There’s one primary reason that Linux gamers can enjoy nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games today, and it goes by the name of Valve. “At the end of 2013, when Valve released the beta of SteamOS everything changed,” Dean said. “After years of promoting the various Linux distributions, we had a major gaming company not just porting their games to Linux, but actually creating their own Linux-based operating system. It was an incredibly exciting moment and a turning point for Linux users.”
Now, more than a year into the SteamOS era (measuring from that beta launch), the nascent Linux gaming community is cautiously optimistic about the promise of a viable PC gaming market that doesn’t rely on a Microsoft OS. Despite technical and business problems that continue to get in the way, Valve has already transformed gaming on Linux from “practically nothing” to “definitely something” and could be on the verge of making it much more than that.
Read more at ArsTechnica.
