I buy and play an order of magnitude more games these days now that there is a reasonably large library of games on Steam with Linux support. I don't know if it moves the revenue needle for them enough to notice it, but I spent about $10/year on games (sometimes I'd go more than a year between buying a game) before Linux support became a common thing. It's a heck of a lot more than that now, and would be higher still if more games I wanted to play were available for Linux.<p>I have Windows 7 on my laptop, but my desktop machine (which has a huge video card) only runs Linux. So, gaming happens on Linux or not at all (almost; I play Civ V on my laptop sometimes).
Slowly removing microsofts AAA game monopoly!<p>this is a great thing, as a person who only runs linux, I'm super excited at the idea of getting the older games updated to this version and potentially running on Linux. :)
About time. I am so sick of rebooting into Windows just to play the odd game. I find myself spending a lot of the time rebooting for windows updates, removing spyware or finding myself rebooting into OS X / Linux when needing to do work (ssh, git etc...)
Unfortunately, Oculus removed Linux&OSX support. Or at least put it on indefinite life-unsupport. <a href="https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/</a>
Whenever I see news about opengl these days I only think about how great vulkan is going to be. I know the spec won't be out until late this year, and drivers will probably need a good 6 months, but still everything opengl already feels outdated.
Next step must be making the tools run on Linux/OSX.<p>I've been using Linux as a desktop at work, and it just works.<p>(Good HW configuration seems to be the key though, and Windows still is the leader of running almost on anything x86 out there)
Things are looking good for October when the pre-order Steam Controller and Steam Links should ship out :)<p>I don't play games on my desktop computer anymore because I prefer to do work there. After giving my old Xbox 360 to my nephew I've been hesitant to get another console, choosing instead to wait out Steam's living room experience (Steam's where most of my games are anyways). It'll be fun to fill some of my work breaks with a little bit of light gaming on the couch.
supporting your game engine for Linux is great for overall PC game ecosystem and not just Linux. Also, for a casual gamer, its a win as they can probably buy a 20$ game and run it on a Linux laptop without needing to buy the PS machine. I mean, most of us run a i5 8gig laptop as a dev machine anyway.
Not surprising. Demand is coming from developers, so all major engines are supporting Linux now. Those who don't will be less competitive.<p>Some middleware solutions however still lag behind. For instance Umbra 3D still has no Linux support: <a href="http://umbra3d.com/" rel="nofollow">http://umbra3d.com/</a><p>I wonder how Witcher 3 developers plan to port it to Linux without Umbra.
Oh yes, another major step taken! I love how the whole world switches to Linux. Now I hope they start to leverage the GPU driver companies into better Linux support. At least on my computer it's still complicated as hell to get everything running and even then the performance is quite below of what Windows drivers would get done.
There's more in-depth information on the release notes: <a href="http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1" rel="nofollow">http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1</a>