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

[Naquatis]

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

Someone who enjoy usability. Someone who really enjoyed to play Ratchet & Clank, Knack, Knack 2, Alienation, Uncharted or the The Last Of Us.
Someone who is able to see the difference between console gaming and PC gaming without naming people peasant.
You know real couch gaming with 4 friends playing Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition with 4 controller on a 56 inch flatscreen.

I like to remind you to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFrL6-OhN94

It is already 8 years ago and it take me a while to realize that Steam only like DX controller.
Oh yes I got a lot of controller mapping problems with Steam.

[Dukenukemx]

Someone who enjoy usability.

I don't know why you're using Linux because it's the least usable thing. That's why we're here, to fix that.

Someone who really enjoyed to play Ratchet & Clank, Knack, Knack 2, Alienation, Uncharted or the The Last Of Us.

Just sounds like a bunch of exclusives to me. Also Knack? Man you are a peasant.

Someone who is able to see the difference between console gaming and PC gaming without naming people peasant.

If I said to you that a machine is using an 8 core Zen2 based CPU with RDNA2 graphics, then what am I talking about? Is it a PC, a PS5, or a Xbox Series? You see what I'm saying?

You know real couch gaming with 4 friends playing Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition with 4 controller on a 56 inch flatscreen.

Firstly, you can hook up your PC to your TV and couch game. I know this cause I do this with my HTPC running Linux Mint. Secondly, Diablo III? Your taste in games is terrible.

[piorunz]

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.

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.

[Naquatis]

I don't know why you're using Linux because it's the least usable thing.

To build a hell of infrastructure. No idea why you think that Linux is the least usable thing?
Linux was already awesome before people like to use it to create the future of gaming.

[Dukenukemx]

"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.

My guess is that Valve is supporting Linux because they're not done with Steam Machines. When they released Steam years ago it's pretty clear they were unprepared in what to expect. Things are definitely better now with video drivers being in a much better place and Proton. It's not enough to be almost as good as Windows, as people aren't going to buy a machine just to play Steam games a bit slower. Hence why DXVK and ACO. More work obviously needs to be done.

[Dukenukemx]

To build a hell of infrastructure. No idea why you think that Linux is the least usable thing?
Linux was already awesome before people like to use it to create the future of gaming.

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.

[piorunz]

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.

Don't mistake Ubuntu for Linux. Linux is Linux. Ubuntu is one of the distros which happened to be using Linux kernel. I agree that Ubuntu went downhill in last few years and it's slower than it was. I've tried it on two machines and I didn't liked it, went back to my my usual distros. Ubuntu isn't most polished or bug free, fastest or most popular, it's just one of the distros based on Debian, which there are many. There are much better alternatives.
But coming back to Linux - Linux has skyrocketed with progress and quality. Everything improved. Drivers, usability, hardware support, optimisation for everything, bugs fixes. Millions of lines of code are being written, added or improved, month by month, year by year, to Linux. More devs are joining in to code for Linux, for distros in general. Linux is gaining popularity, more users, more hardware, more everything. I never dreamt to have desktop experience that polished as I have right now on my PC. Same in my home server, which has been running with all software i need, non stop for last 1.5 years with few reboots, rock solid.

[Danielsan]

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

[Chugworth]

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.

The amount of money that flows from Linux users is utterly minuscule compared to the amount of money that flows from Windows users. So many developers just don't see it as being worth the extra effort. That's not going to change until Linux desktops are seen as a more competent gaming platform.

And besides, some of the "native" Linux games don't even work right because they're just quick and sloppy ports that the developers put little effort into. I would almost think we would be in a better situation if Linux could run Windows games great rather than rely on the game developers to do a decent job at porting them.

[oiaohm]

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?

The reality is game companies have some much resources to invest. Proton is not exactly mistake as it can show game companies with some games they have more Linux market share than they think.

Single target is the big thing. WSL2 supporting graphical applications that Microsoft it working on will open up single target the other way. Going forwards I expect at some point to get messy with games released Linux only running by WSL2 and games released windows only running on Linux by proton/wine. Yes this is going to get wacky in the single target fight.