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Didn't SteamOS mostly become a hedge against Microsoft locking away first class access to their platform for Games from competitors like Valve and the titles th

Didn't SteamOS mostly become a hedge against Microsoft locking away first class access to their platform for Games from competitors like Valve and the titles they help sell/publish for developers? In the years since SteamOS first launched the open source hardware drivers have also gotten much better. Valve continues to contribute towards better OpenGL and Vulkan (note, mis-spelled as a distinct brand name) support (new features, hitting current contemporary hardware support levels/etc). The biggest issue that I can see is the number of development studios that only target Windows (currently 90+% of the market share); it tends to be better if they use a development kit that also allows for builds on other platforms, but if the developer doesn't have basic automated testing on either a Mac or Linux/BSD/etc system of some other kind then platform specific bugs easily slip in.

erikb 9y ago
90+% without Linux? That's not how it feels like, though. Maybe it's because the genres I play are accidentally also the genres with the most Linux support, but it feels like beside the odd game here and there or an older incarnation of a game I like, everything is on Linux. And with most engines providing the easy choice to add another OS to build for, the numbers should be growing even more.
- Jach 9y ago
  I also don't think it feels like 90+% these days. My own steam profile says 144/323 games support Linux, plus I've got some number more Linux capable games from bundles that I never imported into Steam but either played on desktop or in some cases the mobile version. (Then there's the "classic" Linux games from the dark ages that I really liked a lot like Battle for Wesnoth, Tremulous, and BZFlag.) Of course of the steam ones, I've encountered several that either flat out didn't work on my system (probably the hardest part of shipping linux binaries is testing for many distros and setups, SteamOS/Ubuntu gets you most of the way there though) or they worked poorly. So most of my gaming is still in Windows 7 but I don't really use that OS for other stuff. Of those 144, I've played maybe half of them (my backlog is huge..) but mostly not on Linux. Either because they didn't support it when I played (Half-Life games as probably the oldest example) or I tried and it didn't work [well] or I just didn't even bother trying. Even for the engines that don't support one-click Linux (or Mac) builds, it's not an insurmountable effort to support Linux, and if the game was already targeting multiple consoles+PC they've probably abstracted most platform specific stuff already. So it's just an economic issue. A lot of the technological issues have been mitigated or gone away.
- mjevans 9y ago
  I was speaking about potential customers (by sheer numbers) it's currently over 95%; though this is a catch 22 / chicken and egg issue. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ Scroll down, click on "OS Version" (you might need to enable some steam domains in your script blocker) Windows has about 96%, Mac a little under 3 percent, Linux about 0.75%.
pjmlp 9y ago
This is what Carmack has to say on the subject of graphics APIs. "John Carmack: Its still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. Its interesting how little of the technology cares what API you're using and what generation of the technology you're on. You've got a small handful of files that care about what API they're on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they're on." http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And for every Carmack out there that can dream up whole new render pipelines in their sleep, there are thousands and thousands of games that start with a pre-made engine that in turn i deeply wedded to the DirectX platform. Game engines, much like web browser engines, have become complex beasts. Hell, even as far back ad Wolfenstein 3D i suspect ID Software made as much or more licensing their engine to third parties as they did selling actual games.

erikb 9y ago

90+% without Linux? That's not how it feels like, though. Maybe it's because the genres I play are accidentally also the genres with the most Linux support, but it feels like beside the odd game here and there or an older incarnation of a game I like, everything is on Linux. And with most engines providing the easy choice to add another OS to build for, the numbers should be growing even more.

Jach 9y ago
I also don't think it feels like 90+% these days. My own steam profile says 144/323 games support Linux, plus I've got some number more Linux capable games from bundles that I never imported into Steam but either played on desktop or in some cases the mobile version. (Then there's the "classic" Linux games from the dark ages that I really liked a lot like Battle for Wesnoth, Tremulous, and BZFlag.) Of course of the steam ones, I've encountered several that either flat out didn't work on my system (probably the hardest part of shipping linux binaries is testing for many distros and setups, SteamOS/Ubuntu gets you most of the way there though) or they worked poorly. So most of my gaming is still in Windows 7 but I don't really use that OS for other stuff. Of those 144, I've played maybe half of them (my backlog is huge..) but mostly not on Linux. Either because they didn't support it when I played (Half-Life games as probably the oldest example) or I tried and it didn't work [well] or I just didn't even bother trying. Even for the engines that don't support one-click Linux (or Mac) builds, it's not an insurmountable effort to support Linux, and if the game was already targeting multiple consoles+PC they've probably abstracted most platform specific stuff already. So it's just an economic issue. A lot of the technological issues have been mitigated or gone away.
mjevans 9y ago
I was speaking about potential customers (by sheer numbers) it's currently over 95%; though this is a catch 22 / chicken and egg issue. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ Scroll down, click on "OS Version" (you might need to enable some steam domains in your script blocker) Windows has about 96%, Mac a little under 3 percent, Linux about 0.75%.

pjmlp 9y ago

This is what Carmack has to say on the subject of graphics APIs. "John Carmack: Its still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. Its interesting how little of the technology cares what API you're using and what generation of the technology you're on. You've got a small handful of files that care about what API they're on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they're on." http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf

digi_owl 9y ago
And for every Carmack out there that can dream up whole new render pipelines in their sleep, there are thousands and thousands of games that start with a pre-made engine that in turn i deeply wedded to the DirectX platform. Game engines, much like web browser engines, have become complex beasts. Hell, even as far back ad Wolfenstein 3D i suspect ID Software made as much or more licensing their engine to third parties as they did selling actual games.