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The influence of Kickstarter (largely due to Linux support for the popular game engine Unity) and Humble Bundle on the availability of games on Linux cannot be overstated. But even outside of Linux, it is wonderful to see how the indie gaming scene is blooming at the moment.

There was an editorial (which I can't seem to find now) on Rock Paper Shotgun, about how we're having the golden age of gaming right now, and it's very true - though we'll have to wait for many of these kickstarters (Torment and Wasteland, to name to two most well-known ones) to come to fruition.

It's also neat to see that they don't necessarily go the nostalgia route. The last one I've backed, Sunless Sea [1], is going to be a mix of different concepts (roguelike, exploration, survival, trade) along with a mechanism for madness, and is not a follow-up to anything in particular.

I'll toast the future of gaming, happening right now.

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/failbetter/sunless-sea/

I completely agree; the combo of Kickstarter, Unity and Humble Bundle has been a powerful force to demonstrate Linux gaming. Then add Steam in to help tie it all together in a convenient one stop shop and advertising platform and it really is looking great.

Thanks for pointing out Sunless Sea btw. I'm a big fan of FTL and this looks like a very interesting game in a similar vein.

It's probably worth mentioning that demand for Linux support on Kickstarter played a huge role in getting Unity ported over.

Ah, it's a kind of positive feedback loop, then. More of this, please.

> Thanks for pointing out Sunless Sea btw. I'm a big fan of FTL and this looks like a very interesting game in a similar vein.

You're welcome. You also get quality, funny, atmospheric writing for the same price.

But thinking about it, it would be interesting to have informal statistics about what kind of game gets funded on Kickstarter. I've seen adventure games, roleplaying games, one Diablo-like, a roguelike or two, and plenty of strategy/tactics games (marking a strong comeback of turn-by-turn play). On the other hand, there seems to be a dearth of manshooters/interactive torture games (apart from a tactical one I read about not so long ago) - either because the public is already well served by Medal of Duty XXIX or due to budget constraints. On average, the emphasis seems to be more on "thinking" games than clicky-clicky.

Were interactive torture games ever a thing?

I'm told you can punch people with broken glass in their mouth to make them talk in Black Ops.

One thing that actually concerns me is how satisfied I am with a few kickstarter games and humble bundles...

I mean Guns of Icarus is no AAA, but it's pretty fun. So is Awesomenauts (I wish it would allow local 2v2 splitscreen!). Not to mention my backlog of fairly fun timewasters. And upcoming Project Eternity and Torment games. I'm seriously pretty much set for games. And at this point odds are if AAA games came to Linux, I'd probably just skip them and wait for the next interesting Kickstarter or Humble Bundle.

If other people are like me (Linux or not, I suppose) the AAA game could be dead in short order.

> and when I weigh up the decision between rebooting to Windows to play something, or just stay in Linux and play one of those. I always stay.

I can relate to that. I also play on Windows with a dual-boot install, and since Steam came out on Linux I just boot up Windows way less for gaming. I end up playing much more the titles which are available on Linux rather than wanting to reboot to play other games.

In a sense, this proves one thing: convenience wins, again. And that's definitely a great sign for Steam, since many Linux users are probably feeling the same way we do.

In a sense, this proves one thing: convenience wins, again. And that's definitely a great sign for Steam, since many Linux users are probably feeling the same way we do.

If convenience wins, doesn't that mean the vast majority of people will just stick with Windows for gaming?

People stick to windows for gaming. Its already the case. The point is to make linux users stick to linux even when they want to have fun.

It is interesting, because I am a long time hardcore unix guy, and I have the exact opposite feeling. I don't think linux offers any advantage over windows for a desktop/gaming environment any more. Back when we had to deal with the instability of windows 98, having games work on linux was a fantasy. But now, between the increased stability that came with moving to NT for windows, and the decreased stability that came with all the crap that comes with gaming on linux, I don't see the benefit. That combined with linux moving so far away from unix, and so much closer to the bloated complexity of windows, just makes it seem pointless.

Thanks for the contrarian perspective. Sure, there's the pain of dealing with drivers and settings and tweaks with Windows, even with Win7, but it's certainly not any worse than getting Linux to work.

I don't mean to nitpick, but that is one thing I don't find to be true. Comparing W7 install to Linux Mint, Mint won by landslide on my laptop. Disregarding the horrorshow of a partition layout from the manufacturer that I had to fix, the mint install was much, much faster and easier, with full support from the get-go. The drivers thing really is an important point, and even when my Windows install was fully completed, the fact I had to cope with the horrible ASUS shell to use keyboard functions has caused me to not even boot W7 for months.

I use arch on my other machines, and naturally that is a whole other story I wouldn't even dare tell a less tech-savvy person.

Good point. I hadn't really thought about it from the point of view of relative advantage of platform. More just my own personal desire to game where I work I guess!

Having said that, I do still find Linux to be a much more stable and high performance platform. One of the reasons I dread dual-booting is that it takes about 5-10 minutes after booting for my Windows installation to be properly responsive to commands. I know I can re-format, but I don't feel I should have to. I've been running the same Arch install for longer than I have Win 7 and haven't had to resort to massively drastic tactics like that yet.

I guess it all comes down to lowering the barriers to entry. Ultimately the mass-market will use what is installed on their computer when they buy it. This gives the major manufacturers one more reason to try the Linux experiment and cut the Windows license costs. It's a pretty good reason too. Gaming was one of the very few things that couldn't be fixed easily through some other means like Wine or VMs.

In my experience, Linux definitely has the advantage. Once I remembered to close my 5 workspaces and sorted out my graphics drivers (problems that won't affect a console-like system), Team Fortress 2 felt buttery smooth.

If I want to switch playlists while gaming on Windows, I have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, click Task Manager, then click the web browser in the task bar on the bottom. Linux Mint with Cinnamon snaps me right there with an Alt-Tab.

Currently I can't play Steam on Linux because I'm stuck with with the OSS Radeon driver, which works fine for a desktop but doesn't have the performance for TF2. Whereas the ATI driver would, except it doesn't support compositing and DRI so I can't use my desktop with it.

I want gaming on Linux if only because it would light a fire under the manufacturers to fix their god damn drivers.

A non mandatory app store is the real thing that has pushed Valve and a real consideration here.

> I don't think linux offers any advantage over windows

It's free in beer, and free as in speech. The developer experience is much better on Linux; doing something like running all your video assets through a converter in parallel is a one-line shell script on Linux [1], but a hundred-line Python script on Windows. Subjectively, on Linux filesystems seem to be faster and overall memory usage seems to be smaller.

Seriously, a long time hardcore unix guy doesn't see the benefits of Linux over Windows?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6363676

>Seriously, a long time hardcore unix guy doesn't see the benefits of Linux over Windows?

Nope. Linux barely even resembles unix at this point, as I mentioned. That one line shell script is also a one line shell script on windows, install cygwin or learn powershell. I find the developer experience on linux to be terrible, I do my development on openbsd running in virtualbox regardless of whether I am running windows or linux.