I wish more studios would follow their example and release code for older games they are commercially done with, so that their fans can mod them or make them run on newer machines. There are a lot of games out there that deserve to live on and be preserved.

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Quoting: scainebut there's a reason I don't back Kickstarter any more and developers like these guys. They use Kickstarter as a springboard to canvass money from a platform group (whether that's Linux, consoles or Mac), then completely do them over when the ball is in play. Project Cars did it to the Wii (and us) and countless projects have promised Linux support only to renege when the chips are down.

Yeah, I must admit I am now more careful than I used to be, too. I will still back KS projects (obviously only those who promise a Linux port), but these days I do require the studio (or at least a high ranking team member working for them) to have released at least one Linux game already. In the hope that if they did it once, they can do it again. Harebrained will still get my money, but I will no longer back unknown studios with no Linux track record. Too many of them think they can write Windows games that magically compile in Linux without ever taking the platform into consideration.

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I bet it's yet another middleware issue.

I find it so hilarious that many studios not only announce but sort of sell (I know that legally backing a product on KS isn't regarded a sale, but still) Linux support, but then build their product for Windows only, without even thinking about how to get it to run on the other platforms they planned to deploy on. And halfway through the development process it suddenly occurs them that they maneuvered themselves into a Windows only corner.

Can I call that "unprofessional"? Because that's what it is.

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Quoting: sasannWhat survey? I've been playing games on my linux box for quite some time and never got this so called survey.

Same. That's the biggest complaint people have against the Steam Hardware Survey. It might or might not be based on a solid methodology. We don't know, as Steam doesn't disclose how they conduct it, which alone justifies to dismiss it as not being based on solid science. The numbers could be anything between accurate and off by a landslide. We know with some certainty that at least some Linux users are not counted, as the survey isn't getting displayed on Big Picture (which some are probably using almost exclusively if they use Steam Machines.)

But sound methodology or not, the number -is- somewhat consistent with the reported sales of a number of devs having published games on Linux, so there is that.

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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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