2018 was a rocky year for Steam and PC gaming, I think. First of all, more and more sellers are jumping ship and moving to their own crappy launchers with little to no consumer protection,...
2018 was a rocky year for Steam and PC gaming, I think. First of all, more and more sellers are jumping ship and moving to their own crappy launchers with little to no consumer protection, especially the Epic store, and the market is just becoming fragmented. Besides software, the hardware side was also disappointing with no real advancements being made. I mean, RTX is a cool technology and all but the RTX cards themselves offer the same performance as a 10 series for twice the price, and many faulty RTX cards were shipped out. That being said, 2018 was a good year for Linux and Linux gaming, with Valve especially helping push Linux, and more and more indie developers opting to support Linux. Regardless though, this was all around a mediocre year I think. We'll see about 2019 though, since I think there are some rumors out there about 11 series cards.
Steam has my full support over every other storefront due to their incredible support for Linux games. Proton is advancing far faster than I thought it would, and the community has been doing...
Steam has my full support over every other storefront due to their incredible support for Linux games. Proton is advancing far faster than I thought it would, and the community has been doing amazing work in the wiki.
On PC gaming in general, I like the fact that Vulkan adoption is picking up, and the Vulkan for Metal wrapper should help see it become the leader in close-to-hardware APIs. I don't care at all about AAA games moving to their own shitty stores, because I don't play many of them. Indie and medium-sized studios are the future, and Asian game publishers are almost exclusively putting their games on Steam, with many of them being excellent. Overall I'm really looking forward to seeing what the next 5 years bring to PC hardware and Linux gaming.
2018 was a rocky year for Steam and PC gaming, I think. First of all, more and more sellers are jumping ship and moving to their own crappy launchers with little to no consumer protection, especially the Epic store, and the market is just becoming fragmented. Besides software, the hardware side was also disappointing with no real advancements being made. I mean, RTX is a cool technology and all but the RTX cards themselves offer the same performance as a 10 series for twice the price, and many faulty RTX cards were shipped out. That being said, 2018 was a good year for Linux and Linux gaming, with Valve especially helping push Linux, and more and more indie developers opting to support Linux. Regardless though, this was all around a mediocre year I think. We'll see about 2019 though, since I think there are some rumors out there about 11 series cards.
Steam has my full support over every other storefront due to their incredible support for Linux games. Proton is advancing far faster than I thought it would, and the community has been doing amazing work in the wiki.
On PC gaming in general, I like the fact that Vulkan adoption is picking up, and the Vulkan for Metal wrapper should help see it become the leader in close-to-hardware APIs. I don't care at all about AAA games moving to their own shitty stores, because I don't play many of them. Indie and medium-sized studios are the future, and Asian game publishers are almost exclusively putting their games on Steam, with many of them being excellent. Overall I'm really looking forward to seeing what the next 5 years bring to PC hardware and Linux gaming.
I'd love to see a breakdown of indie sales vs AAA sales in an overview like this. I wonder if indie-games are chipping away at the AAA-market.
There aren't any hard numbers, but you could look at Steam's Top Sellers of 2018 page and see how many AAA/indie games are in each tier.