14 DAY TRIAL // Steam for Linux has been available for a couple of years already and it seems like it's definitely making an impact, if we look closely at the most played games on the digital distribution platform.
Valve has all sorts of interesting tools for Steam and one of those tools tracks which games are the most played at any given time on the platform. From the top ten games, we can clearly see that seven of them come with Linux support and that's definitely not a bad figure.
These are the games, in the precise order: Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Football Manager 2015, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Garry's Mod, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Counter-Strike, PAYDAY 2, and Warframe.
With the exception of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, PAYDAY 2, and Warframe, all the others have native clients for Linux players, so we can definitely say that it's been a very good year for the open source platform. In fact, the first top four are also Linux games, so we can only hope that 2015 will end with support for all the titles.
Steam Machines could make a difference
As for the market share, the situation is not great. Linux sits at just 1.13% and that could and should be much better than that. On the other hand, the Linux market share in the world also sits at around 1 or 2%, so there isn't much difference there. Valve is working to improve those percentages by launching a new console / PC hybrid called Steam Machine that is powered by SteamOS, a Linux distro.
It's still unclear just how advanced they are with this project and they haven't said much about it lately, but this console alone has the power to make a difference. 2015 will probably be the year when we find out just how successful a Linux system can be.