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Games Linux

Steam Has Brought 1,600 Games To Linux In the Past Three Years (phoronix.com) 110

An anonymous reader writes: Today marks three years since Valve's Steam client went into beta on Linux. In that time over 1,600 games have become natively available for Linux. Going beyond having many new Linux games, Phoronix recaps, "we've seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG). Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2. We've seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, and Valve has been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API. They have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more." The three-year anniversary is coincidentally just days before the release of Steam Machines.
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Steam Has Brought 1,600 Games To Linux In the Past Three Years

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  • 1600 (Score:1, Funny)

    Jeeze! How many variations of Tetris is there?

    • Re:1600 (Score:5, Informative)

      by ledow ( 319597 ) on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:50AM (#50883517) Homepage

      I suggest you peruse the actual lists once in a while:

      https://steamdb.info/linux/ [steamdb.info]

      Although "big-studio" games are largely absent, an awful lot of top-end indie games are there. Indie doesn't always mean shite in a bundle, by the way.

      Killing Floor, X3, Civ, Bioshock, Trine and all kinds of other games are well worth the money.

      And there are definitely more of them lately, and bigger titles are getting more attention since Valve started their Linux port.

      • Sorry, I never got past Pong and Solitaire, everything else is too fast and complicated for me.

      • I went through the entire list basically just scanning titles and found about a dozen games in the $10-$20 range I'll pick up without a second thought, and there are a few AAA titles that I mostly already have. Overall, looks good to me, no shortage of decent content.

      • by rea1l1 ( 903073 )

        Including my personal favorite Natural Selection 2.

      • Re:1600 (Score:5, Informative)

        by AntiSol ( 1329733 ) on Sunday November 08, 2015 @01:07AM (#50886489)

        As you say it's getting better for the bigger titles. Here are some of the bigger games you forgot to mention:
        * Borderlands 2
        * Borderlands The Pre-sequel (linux version on launch day!)
        * XCOM: Enemy Unknown
        * All the valve games (Half-Life + all addons, HL2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, counterstrike, portal 1+2, etc etc)
        * KOTOR 2 got a port not long ago
        * Shadow Warrior (the reboot/remake thing, it's awesome)
        * Serious Sam 3
        * Saints Row 4 (announced, I can't wait)
        Also the ones you mention: Civ 5, Bioshock Infinite, X3, etc

        Also the next Crysis engine will have Linux support, as does Unreal Engine 4 and the new Unreal Tournament (which is open source and community built! You can sign up, clone the git tree, and compile it now).

        There are also a bunch of really great not-so-huge titles:
        * Oddworld: New & Tasty
        * Grim Fandango Remastered
        * Postal 1+2 (available before steam)
        * Duke Nukem 3D
        * Shadow Warrior (original)
        * Psychonauts (available before steam)
        * Goat Simulator
        * Spec Ops: The Line
        * Kerbal Space Program (I think this just might be the best game ever made)

        As an exclusive Linux user, I have a huge backlog of games I haven't gotten around to playing yet. It's awesome!

        • by sad_ ( 7868 )

          for rpg lovers: icewind dale, baldurs gate 1 & 2, wasteland 2, pillars of eternity, legend of grimrock, swordcoast, trochlight 2, shadowrun, witcher 2 (witcher 3 comming), shadow of mordor.
          that's hundreth of hours of quality gametime right there.

    • No Tetris on Linux (Score:3, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      I don't think Tetris® was ever officially ported to GNU/Linux. The original designer of Tetris is in fact on record as an opponent of free software [slashdot.org]. He said free software "should never have existed" because it "destroys the market". It makes me wonder why the Free Software Foundation hasn't been sued yet [slashdot.org] for one of the .el files included with Emacs [gnu.org]. The closest to Tetris for Linux is probably EA's port to Android.

      "EA's port: It's in the game."

    • Yeah, it's mostly indies. Euro-devs mostly, too small, too poor or too PC-partisan to go console.

      Which is why I say that Steamboxes are machines without a market.

      Hardcore "PC Master RAce" guys aren't going to give up their mice/keyboards for big screen play. And they certainly aren't going to give up Windows, because that's where the "AAA" games with PC versions will be.

      Console players aren't going to pay MORE money for a machine that is basically an indie-box. Since most of the better indies (Don't Star

  • by nefus ( 952656 ) on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:51AM (#50883523) Homepage
    As trivial as this might seem, having games for linux might help bring in more of the youth crowd. Their comfort level with linux will increase and out of that user stream you'll develop more hardcore linux users. I doubt Steam thought about it that way but in the long run, it is really a smart thing for the future heath of the linux fan base.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Distros that help Linux in the REAL WORLD.

      Linux Mint (Desktop)
      SteamOS / SteamMachines
      Ubuntu (debian -> ubuntu -> ?)
      CentOS (back office)

      http://futurist.se/gldt/ [futurist.se]

      This shows graphically the distributions in the Linux world.

