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

[Dukenukemx]

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.

I get Windows but consoles? What kind of peasant are you?

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!

Linux would be the best for gaming if we can stop acting like idiots about it. If you have a Intel HD 4000 or Haswell based CPU then it's better to game on Linux because you get Vulkan support. Older Intel GPU's don't even have OpenGL support in Windows. If you're an AMD user and need good OpenGL performance then you want to use Linux. I got a Vega 56 on Windows that can't play Citra emulator with a good frame rate but my Radeon HD 6850 on Linux can just fine. Nvidia users are just better off on Windows. No benefits for them being on Linux in my opinion.

The problems are still the same as always on Linux. We still have dependency issues with certain apps and therefore certain games. Wine is always needed because we still need it as a bridge for Linux gaming, but Wine still sucks. It's better, but still sucks. Why are the Radeon HD 5000's and 6000's still without FP64 support? Where's Soft FP64? After Kernel 5.8, GCN 1.0 cards don't work anymore with AMDGPU. You either use the Radeon driver and live without Vulkan or use an older kernel. Things that weren't a problem, are now a problem. Nothing stays working on Linux, it just gets worse as it also gets better.

[eydee]

@QaridariumWith 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.

Not gonna happen until the laws of physics change. Wires are always gonna have resistance. Access points are always gonna take time to process information. Servers are gonna be slow and overloaded. Latency is staying. And even for a casual player, a crosshair moving as if it was attached to a lasso is a deal breaker.

It has nothing to do with bandwidth. Has never had to do anything with it.

[theriddick]

And I have had sound issues - only sounds triggered by me (first instance) are played -.

Using proton experimental (separate download in the tools/apps section of steam) should solve most sound issues.
I've already finished the game, its a bit of a mess in areas, will revisit it early 2022, see where its at. I do believe cp2077 needed another year in the oven imo!

Cloud gaming will never happen.

Oh it will happen for the few that have fibre links directly to the cloud servers or who are standing outside the cloud server building on mobile.....

Unfortunately western world society has a major infrastructure upgrade issue, mostly due to corruption and bad governance.

[furkantokac]

Epicgames has an effect on that, I think. They are good at supporting developers and gamers but they should bring their launcher to Linux and improve the UnrealEngine's Linux support.

[Almindor]

There's a few factors:

1) A well justified fear of microsoft marginalising them by making the windows store increasingly prominent.
2) They are a fully private company with billions in the bank and can do whatever they want on a whim
3) Linux would allow them to have their own OS that they control top to bottom

The money they spend on linux will be pennies. Considering they're not slowing down at all you have to assume that SteamOS 3 is going to appear... eventually and will also probably be a fairly dramatic departure from their previous attempts.

None of the points make sense. They might make sense at the start or even a year from going into the endeavor but not after all this time when there's literally nothing they can show up for all their efforts. Proton is nice but it can simply not replace native for games. Native linux itself is a minefield.

If they built a killer console I guess but then they're spending their energy on the wrong thing. Instead of building a really good linux based console to utilize proton for (and with that making it much simpler for single hardware) they are playing whack-a-mole with Linux support.

Make a good solid console offer and the rest might follow, especially if you provide good discounts specifically for it, people would flock to this. But building a good console with all the doodads is not easy and I think it's not within Valve's possibilities.

[Almindor]

Don't underestimate power of FOSS. Bitcoin is FOSS and it never made any sense. Until it did.
Linux was a garage project of some Finnish student. Until it wasn't. Five or ten years ago you could only dream of running AAA games on Linux. Today it's a standard, not every game but still, difference in gaming quality is huge. When I read on Phoronix about constant flow of advances in AMD graphics drivers, Wine project, Valve's Proton and so on, I couldn't be any more happier.
Give it some time.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin and Linux both bring something new to the game. What does Valve get from supporting Linux? I said it in another reply, the only thing that'd make sense for them right now would be to make a killer console (ONE not 50+ crappy ones) and make a good discount for all steam titles on it for a while. It'd flip the console space faster than bitcoin hits 50k this year.

[Almindor]

Because 1% of 90+ million active users is still a lot.

I don't think they'd lose them. They'd just boot into windows more.

[Almindor]

Well, they don't make native linux games anymore. Even Trine 4 and Serious Sam 4 is windows-only. And a number of older games has dropped linux support. Proton is a mistake.

I've been saying this a lot, people always downvote/shut me down on it. Proton isn't a mistake per-se but it does lead to no native games for Linux plain and simple. It's a single target much easier to support (even proton directly not just windows) so why bother with the Linux .so/dbus/glib-version hell minefield?

[Anarchy]

It might seem like a bad thing, but the reality is that Steam reached 25 mil. concurrent users for the first time in its history. They'll be gone by the end of January.

[Dukenukemx]

Oh it will happen for the few that have fibre links directly to the cloud servers or who are standing outside the cloud server building on mobile.....

Even with that you'd get input lag. Mostly because you're on a mobile phone.

Unfortunately western world society has a major infrastructure upgrade issue, mostly due to corruption and bad governance.

Even if you were to upgrade our infrastructure, you'd still get the same input lag. You'd need less routers, less switches, and the server in the same town you live in to not notice the lag. Even then you'll need to deal with compression issues since it is a video feed. If YouTube can't make video games look good then streaming won't either.