Quoting: bradgyBasically, has the increase in Linux users over time kept up with the increases in costs required to port games to that platform?

Has there been an increase in costs required to port games to Linux? The impression I've had is that, to the contrary, technological barriers to porting have been shrinking for the most part.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Valve say they fixed it, so it should mean the April 2018 number is actually correct.

I would say rather, it should mean that particular counting error is no longer affecting the totals. Doesn't mean it's correct--we still have no idea how things are counted and so what other sorts of errors and/or biases may be lurking in the methodology.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: skinnyrafFor something as big as HL3, timed exclusivity would be enough, especially if first reviews were good.

Remember, Linux is free (apart from the time to learn how to install it), so if HL3 was released on Linux 2 months before every other platform millions would install Linux. If Valve announced the next generation Steam Machines in October, preloaded with HL3, and it was released for major platforms only for Christmas, thousands of Steam Machines would sell. Even if some folks would wipe SteamOS and install Windows, some would stay.

Hell, you could bundle a Linux with a (timed) exclusive game release.
. . . come to think of it, there's a way to do something like an exclusive without being evil. Or at least, without being as evil as exclusives. You have, like, SteamOS (or, better, Mint--heh) bundled with the new game. So then, when you go to install the game from Windows, the game installer defaults to installing SteamOS as a dual-boot and then installing the game on it. You can choose to install it differently, such as on Windows as a Windows game, but you have to make a positive choice to do that. And, maybe if you let the installer do its thing and play the first time from Linux, you get a special 'hat', so you feel exclusive and badass rather than herded and put upon. A lot of people would end up with a Linux partition on which they played their game, and might start doing other things with it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: qptain Nemo

Quoting: Sudo_halttrash calendar support (dont even get me started)

Well now I'm curious.

I assume he means that support for the persian calendar used in Iran and Afganistan is lacking under Linux. I see a couple of dedicated calendar applications like Gahshomar [External Link] but I wouldn't know how well they integrate into the OS. I also see a Thunderbird persian calendar plugin and apparently Google calendar has support as well. But again, no first-hand experience.

Thing is, whenever I hear something like this, I wonder, how to put it . . . like, not so many years ago it was like that in English. But it's open source. People, starting mainly in universities and such, built up a software ecosystem and now an awful lot of stuff is pretty dashed good. All this, starting from when Linux was completely a hobbyist OS, not even used in servers, not relevant to anyone's employment really, not capable of doing very much.
All a place like China has to do is take existing desktops and software and man pages and whatnot, and localize 'em; with Chinese writing that's a bigger challenge than its seems, sure, but still, the compilers and spreadsheets and kernel and desktop environments and blah and blah and blah are all already done. And China has masses of high tech university campuses full of students, and they're gonna be using some Linux because it's the OS for servers and the cloud and supercomputers and robotics and often science. So why the hell aren't they fixing it up? Same goes for a place like Iran--educated population, plenty good reasons not to be dependent on US software, source is open, what's the problem?
In short, I understand that Linux is in many places not that polished for the desktop, but why not?!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Maybe it's just the dramatic music, but the end game felt surprisingly ultra-violent for a bunch of buildings sitting there. I'm interested.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: mishugashu

"PC (Windows, Linux), Mac"

Still not really right, though. If the definition of "PC" they're using is IBM PC Compatible Clone (i.e., x86 architecture), Macs are also PCs since 2006. The whole "Macs vs PCs" marketing scheme predates the Intel switch.

I feel old now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Good to see the project moving forward. I wish you luck finding people and time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: tonR

There's still a lot of ways Linux gaming needs to improve of course. It seems pulling in users from Asia would probably help quite a lot, but for that we need the heavy-hitting titles they seem to love like PUBG.

That's impossible to do with todays smartphone craziness in Asia. Significant majority of us are now rarely gaming on PC anymore. Everything smartphone.

Hang on a minute--the article we're discussing around relates to the masses of new Asian Steam users, mostly playing PUBG, in such numbers that (since virtually none of 'em use Linux) they're torpedoing the % share of Linux on Steam. So are you saying all those people don't exist? Surely if them not using Linux is sufficient to seriously drop the Linux share, them using Linux at least as much as everyone else would make it not drop, which I think could reasonably be considered "helping quite a lot".

I have no doubt that lots of Asians play games on their phones (just like everyone else). Makes me kind of glad Android uses Vulkan. Doesn't mean nobody's playing any games at home or in PC-bangs or whatever they call them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Crazy Penguin

Quoting: muell> I would imagine the overall number of Linux users has increased

> I can agree as long as fairy stable means growing slowly but otherwise I just can't believe it.

Can you all just stop that bullshit? All the data suggests that there is no growth. This is nothing where your believes are somehow relevant. Linux gaming doesn't grow whereas other platforms do. That's bad news. Stop trying to spin it any other way.

The only data you have are PERCENTAGES OF A MARKETSHARE which is dropping. But Steam has a rapid grow which means the absolute numbers of Linux Gamers is also growing, just not as fast as others which results in a dropping PERCENTAGE OF THE MARKETSHARE. Got it?

Ehhh, he has a point though. Sure, it's obnoxiously expressed, but it's based on a pretty plausible reading of the rate of growth of Steam users vs. the rate of shrinkage of the marketshare . . . if you take the available figures at face value, it kind of looks like Linux gaming is not growing while the total market is.

I don't take the available figures at face value, and it does seem like a lot of the Steam growth is from Steam expanding from a market base with more Linux usage into regions with less Linux usage. But based on general figures of how much web browsing world wide is done on Linux, that points to kind of bad news about Linux gaming in the first place: The "Survey" always showed Linux Steam use as significantly lower than most figures for the world Linux desktop share, but it turns out even that was actually based on a kind of cherry-picked user base. Like, if world desktop Linux use is, say, 2.5%, and Steam Linux use used to be about 1%, then 40% as many people used Linux to game with compared to other platforms. But if actually the Steam user base used to be mostly from parts of the world with more Linux use, as compared to much of Asia where it seems to be a rounding error, that means even fewer of the Linux desktops were used for gaming. Assuming the new Steam user distribution to be much closer to a true worldwide distribution than how it used to be, that would indicate that compared to say Windows, a Linux desktop turns out to be only about 20% as likely to be used for gaming, rather than 40% (Imagining 2.5% Linux desktop share and 0.5% Steam use share and Linux use of Steam vs other approaches to gaming like GOG being comparable to other platforms). Use different figures for desktop share and the specifics shift, but the point remains: The proportion of Linux desktops used for gaming is low, lower than we thought, and doesn't seem to have budged much over the last few years.
After all the Linux progress both as a gaming platform and in terms of number and quality of available games, that's kind of depressing. I had always assumed that games was a significant factor holding the Linux desktop back, and if it achieved something like parity with MacOS for game availability and playability (which it basically has), Linux would be freed to grow significantly more both as a desktop OS in general and as a platform people played games on. This does not seem to have actually happened so far.

Of course, all this assumes the accuracy of the Steam survey, which I do not actually assume.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I also think this is a great site and really depend on it for Linux-related stuff; I think gaming is a big part of where the Linux action is these days, and really exposes a lot of important issues for the platform as a whole. 'Cause it's like, problems that the rest of Linux has a tendency to grumble about a bit and let slide, become glaring issues for game performance and ease of development, and so a lot of the most important commentary and work on them is done in a gaming context. So I don't just get my gaming fix on here, I get a lot of my Linux news in general.

View this comment - View article - View full comments