While Linux gaming owes so, so much to Valve, I don't think you can say it's on life support. Valve has been building up Linux gaming, they're not dragging it through life whether it wants to live...
While Linux gaming owes so, so much to Valve, I don't think you can say it's on life support. Valve has been building up Linux gaming, they're not dragging it through life whether it wants to live or not.
Support from Valve has gone into funding major leaps and bounds in the past few years. I just got finished playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When I migrated to Linux I thought it'd be a decade before it was even slightly playable again with some third party patchset that you have to compile yourself. I just hit "Play" in my native Linux Steam client like any other game.
And they pushed back all the work they could back upstream into WINE, and open sourced the rest. They dumped a bunch of money into DXVK, almost instantly (felt instant, anyway) bringing support for thousands of new and old games to Linux. At this point, I really don't think Linux would wither away and die if Valve's Linux worked slowed or stopped. It'd just progress slower.
And Valve's attention I think has brought in some other attention. Discord's store will be arriving on Linux shortly. I've got a sizeable library of DRM-free titles from GOG and Humble Bundle (which, when the stats existed, showed that Linux users almost always paid far more per bundle than any other OS).
Ignoring the stores, Valve's not the only force working actively to improve the landscape here. AMD has finally got their act together with their drivers on Linux, and they're doing it right. Open sourcing and mainlining their drivers. Intel, too, apparently they just dumped a whole bunch of code for their upcoming discrete GPUs into the kernel.
Saying it's on life support in the face of all that sounds super strange.
I don't game on linux, so I find this to be an interesting take. What's really shocking about the linux situation is this super meaty (heh) quote: It's interesting that Valve—which has a current...
I don't game on linux, so I find this to be an interesting take. What's really shocking about the linux situation is this super meaty (heh) quote:
Refenes breaks it down as follows: "If I were to list how Super Meat Boy has made money since the Linux version dropped, starting with the highest earner, the list would be: Windows, Xbox, Playstation 4, Switch, various licensing agreements, Mac, Playstation Vita, WiiU, merchandise sales, NVidia Shield, interest from bank accounts, Linux."
It's interesting that Valve—which has a current public perception of profit-mindedness—continues to fight hard in the linux territory, demonstrated even recently with the release of Proton. (I know, a major part of it is to fight for a semblance of API/etc control in a world where Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Apple have so much.)
That's what I like so much about Valve. Most of the gaming industry is obsessed at extracting the greatest profit out of it's customers. Nintendo has some great products, but they are just as...
That's what I like so much about Valve. Most of the gaming industry is obsessed at extracting the greatest profit out of it's customers. Nintendo has some great products, but they are just as guilty. Valve is the only company that actively gives value back to it's supporters. Half Life is over 20 years old now, but it is so well supported that if your computer has problems running it, the chances are higher that your computer is causing the problem.
Although I haven't played around with it much, it seems Proton is making very quick progress on making Windows games run on Linux. A recent Proton update actually fixed a text rendering bug that had existed on Wine for quite a few years now, which makes a number of games infinitely more playable.
Gaming on Linux is extremely important, I feel. For many users, Games are basically the only thing tying them to Windows. If the industry can be tempted to support Linux, that would be a major milestone in making computers an open and free world.
Gaming on not-Windows is extremely important. While similarly small, there's a contingent of Mac and not-Linux Unix (e.g. BSD) users tied to Windows for gaming as well. Further, supporting Linux...
Gaming on not-Windows is extremely important. While similarly small, there's a contingent of Mac and not-Linux Unix (e.g. BSD) users tied to Windows for gaming as well. Further, supporting Linux means that a lot of the work for supporting other not-Windows systems is already done. Windows is the dunce-capped snowflake, here, the only modern major OS that doesn't really support things like POSIX in a meaningful way. Port to Linux and you also get a lot of the work to port to other platforms done.
There's definitely more work needed to make things work on e.g. macOS after porting to Linux, but adding support for not-Windows POSIX APIs is certainly important. And game engines like Unity and Unreal make this kind of thing a lot easier than it used to be!
On a similar topic, at the beginning of the year, one of the Planetary Annihilation developers made some tweets about their Linux version. There are a few more in there, but quoting the most...
On a similar topic, at the beginning of the year, one of the Planetary Annihilation developers made some tweets about their Linux version. There are a few more in there, but quoting the most relevant ones:
We shipped Planetary Annihilation on Win, Mac, and Linux. Linux users were a big vocal part of the Kickstarter and forums. In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related). Would totally skip Linux.
By the end of my time at Uber I believe very nearly 100% of both crashes and support tickets actually for the game were still Linux related, even after significantly engineering time. Way more Linux specific time put into that project than any other platform.
