Admittedly, I don't own a lot of AAA titles, but only one of the ones I own doesn't support Linux (Skyrim). Even most of the indie games I own support Linux. Honestly, it feels like games that don't support Linux have been the minority in the past few years.

Steam Top 3 (# of players playing right now)

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (518008), Dota 2 (456350), ARK: Survival Evolved (58477)

Linux version? 3/3.

How many users of those games are actually playing on Linux? Genuinely curious because I doubt it's more than 10%.

There aren't many stats on actual Linux usage for cross platform games. The only public data is from Humble Bundles, and it was for indicated usage (i.e. you could select what platform you intend to use the game on while buying).

Even if it's 10% - it's a lot of users.

There was some article, that availability grows gradually. I.e. if too many games will come out for Linux at once, the market will be too flooded with them, which will in turn hurt both developers, and users.

Probably 1% or less (based on the steam hwsurvey).

Considering the share that Linux has on the desktop, this is hardly a surprise.

Steam survey doesn't show percentage of usage per OS for cross platform games. At least I've never seen such data published. It's tossed around often, but it's not useful really.

That's true. However, I'd wager that the data would still correlate with the hwsurvey results. Would be interesting to see the actual numbers, especially for CS:GO and Dota 2.

I don't think it would. I saw some reports from actual developers, that differ quite a lot from that survey. So, I wouldn't use it as any sort of definitive metric.

Of my steam library of 324 - yes, mostly Indie games, not AAA, which generally don't interest me - 230 is available on Linux. Now I have to admit I would not buy a Humble Bundle if there were not at least two Linux compatible games in it, but then why would I as I have 3 home machines none of which ran Windows. That changed when I bought a Vive, the same machine has not been switched on since October last year... Oh well another 2k invested in the "future of humanity".

The Steam survey says that 95.97% of Steam users use Windows, and almost 50% use Windows 10.

Only 0.8% use Linux.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

How is this relevant ?

I was commenting on the availability of Linux games. There are very many and they generally don't suck. Avoiding Linux because of a lack of games is not a strong argument, if it ever was.

You mentioned your Steam library....

You are aware that steam runs perfectly under Linux, are you not ?

Of course. Do you have a point?

Not sure how indicative I am, but I run a windows VM just for gaming and have set the same up for friends.

If more games were available on linux I wouldn't have to run the VM and be a lot happier. I still refuse to buy or play any blizzard games due to their policy of ignoring linux users.

Though the other issue is nvidia drivers.

Steam survey is not useful for estimating Linux usage of cross platform games. It's not even clear how accurately it represents all Steam users. But given that majority of Steam games are Windows only, such survey is pointless when you need to know percentage of Linux usage for a given title.

Can Steam run in Wine? If so, Linux might be substantially undercounted. It is a small minority in any case, of course.

Many games work well in Wine. And now with DX11 support coming, even more of them will.

So I've heard; what I was wondering is if Steam itself does?

Since Feb 2013.

What would be the point of that ? Just install steam on your Linux of choice.

So you can run Windows only games on Linux? I do this. It works well.

Their number is gradually rising. Higher availability of games needs breaking the catch 22, it's not an instant process (i.e. bigger market means more games). Linux gaming grew in the last 5-6 years tremendously already. And it in turn increased Linux desktop usage. So catch 22 is eroding and things are progressing in the right direction.

Recent bigger focus on improving graphics situation (Vulkan and etc.) is helping that as well.