The Most Significant Linux Gaming Milestones Of 2014

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Most Significant Linux Gaming Milestones Of 2014

This year was huge for Linux gamers with titles like Civilization: Beyond Earth, Metro Redux, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive seeing native Linux game releases. There were also new milestones reached for SteamOS, Linux drivers for better handling OpenGL games, etc. Here's a look at the most popular Linux gaming 2014 milestones along with a call for feedback for what you view as most significant to Linux gaming this year...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg3MzY

[eydee]

The sad thing is that game releases count as milestones... Developers/publishers should get their act together and start releasing ALL games for linux as well.

[mmstick]

I'm pretty sure the release of Empire: Total War on Linux was a huge milestone. It's one of the top franchises in PC gaming. Not to mention, the game runs beautifully on Intel, AMD Gallium3D, AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA drivers. I'm looking forward to the release of the rest of the Total War franchise.

[birdie]

Civilization: Beyond Earth, Metro Redux, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

3 AAA games for a year.

Michael, are you serious? It's a milestone for Linux gaming? It's an embarrassment. Loki around 1999-2000 ported almost three dozen AAA games - that was something to remember.

[dungeon]

I think i will remember only The Talos Principle by Croteam as something new in 2014 . Great game, and yeah same day release for Linux that is what i count and right from developer .

[eydee]

3 AAA games for a year.

Michael, are you serious? It's a milestone for Linux gaming? It's an embarrassment. Loki around 1999-2000 ported almost three dozen AAA games - that was something to remember.

I'm sure there were much more AAA games released for linux 5-10 years ago... It is something. Let's hope more will come in 2015. (The Witcher 3 for example, though I suspect it will fail even more than Duke Nukem Forever... )

[gotwig]

Valve Is Making All Their Games Free To Debian Developers
Valve will be making all of their games -- past, present, and future -- available for free to Debian Linux developers.

No, wrong. Its about PACKAGE MAINTAINERS, not developers.

I was Ubuntu Developer for over 2 years and got nothing what so ever. But the Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers got the free games.

[Dukenukemx]

To me the biggest milestone wasn't a game but a method to play games, and by that I mean Gallium-Nine. Like it or not there was and going to be a lot of games on Windows that won't appear in Linux. The solution isn't to stream those games from a Windows machine to a linux machine, or for that matter to dual boot Windows and Linux. If that were the case why not run Windows?

Wine though is just a pain to get any single game working, and even then it can sometimes run horribly slow. For me on my crummy 4 year old i3 laptop with a Radeon HD 6370M, Mass Effect goes from a slide show to almost playable. Even though Gallium-Nine introduces some graphic bugs, but I'm sure that'll be corrected over time. Unigine Sanctuary Windows runs at 10 fps with medium settings on regular Wine. CSMT Wine gets 13-14 fps. Gallium-Nine Wine gets 20 fps. Just for comparison Native Unigine Sanctuary for Linux runs nearly 22 fps. That's pretty good all things considering.

Not that I don't want games made for Linux. Mass Effect is through Origin and that application has stopped playing nice with Wine for nearly half a year now. There's still patches being made for QT5network.dll but there's been an update for Mass Effect that I still can't apply for it, and saves don't work. But somehow I don't think EA is going to try and bring Origin to Linux, at least not for a while. Even still, I don't think they'll port any old games to Linux when and if they do.

[Dukenukemx]

Meant to say I do want games made for Linux.

[sarmad]

The title should read "The Most Significant Linux Gaming STORIES", not Milestones. Not that there isn't real milestones in this article, but not everything in the list count as milestones.