And again, that was for a tiny fraction of the users. Adding Linux support ended up likely costing Uber hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hundred dollars in sales revenue.
The followup is worth including for additional context. https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384
The followup is worth including for additional context.
By the end of my time at Uber I believe very nearly 100% of both crashes and support tickets actually for the game were still Linux related, even after significantly engineering time. Way more Linux specific time put into that project than any other platform.
As a follow up to this, I've been told by those actually involved with Linux stuff that this wasn't true. I probably just stopped paying attention to Linux issues at a time when everything was broken.
It is clearly the only reason. Valve depend entirely on Microsoft--a competitor!--for their business to succeed and that is terrifying. Gabe himself even came out and said, rather directly at one...
It is clearly the only reason. Valve depend entirely on Microsoft--a competitor!--for their business to succeed and that is terrifying. Gabe himself even came out and said, rather directly at one point, that he doesn't like the way Windows is going and wanted another option. This was around the time that Windows 8 was, well, being Windows 8.
This is rather like the PUBG/Epic relationship, which explains why the PUBG folks are so, uh, catty toward Epic. That and they're just jerks, but a lot of it is being scared of their competitor having more power in the relationship than they do.
On desktop, Apple has no API / etc. control in gaming. They can release high performing APIs like Metal that make incredible things possible on otherwise anemic hardware, but without developers...
On desktop, Apple has no API / etc. control in gaming. They can release high performing APIs like Metal that make incredible things possible on otherwise anemic hardware, but without developers actually targetting the Mac as a first class citizen, it doesn't matter. Unreal and Unity do support Metal, that's true, but Apple just doesn't have the marketshare on desktop to direct the industry like they do on mobile.
Come on, I specifically added the "to a lesser extent" qualifier to mitigate comments like yours. Apple remains in control of their platform, by their own choice. Introducing metal as a first...
Come on, I specifically added the "to a lesser extent" qualifier to mitigate comments like yours.
Apple remains in control of their platform, by their own choice. Introducing metal as a first class citizen on macOS, iOS, *OS is one step. Apple making the choice to deprecate OpenGL is another step. Evaluate the merits of their choice (consumer/anti-consumer, market share, etc) as you will, but Apple can easily influence their non-zero, revenue generating share of the pie, even on desktop OSes.
I'm sorry that you feel I didn't respect your qualifier. Yes, Apple does control their platform. I was just trying to say that, even if they control their platform, it doesn't matter because so...
I'm sorry that you feel I didn't respect your qualifier. Yes, Apple does control their platform. I was just trying to say that, even if they control their platform, it doesn't matter because so few developers target macOS with their games. That's what makes platform control important.
It's all good—I appreciate your clarification, but I feel that our perception of the market probably differs, based on the worlds we live in. Irrespective of proprietary graphics APIs, I see...
It's all good—I appreciate your clarification, but I feel that our perception of the market probably differs, based on the worlds we live in. Irrespective of proprietary graphics APIs, I see Apple's presence as a force for good in this market (along with Linux), not as totally irrelevant. And, as much as Apple developer relations would hate to admit it, Steam was huge boon for Mac gaming, bringing the platform to some semblance of relevance for gaming again (there is not a dearth of gaming options these days, which is not the same as it was in the mid-2000s), instead of forcing Mac users to reboot into windows or purchase other sets of hardware.
I would say that gaming on Linux depends on more than just Steam but also the two major gaming engines, Unreal and Unity. These tools make it (relatively!) simple to develop for Linux, and are a...
I would say that gaming on Linux depends on more than just Steam but also the two major gaming engines, Unreal and Unity. These tools make it (relatively!) simple to develop for Linux, and are a big part of how you have so many games releasing on not-Windows these days at all. Sure, as pointed out in several comments above, there's still a lot of development work that needs to go into a Linux port even with engine support, but it does make a lot of things easier.
While Linux gaming owes so, so much to Valve, I don't think you can say it's on life support. Valve has been building up Linux gaming, they're not dragging it through life whether it wants to live or not.
Support from Valve has gone into funding major leaps and bounds in the past few years. I just got finished playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When I migrated to Linux I thought it'd be a decade before it was even slightly playable again with some third party patchset that you have to compile yourself. I just hit "Play" in my native Linux Steam client like any other game.
And they pushed back all the work they could back upstream into WINE, and open sourced the rest. They dumped a bunch of money into DXVK, almost instantly (felt instant, anyway) bringing support for thousands of new and old games to Linux. At this point, I really don't think Linux would wither away and die if Valve's Linux worked slowed or stopped. It'd just progress slower.
And Valve's attention I think has brought in some other attention. Discord's store will be arriving on Linux shortly. I've got a sizeable library of DRM-free titles from GOG and Humble Bundle (which, when the stats existed, showed that Linux users almost always paid far more per bundle than any other OS).
