Portal, Portal2, Tomb Raider, Kerbal space program, Shadow of Mordor, Rocket League, The Talos Principle are some of the AAA games that I've played on my linux mint box in the last few years. I am just an occasional gamer and I do not have a gaming machine (amd fx8350, nvidia gtx770, 1GBram) but all these games worked flawlessly. No wine, no glitches no driver problems. I don't know if it would have been "good enough" for professional gamers (I admit I play on "high details" instead of "ultra high details" mode)
The terms gamer and gaming community are used by people to lump anyone who plays video games into a small digestible nugget. There is no single gaming community and the sheer size of each of the countless gaming communities dwarf most other hobby or enthusiast communities.
Most people promoting gaming on Linux are so out of touch that they think having Tux Racer playable makes a Linux desktop computer a first or even second class gaming platform. Having The Witcher 3 or Tomb Raider on Linux is a novelty or a way to win brownie points.
I'm not a serious gamer by any means, my highest played game only logs 403 hours of playtime, I've see people with ten times that. With that in mind, none of the games in my top 10 list in terms of hours (~1800 hours) played are available on Linux.
I generally agree with this sentiment. The way I see it, if you have to make concessions for a platform, then that platform is not really a very viable option. If I want to play X, but X is not available for my platform, telling me "Well Y is supported, and it's also a AAA game!" That doesn't really help me any, because I don't want _Y_, I want _X_.
I feel like a large part of the group making who believe Linux is gaming ready doesn't understand that angle.
It's a chicken and egg problem. Gamers don't want to adopt a platform that will hinder them and studios don't want to support a platform no one is using.
It was in the past, but it's not stalled anymore, since you can observe the gradual growth. I.e. more games are coming out for Linux, which in turn makes more people use it, which in turn brings more games. So it's improving.
The two most played games on steam have a decent linux port.
At this moment they make up nearly 1.3 million concurrent players. The rest of the top 10 games that do not have a linux port accumulate close to 0.7 million concurrent players.
For a lot of players, CS:GO or Dota 2 are the only games they play regularly, so linux is a viable option for them.
For those who play CS:GO and Dota 2 competitively, Linux isn't a viable option because CEVO and ESEA don't have clients for Linux. That's ignoring all of the bugs and quirky behavior that come with the platform. ALSA has a 10-100ms delay and for a game like CS:GO that relies so heavily on audio feedback, that's inexcusable. There are also issues with mouse input, lag, and random frame drops on Linux that have lingered for years.
You'll see all kinds of posts showing Min/Max FPS and how Linux beats Windows at this game or that but you rarely see any mention of Average FPS because they're usually pretty awful.
I never said anything about PulseAudio, I said ALSA introduced delays. JACK uses ALSA the same as PulseAudio.
In any case, it's the game developer's choice and not mine. Yet another problem Linux has for developers is that there isn't always a clear choice and the flavor of the day may not be the best choice long term. That's why frameworks like Qt and Unity are so prevalent because they abstract a lot of the crap away.
Rocket League started out that way, but I'm not sure its still that way. It started small, but is now one of the most popular online games and competitive e-sports - to the point where actual soccer clubs are supposedly setting up e-sports teams for it. Psyonix is building an empire around it.
> but is now one of the most popular online games and competitive e-sports
Are there any numbers, I'm actually curious. I don't regularly see it on the Twitch.tv front page, so my impression was it was a bit behind the big names in esports (LoL, DotA, CS:GO, SC2, Hearthstone, Overwatch).
That's like calling a small Indie film a Blockbuster and dismissing objections as a matter of opinion.
The term AAA is analogous to Blockbuster in the film industry. It's a reference to both budget and expected unit sales. Blockbuster movies have budgets starting in the hundreds of millions where as Indie films budges are usually in the single to double digit millions. Video games are no different in that respect.
No, it's like saying that good art doesn't equal to whether big publisher funds it or not, and millions in budget can result in trash result.
That's why I don't like the term AAA, it's way too confusing, conflating unrelated and often orthogonal issues (budget, publisher funding vs independent development, quality and so on).
Anyway, there are big budget games coming out for Linux, so above is really besides the point.
It has nothing to do with the quality or content. There are plenty of Hollywood Blockbusters that are awful, most in fact, but they still cost a lot of money to make.
