Valve's Steam Data For December Points To A Huge Dip For Linux Gaming Marketshare

[Dukenukemx]

As a Linux Mint user my experience has been getting worse. My Steam games are actually working better than ever as I don't need to enter in any special fixes to get the games running, but on the other hand not many new games are getting ported to Linux. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are getting more problematic with each new upgrade. Citra the 3DS emulator doesn't have a working flatpak anymore. Yuzu the Switch emulator just hates my AMD graphics now, both OpenGL and Vulkan. The Dolphin emulator doesn't have a working PPA for Focal, so I have to compile it now. These things were simple and easy before, and now they're all broke in some ways. Linux Mint not supporting snapd is easy to fix but not many Windows uesrs are going to know this, also snapd is mostly useless now. Oibaf's PPA still breaks once in a while, but still once too often.

Then there's Wine, which is the reason why Linux sucks the most. It's still nearly impossible to get anything working in Wine. It has gotten better but not Windows user fool proof. Lutris is getting worse as it depends on Steam's Proton, which why even use Lutris at this point. There are far too many Wine versions out there. Wine, Wine-Staging, Proton, TKG, and more than I care to know. There is no one good version of Wine. Fallout New Vegas is an old game that is popular, but Lutris doesn't get it working. I'm better off installing it in Wine-Staging and installing quartz and gstreamer1.0-plugins-good:i386 for music. I still don't know what codec I need for Mass Effects launcher music, not that it matters. Doom Eternal only works in Proton, so don't even bother with Wine-Staging. Borderlands 3 needs MF-Install and MF-InstallCab for it to work. A lot of DX9 games now require MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.4, where as OpenGL3.3 used to suffice. I also use Gallium-Nine as well, so I really don't know why I need anything higher than OpenGL3.3. VKD3D isn't enough, you need VKD3D-Proton for some games to work.

If people aren't gaming on Linux it's because things have gotten much worse than before. We need to unify all the Wine paches into one. Get more games ported to Linux instead of depending on Wine too much. Lots of work still needs to be done before anyone can reliably game on Linux. I know I can't.

[Kano]

@Qaridarium
As always: the price is higher then the demand is greater than produced. And before the holidays the demand was extra huge. Right now many people are at home and the demand is higher than normal as well - same for PS5 (and a bit Xbox Series X).

The huge number of chinese systems looks like the shutdown of Internet coffee shops is over. Maybe they will upgrade to Win 10 or just deploy the system again on reboot. It is very unlikely that Linux will be installed on those systems.

With faster Internet connections gaming will switch to streaming - at least for casual players which don't want to buy highend hardware just for a few games. I read a review where Cyberpunk 2077 ran fine with Geforce Now - much cheater than buying a RTX 3070+ or better yourself. If this game runs, then many others will do too.

[Chugworth]

Don't use Proton then.
I'm only supporting (paying for) editors that offer a Linux version of their game, and I don't have any kind of tweaking or fiddling to do. All my games just work.

If you support companies that don't offer Linux versions, how can you possibly complain about how Linux don't deal well with these games?

Well here's the problem - Major game companies aren't going to care to support Linux unless they think that a market exists there. And as long as gaming on Linux remains limited and quirky, there's not going to be a market there. If you want Linux desktops to grow as a gaming platform, the only path forward is to force enough Windows games to work effortlessly that more gamers are willing to use Linux.

[Naquatis]

OpenGL is already obsolete and only legacy support right now.

please come again if you come up with some vulkan/dx12 tests.

Tested Vulkan a lot especially in Dota 2 but sorry beside ramping up Shader Compiler times and strange crashes I found not much that is worth to mention.
In UE4 it is able to crash the whole Mesa graphic stack because of GCC 10.2.0 and the bad thing about that is that UE 4.26.0 using Vulkan as default.

[remenic]

I really wish I would stop hearing about graphics drivers causing system crashes. No user space app should be able to take a system down (including leaving gpu in unrecoverable state) unless intentional.

[r_a_trip]

With the ongoing controversy of the survey numbers and the reports that Linux hardly gets the survey (which I tend to believe, been on Steam since 2013 and can still count number of times I saw the survey on one hand), I wouldn't be surprised if Valve is trying to paint a certain picture. Report low numbers of Linux users so Microsoft doesn't spring in to action, all the while building out their new gaming market.

[Dukenukemx]

@Qaridarium
With faster Internet connections gaming will switch to streaming - at least for casual players which don't want to buy highend hardware just for a few games. I read a review where Cyberpunk 2077 ran fine with Geforce Now - much cheater than buying a RTX 3070+ or better yourself. If this game runs, then many others will do too.

Cloud gaming will never happen. Geforce GRID has been out since 2008 and it still hasn't caught on for a reason. As much as people want to believe there's no input lag, but there always is and that discourages people to use the service. Faster Internet for cloud gaming isn't more bandwidth but lower latency, which means moving servers more closer to you. Due to router hops and speed of light issues, cloud gaming has about as much of a chance of working as Fusion energy. The only people dumb enough to use cloud gaming are those with slow reaction times, as they wouldn't notice the lag.

[Naquatis]

Time to realize that we as Linux community have done a lot to make Steam our home for Linux gaming. All the games I have bought have even after years the same bugs that never got fixed and because of that I am finally play on Windows or PS4 or XBox.

He who tell people it must be strange to tell people that "Linux is the future of gaming" because it is the same like telling the pope about catholicism need to be said that the matured Linux community using nearly every operating system beside their lovely Linux.

To think that someone who see that games working better on another platform will using the worst is something beyond wishful thinking!

[Mez']

Well here's the problem - Major game companies aren't going to care to support Linux unless they think that a market exists there. And as long as gaming on Linux remains limited and quirky, there's not going to be a market there. If you want Linux desktops to grow as a gaming platform, the only path forward is to force enough Windows games to work effortlessly that more gamers are willing to use Linux.

I don't really care about major game companies. From my point of view, most of their games are overrated or sequels anyway.
On Steam, I filter on Linux and that's my pool of games to pick from. I don't even know about other games. I just read in this topic that apparently Cyberpunk 2077 is a big hit. Never heard of it before.
Yet, it doesn't prevent me from being happy with the games I have. And there's nothing quirky with the smoothness of installation and running of my library of games. They all just work.

I disagree on the way to awareness. If you reward lazy editors that neglect Linux as a platform, they'll stick to being lazy and to neglecting it. If you make money flow for them on the Linux side, they're gonna want to explore it further.

As mentioned by someone else above, Proton seems to drag editors away from Linux rather than encouraging them and pulling them in. It was to be expected.

[qarium]

He who tell people it must be strange to tell people that "Linux is the future of gaming" because it is the same like telling the pope about catholicism need to be said that the matured Linux community using nearly every operating system beside their lovely Linux.

there is a Linus Torvalds quote: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

never say never... in only 1-2 years you could be complete wrong.