More people than ever before want to game on Linux

Oct 29, 2014 13:30 GMT  ·  By

The Linux ecosystem is changing faster than users can keep up with it and it all has to do with just one thing, gaming. This seems to be the most powerful driver in today's development, but why is it happening only now?

The Linux platform is an old one. It's been around for a very long time, but its growth has been very slow. The only domain where it really made a difference is the servers market, but on the desktop it's barely visible. It's not like there weren’t enough developers with the skills and time to make it happen, but for some reason it never really got off the ground.

The Linux desktop has been in limbo for the last decade or so, but things changed a couple of years ago. Some users might think that Steam and Valve had something to do with it, but they are only a factor. In fact, games started to pop up before Steam became a reality, with the Humble Bundle collections. Developers began porting their games to Linux, despite facing some serious problems.

Let's take one example. The first Torchlight game was ported for Linux players and it was plagued by all sorts of problems. The most annoying of all was the fact that the main character had no face. It all had to do with the interaction between OpenGL and the drivers, both of which were pretty terrible.

Now, fast forward a couple of years and we see that Aspyr Media is porting Civilziation: Beyond Earth, which is built on a DirectX engine. Sure, they have some problems with it, but it's nothing they can't handle. The Linux platform has advanced enough that it's possible to read stuff like this and think nothing of it.

Gaming as a driver for development

Why are these things possible? The answer is in the gaming world. If it works on Windows, why wouldn't it work on Linux as well? Gaming is the reason why companies like NVIDIA and AMD are making a ton of money with video cards, why monitors that support 4K resolution are starting to sell like hot cakes despite the fact that there is no media content with the resolution available, and why a simple gaming mouse can cost as much as a processor.

Gaming is pushing the Linux development forward because there are many people who really want to play games and use an open source distribution. Moving from Windows to Linux has many advantages, especially from a financial point of view, not to mention stability and security.

The future is still waiting

It will be a while until Linux users see the same kind of quality for games ported from other platforms, and a time will come when developers will make games available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X simultaneously. Until then, we can only watch how gaming works its magic and what big companies are finally improving their support for Linux. It's all about money, and Linux is about to become extremely profitable.