Budget is a good indicator of audience numbers regardless of quality.
I mean artistic quality, as in good art in general. And why should we care about awful games? I buy games which are interesting to me, not based on their budget size.
I understand what you're saying but the vast majority of people playing games do not share your sentiment and game studios go where the money is. Games like Braid, while beautiful, innovative, and memorable, don't bring in the money of the annually released cookie cutter FPS games like CoD or Battlefield that are shallower than spilled coffee on your desk.
You can say that there are plenty of good games on Linux and everyone should switch but the reality is that the games people want to play are either unavailable or lacking in some way that makes Linux on the desktop a non starter. C64 and Amiga probably have a larger base than Linux.
> Games like Braid, while beautiful, innovative, and memorable, don't bring in the money of the annually released cookie cutter FPS games like CoD or Battlefield that are shallower than spilled coffee on your desk.
In way I don't mind that Linux gamers are getting better games on average, because of less mass market mediocrity, but more interesting (usually crowdfunded) releases that are reaching Linux gamers today. However it ties to the next point, of the market size:
> You can say that there are plenty of good games on Linux and everyone should switch but the reality is that the games people want to play are either unavailable or lacking in some way that makes Linux on the desktop a non starter.
That doesn't describe the situation well. Linux gaming is for sure a much smaller market than Windows gaming, but not only it's already viable (as many developers who sell Linux games demonstrate), it's gradually growing. So it's surely not a "non starter" anymore.
However, since it's smaller, having too many games can actually cause a problem, even if it sounds funny. Simply because it will be overcrowded developers wise, and they'll have harder time selling Linux games. So I'd say actually current amount of games healthily corresponds to the rate of Linux gaming growth.
> In way I don't mind that Linux gamers are getting better games on average
Who says they are? There's plenty of crap available for Linux. I mentioned Braid because it's a very popular and very good Indie game available on both platforms. I surely wasn't implying that Linux only receives ports of the finest of games.
Also what makes a game "good" is subjective. From the perspective of hours played, Braid isn't very good.
> That doesn't describe the situation well. Linux gaming is for sure a much smaller market than Windows gaming, but not only it's already viable
It is viable for some small developers and for larger developer who are already using tools ported to Linux it can make sense to add support however for the majority of game studios making popular (not necessarily good or bad games) it doesn't make sense.
Crowdfunded games are more commonly released for Linux than publisher funded games, and they more often represent not the mass market, but something interesting that creators want to pursue. So for me it translates into better games on average on Linux. But as you said, it's subjective.
The market however is viable for everybody, but as I said, if everybody from the Windows gaming market will start releasing games for Linux now, it can actually hurt it, rather than improve it. Gradual growth is better, and it's already happening. Tools wise, the situation is getting much better as well, with all major engines gaining Vulkan support. Common middleware like Umbra 3D also often supports Linux these days.
Nothing you said is wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that quality doesn't sell. Once a game is "good enough" it often comes down to marketing, and the studios putting out for Linux do not control a majority of the marketing dollars.
> Portal, Portal2, Tomb Raider, Kerbal space program, Shadow of Mordor, Rocket League, The Talos Principle are some of the AAA games that I've played on my linux mint box in the last few years.
Here are the release dates with linux support date.
Tomb Raider: 2013, 2016
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: 2014, 2015
The Talos Principle: 2014, same day
Here are some other random selection:
Borderlands 2: 2012, 2014
Europa Universalis 4: 2013, same day
Pillars of Eternity: 2015, same day
Civilization 5: 2010, 2014
Civilization 6: 2016, 2017
Factorio: not yet released, already supports both
There is a clear trend towards more games with linux support and less lag between windows release and linux release. My impression is that the tipping point for newer games is already in favour of linux support than not linux support.
If you want to argue against linux gaming, I would argue with slightly older games that didn't receive a linux port and maybe never will.
That's one of those xckd which are missing the point, and it's not uncommon for the author to have pointless sarcasm. That's why I mostly don't find his comics interesting.
Along with what others have said, this is also due more to Valve's push for SteamOS to get greater adoption, and their push to have developers of engines like Source and Unreal prep for linux too. This has extremely little to do with the Linux projects individually.
