A Half-Year Since Valve Released Steam Play For Linux, Its Marketshare Is Still Sub-1%

[wizard69]

Honestly not surprised one bit. I never have considered gamers to be the most intelligent people on the planet. As such I really can’t see gamers moving to Linux where’s bit of intelligence is required.

By by the way I understand that there are intelligent Linux users that like to game, but that likely amounts to 100th of that less than 1%. Linux has never been a gather ground for dumb people so I really don’t expect a huge increase in Valves percentages anytime soon.

[Dukenukemx]

Honestly not surprised one bit. I never have considered gamers to be the most intelligent people on the planet. As such I really can’t see gamers moving to Linux where’s bit of intelligence is required.

By by the way I understand that there are intelligent Linux users that like to game, but that likely amounts to 100th of that less than 1%. Linux has never been a gather ground for dumb people so I really don’t expect a huge increase in Valves percentages anytime soon.

Gamers are very intelligent as a lot of things were born from the gaming crowd. As a gamer myself I find it hard to move entirely away from Windows to Linux because all my games don't work. I have only one Windows PC but that machine isn't likely to move to Linux until Wine or Proton is capable of playing all my games without issue. I have like several computers running linux but those machines I don't expect to play games primarily on.

[F.Ultra]

That CPU is basically a first generation rebranded core i7. It even runs at 3.6Ghz which is respectable even though the IPC isn't Sandy Bridge level. RX 580 and a 7200 RPM drive isn't exactly server grade hardware. It is popular today to find cheap server hardware and repurpose it for gaming.

But the stuff Google will be using for Stadia is likely to be high core count with low clock speed. Great for servers and compiling the Linux kernel but poor at playing games which want high clock speed and IPC. Their "custom" Radeon GPU's are not going to be very different from a Radeon VII. The most interesting thing about Stadia is how all these games will be running on Google's custom Debian OS, which suggests that Stadia games are indeed ported to Linux. It's a shame that after all that effort to get something as useless and Cloud Gaming that Google won't open up a competitor to Steam and allow us to download and install these games on Linux. What a waste.

It's not like Google is going to just throw all this together and not do any QA what so ever until launch date. You're starting with the assumption that this will be bad and then you base your assumption on their hardware setup on that premise (that it will perform badly).

[Dukenukemx]

It's not like Google is going to just throw all this together and not do any QA what so ever until launch date. You're starting with the assumption that this will be bad and then you base your assumption on their hardware setup on that premise (that it will perform badly).

Cloud gaming will always perform badly because some CEO somewhere believes that games are like movies and that you can stream it. Like I said, the idea of cloud gaming was born from people who don't play games. They don't see latency being an issue. They don't see image quality loss from compression to be an issue. The hardware specs of their servers are mostly irrelevant cause their games are limited to 1080p 60fps WHICH IS NOT HIGH END GAMING. You don't get a RTX 2080 and a 9900K to play games on anything less than 1440p 120hz or 4k. Don't give me that 4k nonsense cause they go from 25Mbps for 1080p to 30Mbps for 4k. Last I checked 4k has more than 2x the pixels on screen, so why isn't the data more than 2x the amount?

As a Linux gamer I see Stadia as an enemy. Stadia does nothing to help Linux gaming. Google isn't porting their games to Linux, they aren't even setting up a store on Linux. I don't care what any of you Google employee's say, cloud gaming is not the future. I want the year of Linux, not the year of Chrome web browser.

As a consumer this cloud gaming businesses is anti-consumer. Where can I buy my games? Can it play my old games? As much as they're trying to be the Netflix of games, Netflix doesn't charge me money per movie, while Stadia will certainly ask for $60 per game on top of the monthly fee I'm sure I'll have to pay. As a PC gamer I don't pay $60 for games as I shop around with places like G2Play or Humble Bundle, or just wait for a Steam sale. With Stadia I'm sure I have no choice to buy games from them directly, if you call it buying since I can't play my games unless I pay for the monthly fee.

You can trick the normies but the rest of us are aware of what we can expect from Stadia. We know the latency will be there and it will be bad cause you can't avoid the laws of physics. That's a fact of cloud gaming. We know there's video compression which lowers image quality and that's a fact of any compression since compression removes some of the data to compress it. So it'll look worse than a low end PC in terms of sharpness. Again, if you don't play games then you don't understand why cloud gaming is dead before it arrived.

BTW Wendell gives a hint how Google might be using their server GPU's for Stadia. There's a reason why Google went with AMD and not Nvidia. This isn't even new tech.

[Ironmask]

Since when does a "function" do anything without being called? Most likely a hidden service or app in the background which doesn't need to export its internal functions (indeed they could even be inlined by the compiler).

Also what part of the first paragraph you quoted did you not understand?

If you catch someone steal a TV once, you'll assume he's guilty by default from that point, unless proven innocent. It's just common sense.