      This is how I base my decision on distros, by the commitment and origin base.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday November 07, 2015 @12:15PM (#50883619) Homepage

      As trivial as this might seem, having games for linux might help bring in more of the youth crowd. Their comfort level with linux will increase and out of that user stream you'll develop more hardcore linux users. I doubt Steam thought about it that way but in the long run, it is really a smart thing for the future heath of the linux fan base.

      They people running "SteamOS" for the most part won't give a shit about Linux as a desktop and never look under the hood. The primary advantage is that you'll get a lot more developers to write OpenGL games and support the graphics/multimedia parts of the stack that the server community don't care about and Android has only partly touched. Unless Valve wants to pull a little "Chromebook" move, say a switch that swaps between console mode and desktop mode and suddenly you have an alternate desktop for basic use. There's been so many failed incarnations of WebTV and friends though that they probably won't do that until it has a heavy presence as a console.

    • by nnull ( 1148259 )
      I hope so. NVIDIA SLI in linux is abysmal and currently the new Nvidia drivers break a lot of things for a lot of people. Although the Nvidia devs do respond to peoples comments and do promise to fix the issues, the time it takes them to do anything is pretty long. Meanwhile, AMD stuff is even worse.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Just wondering looking at this positive news, could we be looking ahead at 2016 as the year Linux charges onto the desktop mainstream?

  • How many of these are wine-wrapped, and slightly broken, games, much like the catalogue of Aspyr ports on OSX?

    • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      If they Aspyr games are in fact "wine wrapped", then they actually hide it very well.

    • "linux native" = "not wine"

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      Virtually none.

      I don't know of a single Steam Linux game that incorporates Wine in any way. The licensing itself would be a bit of a nightmare to resolve.

      Most of them are native ports, ports using cross-platform libraries so requiring little tweaking anyway. There are a handful of DOSBox conversions on Steam - but even on Windows those same games are distributed with DOSBox around the game to remove the platform-specific things that people no longer have (e.g. Soundblaster cards and full DOS access).

      Serio

      • by GNious ( 953874 )

        Virtually none.

        I don't know of a single Steam Linux game that incorporates Wine in any way. The licensing itself would be a bit of a nightmare to resolve.

        I didn't bother spending much time on this, but a quick google show Transgaming (who uses Wine-code to "port" windows games) as declaring proudly that they have helped games get onto Steam - I also know that EVE:Online's Linux client, on Steam, uses Wine (via Transgaming's efforts, according to all parties). Yeah, that was 2 minutes
        So you might not know of any, but they do exist.

        Ultimately, though, I guess the question comes down to: Are they stable on Linux?
        My experience on OSX has been far from stellar wi

        • by ledow ( 319597 )

          "EVE:Online's Linux client, on Steam, uses Wine"

          Where is that on Steam? Because it only shows Windows and Mac Steamplay, not Linux. Hence it's NOT on Steam.

          I can't find it on steamdb.info either, which is incredibly suspicious. Maybe you should do more than 2 minutes of research. The Steam client isn't Linux, and the Linux client isn't Steam. The user is of course able to cobble this together of their own accord (i.e. it looks like it can run under Wine) but that's not what we were talking about.

          The li

          • Where is that on Steam? Because it only shows Windows and Mac Steamplay, not Linux. Hence it's NOT on Steam.

            EVE-Online used to have an official Linux client, but it was discontinued several years ago [eveonline.com] as there weren't enough users to justify the time & cost. That client used Transgaming's tech (i.e. their WINE fork).

  • by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Saturday November 07, 2015 @01:53PM (#50884173) Homepage
    Which is also good of course. If you've bought your machine primarily for gaming and it's a Mac? You've bought the wrong machine. But for people like me who don't game all that much anymore but still like to sit down once in a while? Very handy.
    • I chose my computer primarily based on gaming specs, about 3–4 years ago. I planned on using Linux most of the time, and dual booting into Windows for the games. However, since 2–3 years ago, I never boot into Windows anymore. There are just too many good games on Linux!
  • This is the end of Windows...

    But only the beginning of the end.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      No, it's only the beginning of the end because of the disaster of Windows 8, and even more now with the spyware Windows 10.
      i.e. Microsoft are killing it themselves.

  • Before breaking out the champagne, it might be wise to look at the numbers:

    OS Version

    Windows 95%

    Windows 7 64 Bit 26%
    Windows 10 64 bit 26%
    Windows 8.1 64 Bit 17%

    OSX 3%

    Mac OS 10.10.5 64 Bit 1%
    Mac OS 10.11.0 64 Bit 1%

    Linux 1% [0.95%]

    Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 64 Bit 0.23%
    Ubuntu 15.04 64 Bit 0.17%
    Linux Mint Rafaela 64 Bit 0.11%

    What you see is a very small and very fragmented Linux market. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: October 2015 [steampowered.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Whenever Fallout 4 is released for Linux, Windows is done.

  • ....does it run Windows games? Oh. Still, it might be cheaper...oh.

    Repeat times a number of millions.

"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"

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