Ignoring the stores, Valve's not the only force working actively to improve the landscape here. AMD has finally got their act together with their drivers on Linux, and they're doing it right. Open sourcing and mainlining their drivers. Intel, too, apparently they just dumped a whole bunch of code for their upcoming discrete GPUs into the kernel.
Saying it's on life support in the face of all that sounds super strange.
I don't game on linux, so I find this to be an interesting take. What's really shocking about the linux situation is this super meaty (heh) quote:
It's interesting that Valve—which has a current public perception of profit-mindedness—continues to fight hard in the linux territory, demonstrated even recently with the release of Proton. (I know, a major part of it is to fight for a semblance of API/etc control in a world where Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Apple have so much.)
That's what I like so much about Valve. Most of the gaming industry is obsessed at extracting the greatest profit out of it's customers. Nintendo has some great products, but they are just as guilty. Valve is the only company that actively gives value back to it's supporters. Half Life is over 20 years old now, but it is so well supported that if your computer has problems running it, the chances are higher that your computer is causing the problem.
Although I haven't played around with it much, it seems Proton is making very quick progress on making Windows games run on Linux. A recent Proton update actually fixed a text rendering bug that had existed on Wine for quite a few years now, which makes a number of games infinitely more playable.
Gaming on Linux is extremely important, I feel. For many users, Games are basically the only thing tying them to Windows. If the industry can be tempted to support Linux, that would be a major milestone in making computers an open and free world.
Gaming on not-Windows is extremely important. While similarly small, there's a contingent of Mac and not-Linux Unix (e.g. BSD) users tied to Windows for gaming as well. Further, supporting Linux means that a lot of the work for supporting other not-Windows systems is already done. Windows is the dunce-capped snowflake, here, the only modern major OS that doesn't really support things like POSIX in a meaningful way. Port to Linux and you also get a lot of the work to port to other platforms done.
There's definitely more work needed to make things work on e.g. macOS after porting to Linux, but adding support for not-Windows POSIX APIs is certainly important. And game engines like Unity and Unreal make this kind of thing a lot easier than it used to be!
On a similar topic, at the beginning of the year, one of the Planetary Annihilation developers made some tweets about their Linux version. There are a few more in there, but quoting the most relevant ones:
The followup is worth including for additional context.
https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080544133238800384
It is clearly the only reason. Valve depend entirely on Microsoft--a competitor!--for their business to succeed and that is terrifying. Gabe himself even came out and said, rather directly at one point, that he doesn't like the way Windows is going and wanted another option. This was around the time that Windows 8 was, well, being Windows 8.
This is rather like the PUBG/Epic relationship, which explains why the PUBG folks are so, uh, catty toward Epic. That and they're just jerks, but a lot of it is being scared of their competitor having more power in the relationship than they do.
On desktop, Apple has no API / etc. control in gaming. They can release high performing APIs like Metal that make incredible things possible on otherwise anemic hardware, but without developers actually targetting the Mac as a first class citizen, it doesn't matter. Unreal and Unity do support Metal, that's true, but Apple just doesn't have the marketshare on desktop to direct the industry like they do on mobile.
Come on, I specifically added the "to a lesser extent" qualifier to mitigate comments like yours.
Apple remains in control of their platform, by their own choice. Introducing metal as a first class citizen on macOS, iOS, *OS is one step. Apple making the choice to deprecate OpenGL is another step. Evaluate the merits of their choice (consumer/anti-consumer, market share, etc) as you will, but Apple can easily influence their non-zero, revenue generating share of the pie, even on desktop OSes.
I'm sorry that you feel I didn't respect your qualifier. Yes, Apple does control their platform. I was just trying to say that, even if they control their platform, it doesn't matter because so few developers target macOS with their games. That's what makes platform control important.
Am I still missing your point? I apologize if so.
It's all good—I appreciate your clarification, but I feel that our perception of the market probably differs, based on the worlds we live in. Irrespective of proprietary graphics APIs, I see Apple's presence as a force for good in this market (along with Linux), not as totally irrelevant. And, as much as Apple developer relations would hate to admit it, Steam was huge boon for Mac gaming, bringing the platform to some semblance of relevance for gaming again (there is not a dearth of gaming options these days, which is not the same as it was in the mid-2000s), instead of forcing Mac users to reboot into windows or purchase other sets of hardware.
I would say that gaming on Linux depends on more than just Steam but also the two major gaming engines, Unreal and Unity. These tools make it (relatively!) simple to develop for Linux, and are a big part of how you have so many games releasing on not-Windows these days at all. Sure, as pointed out in several comments above, there's still a lot of development work that needs to go into a Linux port even with engine support, but it does make a lot of things easier.