Steam's Top Grossing Games Of 2016

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam's Top Grossing Games Of 2016

Valve has published a list of the top-grossing games by revenue on Steam for the 2016 calendar year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Top-Grossing-2016-Titles

[dungeon]

The "platinum" grossing games were Fallout 4, Dota 2, CS:GO, Total War: Warhammer, No Man's Sky, Grand Theft Auto V, Rocket League, XCOM 2, The Witcher: Wild Hunt, Civilization: VI, Dark Souls III, and Tom Clancy's The Division. A majority of those platinum titles do have Linux ports available while Civilization: VI is one of the most sought after games currently by Linux gamers while awaiting information from Aspyr Media on the viability of such a port.

Hm, how i counting here... 5 out of 12 is not a majority, not even half

At least we can say majority is only on Silver, as it is 9 out 16 or should we say half + 1

But it nice to see 43 out of those 100 available for Linux... We actually don't beating even OS X there yet, which is at 46 if a counted all this right

[PublicNuisance]

Hm, how i counting here... 5 out of 12 is not a majority, not even half

At least we can say majority is only on Silver, as it is 9 out 16 or should we say half + 1

But it nice to see 43 out of those 100 available for Linux... We actually don't beating even OS X there yet, which is at 46 if a counted all this right

While I agree that Linux is hardly a market power at 43 titles it's a start. Hopefully next year we are at 50 or even 60. Progress and improvement should be the goal. If next year OS X has more than Linux I won't mind so long as Linux has more than 43.

[Geopirate]

Developers are putting in the effort at this point, the hold ups now are on the infrastructure side. There is a day in the foreseeable future when a developer could port their Vulcan game to Wayland in a few days instead of the weeks or months it takes for a OpenGL game now. Fedora has made the switch to Wayland already and I think in the next year most distros gamers run will switch over as well. It's only a matter of time for the Vulkan driver support to get there. AMD will likely also deliver GPUs across all price points with open drivers that work well for all of these ported games.

I think this will also allow us to finally overtake OSX as it seems they are sticking with Metal over Vulkan. Being able to make a game once and have similar performance features across all gamers except iOS and Xbox will guide many developers moving forward.

[bug77]

Well, given the market share of Linux on desktop and the difficulty in porting titles, that's excellent news. Better than I expected.
Geopirate You're not into software development, are you? You couldn't port a file copy application from Windows to Linux in a few days (because of testing), porting a game so fast is never going to happen. After all, games using OpenGL weren't ported overnight and OpenGL is also cross platform, isn't it?

[dungeon]

Fedora has made the switch to Wayland already and I think in the next year most distros gamers run will switch over as well.

Fedora switching to something, does not even mean next RHEL will switch to same testbed... let alone other distros

You guys really like to use words most and majority in unrealistic or should i say optimistic way

[Geopirate]

Well, given the market share of Linux on desktop and the difficulty in porting titles, that's excellent news. Better than I expected.
Geopirate You're not into software development, are you? You couldn't port a file copy application from Windows to Linux in a few days (because of testing), porting a game so fast is never going to happen. After all, games using OpenGL weren't ported overnight and OpenGL is also cross platform, isn't it?

I actually do some software development....

A file copy application is an entirely different situation for a lot of reasons. I'm not sure why you would bring that up if you are familiar with software development. Also testers and developers are generally two separate groups of people in any medium to large software group. Developers also cost more, so the time from the developer beginning work to being able to present something to the testers is the time frame I'm referring to.

OpenGL was developed 25 years ago. I hope you understand that computing was significantly different at that time than it is now. There are a lot of things in the graphics world that were really important then and not so much now, also things we use all the time now that didn't exist then. As a result it has a lot of stuff that we don't need anymore and still needs to work for programs written before the Linux kernel. It's also not a hard specification so there are a lot of things that are left to the discretion of software and driver developers. As a result it's frankly a mess with a lot of things at this point and there are dozens of implementations of the same thing. So yes when porting your OpenGL game from Windows to Linux you have to deal with all of this, significantly increasing development time for that port, just to get it to work. You have to spend even more development time if you actually want the same level of performance on the Linux platform.

Vulkan was designed with all of these things in mind to make all of those things easier. So a lot of things that are different in OpenGL for Windows, Linux or a PS4 are actually the same in Vulkan. So you don't have to fix those things, you write your game works and a lot of things automatically work on the other platforms without additional development work. Also because many things are the same, the performance is generally pretty close once you get the game working. The vast majority of Linux gamers will be more than happy to live in a world where a rushed port is *only* 5% slower than the Linux version. Check out the performance difference of the platinum titles on the list.

In summary if it takes less time to do a port and it works better you get 3 things. Less money for development needed, so it's more likely the Accountants will sign off on ports. More happy gamers because not only did they get a port, it works well. More ports plus more happy gamers means more sales, which means more ports.

[Geopirate]

Fedora switching to something, does not even mean next RHEL will switch to same testbed... let alone other distros

You guys really like to use words most and majority in unrealistic or should i say optimistic way

Well I did specify *gamers*. The timeline for RHEL, Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, etc is obviously going to be much longer. The majority of people that game on Linux are not running distros that run older software because they want the newest stuff so that they can actually run games. How many of the games on this list actually run on RHEL?

[bug77]

Geopirate Does "code to the standard and not for the browser" ring any bells? Things are never as pretty as depicted in the incubating/development/standardization stage. I'm with you that with Vulkan porting will be easier (possibly significantly so), but porting a game in a few days is not going to happen. What could happen, is developers can run their tests on all target platforms during development and release for all at the same time. Unfortunately, Khronos does not offer any tools (like Microsoft does), so this won't happen.

Once again, OpenGL was supposed to do exactly that: code once, write anywhere.

And the point of the file copy example, was that even for trivial applications, there are simply too many variables to take into account to make porting "in a few days" feasible. Yes, I know dev and QA are different teams, but simply the fact that you need an approved test plan ensures anything will take more than those few days.

[dungeon]

The majority of people that game on Linux are not running distros that run older software because they want the newest stuff so that they can actually run games.

Again that "majority", OK I dunno from where these majorties came in... on steam survey i see "Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS 64 bit" on first place

Here i counted 5 out of 12 for Platinum or 43 out Top 100 available for Linux, but Michael like to missuse word majority... i mean it is fine to be optimistic, but it is good to be real sometimes