... Can you please offer actual decompiled sources and network packet dumps to prove Windows is doing this? If not, you sound more like a religious nut than not, and you're making the rest of us Linux users look bad. Because as far as I know, if you turn off all telemetric tracking in Windows, it just sends empty packets to Microsoft (or did, not sure if they changed it, this was back when 10 first released, not even sure why it sent empty packets at all). Software isn't a religion, it's just instructions for a computer to follow, please treat it like one.
And according to your logic, the NSA is notorious for spying on users, so I should avoid Linux entirely since every distro comes with SELinux. And according to your logic, it's up to you to prove it doesn't steal my information, which would require you to explain to me every single functionality of SELinux's internals just as you're demanding we explain how every piece of Windows doesn't send your entire hard disk to Microsoft.

[Weasel]

... Can you please offer actual decompiled sources and network packet dumps to prove Windows is doing this? If not, you sound more like a religious nut than not, and you're making the rest of us Linux users look bad. Because as far as I know, if you turn off all telemetric tracking in Windows, it just sends empty packets to Microsoft (or did, not sure if they changed it, this was back when 10 first released, not even sure why it sent empty packets at all). Software isn't a religion, it's just instructions for a computer to follow, please treat it like one.

Like I said, I don't trust it. No need to waste time to prove it. It spied and tracked once, I will assume guilty until proven innocent.

Just like how people avoid brands after a bad experience with them, and consider them guilty by default, which is perfectly sane, unless they prove their products are now better or whatever.

And according to your logic, the NSA is notorious for spying on users, so I should avoid Linux entirely since every distro comes with SELinux. And according to your logic, it's up to you to prove it doesn't steal my information, which would require you to explain to me every single functionality of SELinux's internals just as you're demanding we explain how every piece of Windows doesn't send your entire hard disk to Microsoft.

Uhm, yes? Sure if you want to avoid the NSA, go ahead. But you won't even with that, so there's no point in doing so. You're tracked anyway.

But not by Microsoft. There's a difference here. Just because the NSA spies on you doesn't mean you have to make everything public to everyone else as well, including Microsoft.

[creative]

Cloud Gaming can reach console levels if the internet connection does not suck balls. You know, consoles, where people still buy shit titles like AssCreed and can't even unlock the microtransactions.

ROFL. Or Farcry or Farcry wannabies. Look at how Rage 2 is looking. The first Rage was great in my opinion. The latest games coming out seem pretty bad. I completely quite buying games altogether. The gaming industry as a whole has took a huge nose dive in my opinion. It seems I already own all the games that are worthwhile for my taste, no desire to buy anymore cause its all more of the same, just like movies and TV series. It has all become pretty nauseating to be honest.

Also unless one is willing to wait for Steams winter sale everything is so overpriced and not worth what they are asking. Really kind of sad. It's forcing me to become more of an expansive polymath, entertainment can only bring ones psyche and inner emotional state so far and then it grinds to a halt philosophically speaking.

[starshipeleven]

The gaming industry as a whole has took a huge nose dive in my opinion. It seems I already own all the games that are worthwhile for my taste, no desire to buy anymore cause its all more of the same, just like movies and TV series. It has all become pretty nauseating to be honest.

Eh, most modern first person shooters do have that issue, but it's not my main interest so I don't have great experience in them. I've seen people discussing in lenght about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKXfWsbf5w

I've seen that in some you get more realism (aka if you are hit you die like for Insurgency Sandstorm), or games where you have a strong emphasis on teamwork (Squad) or games that have both teamwork and realism like Hell Let Loose (mostly seen youtube videos of this by Bluedrake, the same guy from the video above). But I never tried them so I can't say how much they break the mold.

For strategy and RPGs it's still not bad, as long as you don't mind lower-budget titles with less impressing graphics (but good or at least enjoyable gameplay mechanics), there are many choices.

[creative]

Eh, most modern first person shooters do have that issue, but it's not my main interest so I don't have great experience in them. I've seen people discussing in lenght about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKXfWsbf5w

I've seen that in some you get more realism (aka if you are hit you die like for Insurgency Sandstorm), or games where you have a strong emphasis on teamwork (Squad) or games that have both teamwork and realism like Hell Let Loose (mostly seen youtube videos of this by Bluedrake, the same guy from the video above). But I never tried them so I can't say how much they break the mold.

For strategy and RPGs it's still not bad, as long as you don't mind lower-budget titles with less impressing graphics (but good or at least enjoyable gameplay mechanics), there are many choices.

I own Tyranny, in a Mad Max mood right now. Most likely my main interest pertaining to gaming in the future is X3 'which I own both Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude' due to its expansiveness and interest of complexity plus I was really enjoying the learning curve.

[DebianLinuxero]

That could be that a lot of Linux users be not only for technical reasons but its software philosophy.

And that philosophy is against DRM.