Steam for Linux has been around for three years, and it completely changed the landscape, bringing a lot of games to Linux and signaling to the industry that this OS is ready to become a gaming platform.

The launch of Steam for Linux back in November 2012 has done much more than just convince a lot of developers to port their games to the open source OS. It sent a clear signal to the entire community, not just gaming, that it’s time to look at Linux more carefully and start building products for it.

Let’s just take the example of Nvidia and AMD. Both companies had drivers for Linux users, but they were in a really poor state, and they didn’t seem to care. The advent of gaming changed all that and we now have much more frequent driver releases, and it’s clear that the developers from these companies have a lot more work to do. Also, Nvidia is working to port the available middleware as well.

Where is Steam for Linux going?

Right now, there are over 1600 games (1606) on the Steam for Linux, and the number of releases increases all the time. More developers choose to port the titles for Linux users, developers change their engines to export for Linux, and feature parity between Windows and Linux graphics will be a fact once the new Vulkan (OpenGL spiritual successor) is released.

We can’t really say that Steam for Linux is a success, as it’s still too early to tell. What we do know is that Valve is also heavily investing a new Linux operating system named SteamOS, based on Debian, and it has big plans for the future.

Valve is playing the long game and they don’t seem to expect fast results. As it stands right now, the Linux users account for about 1%, but they do hope that’s going to change in the future, albeit not the immediate one.