It's Been 3 Years Since Valve Launched The Steam Linux Beta, Now At 1,600+ Linux Games

It's now been three years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta.

Obviously, it's been quite a while now since leaving beta and in just a few days (10 November) is when the Steam Machines are officially out and powered by Valve's Debian-based SteamOS. Over the past three years we've seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG), Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2, seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, have tons more games available natively for Linux, they have been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API, they have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more.

In fact, this week marks the Steam Linux game count crossing 1,600! As of writing, the Steam Store is offering 1,607 Linux-native titles! Just over three years ago, many were doubting my exclusive reports about Valve's plans for Linux.

What's been your favorite moments and games over the past three years of Steam on Linux? My favorite Steam Linux titles would certainly be Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Metro Last Light Redux, albeit my gaming interest primarily resides with benchmarking. It will be interesting to see how far Valve is able to take Linux gaming with the reported usage still below 1%.