers in the Linux community. Which in turn would enable more development across the board. So only time will tell how this will unfold. :)

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To play it or Not to play it?... that is the question... I may or may not give it a try.

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this is cool, I had SR2 on my xbox 360 as well, but purchased SR3 and SR4 for PC through steam when they came out. i've played them all to death. but I might buy SR2 on PC just to show some support there, and give it another playthrough.

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that's cool, i've been wondering if this one would make the cut. Although I already own it, it runs pretty good on wine. I'm really looking forward to Rome II and Shogun II.

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Shadowrun: Hong Kong and Satellite Reign were my favorites so far. Guess I've been in a neo-retro mood lately. I loved the old Syndicate game back on my IBM 486 pc so I had to get Satellite Reign... the CRPG series of Shadowrun has been great fun.

But next on my list is COH2 and Stars Beyond Reach.

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it's funny to read about this, and yet they had Aspyr port Star Wars: KOTOR 2 over to Mac/Linux. they should just let Aspyr do all their ports for them. Obviously it helps to know what you are doing. Knowledge = less time taken to develop, which equates to more money for the developers.

But whichever, I'm glad to see so many worthwhile games being ported to Linux. these are some interesting times indeed.

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in the early stretch it will be a little more workload on the game companies because they have to generate their own drivers. but Vulkan, Nvidia and ATI will have the base "default use case" drivers available for companies to work from. These drivers can be used from one game to the next if they use the same or similar technology. DX12 drivers should be very similar and shouldn't require a lot of extra work for porting to Vulkan.

also with Vulkan they are able to do a hybrid driver for some operations on Vulkan while others can be kept with OpenGL/ES. for the early stages of development if companies don't feel the need for full Vulkan drivers.

Right now it's a matter of the Khronos group releasing the API for the public. All I know is, the next couple of years will be interesting to say the least. because if companies really embrace open source technology we could see much more innovation than MS or Apple ever thought of.

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