It is early days yet, proving any market for Linux games at all is big at this point.

Linux has always had a hurdle in the (probably mostly wrong) assumption that Linux users will pathologically not pay for software.

Assumptions have nothing to do with it. As John Carmack has stated[1], games have been released to Linux, and they have mostly failed to make money. The only major exception that comes to mind are the Humble Bundles, whose unique business model makes them a special case.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_a...

I don't think there's really enough data to draw a conclusion here. Carmack's arguments seem to be based on their web game which everyone already played to death 10 years ago when it was called Quake3.

Why would GNU/Linux users pay to use proprietary software? As long as these games are proprietary, they will only see adoption among recent Windows converts who want the same experience. What's the point? I mean I get it that Windows 8 is bad, but I've seen the same share of gripes about Unity.

Plus a lot of these companies offer low quality ports and little to no customer support for Linux users, and if you don't use a supported distro then too bad for you. So again, what's the point? It's the same bad experience as using Wine.

Why would you not pay for proprietary software? It seems like asking "why would windows users use free software?".

Of course there are some who will only use 100% free/open source software for ideological reasons but these people are a small minority of Linux users in practise.

Most of the new indie game Linux ports work quite well in my experience though YMMV I guess. It would be unrealistic to expect support for every distro.

It wouldn't be unrealistic to expect distro support if these were free software packages that distros could patch and package up for their own needs. But they aren't, they are proprietary blobs distributed through a proprietary app store that is only supported on Ubuntu. And that's the thing with proprietary software: you DON'T get what you pay for. Personally, I refuse to play proprietary games, they offer nothing to me and the experience is always negative. I think it is a farce to say that the technical benefits of GNU/Linux are not owed to the fact that it is an entire ecosystem of free software. If you believe this is a question of ideology, and you willingly disregard it, then what is the problem with Windows?

You probably aren't the target market for Steam in that case.

If there was a compelling collection of open source games I would certainly play them but that has never really been the case.

There are tangible advantages in having open source tools and components such as compilers,kernels and desktop environments even without every program on the system being open source.

I would not consider GNU/Linux users the target market either. I would consider the target market to be Windows users that don't want to use Windows for whatever reason. These people don't care what they use as long as it isn't Windows, they aren't loyal to any one system for any particular reason.

Personally I do not derive pleasure from just playing games, I need to be able to study their source code and modify them. So I see no advantages in having proprietary games on my system. I hope that other GNU/Linux users acknowledge this as well. The one true value of the system is that it is GPL-ed.

I'm not sure what the difference is between a GNU/Linux user and a person who is using GNU/Linux because they don't want to use Windows.

If you look at places like /r/linux on reddit the Linux fanboys there are practically wetting themselves over steam.

I agree that more open source games would be a good thing, but I don't see it as necessarily more important than having access to the unedited recordings of a piece of music.

Is someone really a GNU/Linux user if they have no respect for the core values of the system? I personally don't understand the exuberance on reddit. It's just another package manager in the already large sea of them, and a proprietary DRMed one at that; it doesn't really seem to provide any practical advantages to anybody. I believe it did on Windows, where even developers didn't have any reasonable package management system until a few years ago. But I see no real business strategy here. Also funny that you mention that because as a hobbyist musician I think it would be pretty cool to have CC-SA'ed masters of some of my favorite songs.

Because some are just Linux / Ubuntu users without the GNU tag, like me.

Seriously, because people sometimes pays for games, and that's OK, despite of whatever you choose to believe.

Linux had always had a hurdle in the correct assumption that uniform Linux support is difficult (playing the distro game is difficult when supporting redhead-based and Debian-based distributions) and there's nothing that will change the landscape.

On the other hand, if one distribution emerges as the clear desktop leader (and no, Ubuntu isn't there yet) then maybe we will see support for it.