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

[moilami]

Console is a computer without freedom to customize it. Kinda dumbed down computer. Go ahead if that's your thing.

"Bitcoin and Linux both bring something new to the game. What does Valve get from supporting Linux?" Probably nothing. Or not much. How much Bitcoin Core devs get for programming Bitcoin? Nothing. Most of them are on grants. But they do it anyway. Sometimes idea is stronger than financial gain.

Console is good for kids. My kids have Switch.

[Naquatis]

Thanks to gaming, Linux is in a much better place for it. Or you think all these improvements are just the natural course of making one hell of an infrastructure? A lot of this is thanks to Valve and the effort they put into Linux. Also, why are you posting in this thread about Steam and Linux then?

I think Linux was in a better place back in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. Ubuntu 20.04 is a mess right now, in terms of usability. Things break out of no where, and stuff that used to work now doesn't. Either Ubuntu and distros based on Ubuntu are now terrible or Linux as a whole has been getting worse.

I already compiled Wine and played Dota 2 in Wine before we got a native Steam Client or a native Dota 2 version.
It take some time till some former Valve employe like Richard Geldreich pop up to tell people how fast everything is on OpenGL in comparison to DirectX and shortly after that quit his job and tell everyone how messy it is to develope with OpenGL.

It was not Valve or AMD who came up with a working AMD Vulkan driver integrated in Mesa. You remember?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynyO3O3zd3E

This whole Linux Vulkan ride was really bumpy because AMD like to tell people that they did not like to put more effort into Mesas OpenCL integration because nobody else does while having a working RADV integration based on Intels ANV they also never interested in. Now you say stop why OpenCL? Isn't he talking about Vulkan? Because of SPIR-V. This Vulkan shader compiling times making Vulkan extremely unenjoyable!

[Volta]

Without full support for games like Cyberpunk 2077, GTA5, PUB it will be hard to get meaningful market share on Steam. Furthermore, most of the players are probably too lazy to ditch windows, so Linux would have to bring them some advantage like better performance for mentioned games.

[piorunz]

Console is good for kids. My kids have Switch.

My son has Linux PC with Ryzen 2600 which he built himself (with my help). He is 13. No consoles or any other dumbing down devices.

[moilami]

My son has Linux PC with Ryzen 2600 which he built himself (with my help). He is 13. No consoles or any other dumbing down devices.

Hmm, interesting, my kids are 7 and 8 years old, will have to think about making them build a computer themselves.

[piorunz]

Hmm, interesting, my kids are 7 and 8 years old, will have to think about making them build a computer themselves.

I highly recommend My son likes IT, but games are always very tempting (not only for kids). By throwing Linux into the mix he have no choice but to learn Linux and IT if he wants his games to work

[JPFSanders]

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?

I tend to look at it from another angle, imagine a hypothetical PS4 emulator on Linux that would allow you to run a sizeable percentage of modern AAA games at near native speeds. How many game companies would not release games for Linux if the PS4 version works?

Would that PS emulator be a bad thing for Linux? even if the developers of such emulator makes parts of the Linux software stack better and better all the time?

Because this is what Wine is.

Having said that, I buy games that preferably have a native version, but if the game is good and there is no native release (IE: Risk Of Rain 2/No Man's Sky) and all my friends are playing it, the alternative is not play, play on windows or proton/wine... I don't know about you but I prefer the later.

[Dukenukemx]

I really don't understand why is so important speaking about the Linux Gamers which are the 1% of another 1%...

Remember at one point Doom was installed on more PC's than Windows 95. Gives you an idea of the power of gaming.

[Kano]

@eydee
I think you are wrong - and you can easyly test it yourself. If you have got enough upstream (>20 mbit/s) you can stream to other systems even over the internet yourself - for Steam you just have to login with your account anywhere in the world and you can use streaming (preferred if your gfx cards can use hardware encoding/decoding). I used an official Steamlink (because it has the best support for my Amazon BT gamepad) at my friend's home and even MK11 was playable. Problematic seems however the AMD hardware encoder (Win) if you want to stream to Android, this only worked with CPU encoding - this is of course not possible with slower systems. The Nvidia hardware encoder did not show this issue. WLAN is certainly not really useful if you want to have got low latency - that's why I installed > 100 m Ethernet at my home. But to play a slow game (like card games or point to click) on a mobile device it is enough. Not everybody plays shooters - many other games work fine - especially on lowest difficulty settings. If you don't die all the time everything is more relaxed.