this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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They’re not the most played and most popular now.
People want to play online shooters, and those generally don’t work on Linux. Fortnite, COD, Warzone, battlefield, apex, gta, pubg, etc. None of them work on Linux.
Sounds like Valve is catering to its veterans rather than uh younger generations. Aren't those games notorious for cheats anyway, despite kernel level anti-cheat?
Yet they’re still the most popular and most played games.
If valve wants steam machines to ever be more than a niche, they need to fix this problem - and it IS a problem.
They sold out man. Less niche please.
If rhey only make 100 consoles and sell out, does that make it not niche?
The steam deck, for all the talk of how amazing and what a massive success it is, has only sold about 5 million units in its entire lifetime. 5 million. The switch 2 sold like 4 times that in its first year.
Only 4 times? That's within an order of magnitude. Maybe steam is onto something.
Maybe valve's solution to the Anticheat problem is to increase the number of Linux gamers, thus increasing the voices asking publishers to support running their games on the steam deck.
Did you miss the comparison being lifetime sales of the steam deck vs single year of switch sales? It also doesn’t include Xbox and PlayStation sales.
Look at the Linux percentage on any steam survey. That’s how irrelevant it will be until Linux gets a solution for kernel level anti-cheat.
You're right; i misread and thought this was the steam machine which has only been kut for a year
The steam machine will likely never even sell 2 million units.
Of the top 10 games currently on Steam, 9 of them run perfectly fine on Linux, and the tenth is Apex.
And apex used to run fine under proton till they decided that it shouldn't.
Precisely because the "rootkit" (whatever anti cheat solution it uses) couldn't actually do its job when running the game through proton iirc
Yeah, and those top 10 numbers pale in comparison to the games I named in terms of player counts. Most of these games aren’t played through Steam.
Fortnite is the only one of those with a higher player count than CS:GO, though admittedly PUBG would slip in around the middle. The rest aren't particularly popular games, maybe you should have named League of Legends instead.
But then you would just play dota or deadlock
That site is useless and made of hopes and dreams lol. It basically pretends consoles don’t exist.
Fortnite alone has over 30 million daily players. That site has it at like 1.5mil lol
That site also has counter strike go at over 250k more “right now” than steam charts say lol
Steam is far from the only place people play games, especially when the biggest and highest selling games every single year are not even on steam.
I'm not sure the comparison with console games is valid if players already play those on console rather than PC. No point in catering to that if they're using an entirely different device anyway.
The comparison is valid because PCs and consoles are vying for the same market share, especially in the current times where consoles are just fixed spec x86 PCs.
It’s especially valid when the steam machine is being sold as a console like experience.
Fortnite doesn't even have 15 million weekly players, and that site is a live player count, not daily. I think you're in a bit over you're head if you're this bad at reading statistics.
Click on Fortnite you spud lol.
There is no way to get live player counts from these games on these platforms.
Also seems like you vastly underestimate Fortnite’s player count. You think it doesn’t even have 15 million weekly players? Oh do I have some bad news for you lol
The daily peak is the largest number of concurrent players you dummy, not how many played over the entire day. And there are plenty of ways to get live player counts, it requires you connect to a server to play.
You don't have bad news for me, you can't even read stats never mind find them.
Connecting to a server to play doesn’t tell you how many people are connected to that server 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
That site can’t even get the same numbers as steam tracker ffs. It’s just hopes and dreams. They literally say on the site that it’s estimated.
You query the server, genius. Genuinely worrying you're this tech illiterate.
Anyway, what was your bad news, or could you not find any?
You think you can just “query the server” of an online game and get the total number of players?
Are you serious? Do you think that all game servers have an API with zero authentication that just returns the total number of players currently playing the game?
And you have the nerve to say I’m “tech illiterate” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The bad news for you: Fortnite still gets over 30 million unique players a day lol
Those ore details you added, not me.
Well I have bad news for you: there exists literally no evidence of that, because it's untrue.
You said that you just “query the server” and get how many people are playing an online game……?
Yeah, I'm not including a detailed explanation for an idiot who cant read statistics and makes up silly numbers of players with no evidence. You don't really think you're worth that kind of time, do you?
You clearly have no idea how networks and servers work. Someone would have to make an API that responds with the number of active connected users, and leave that open with no authentication, or return it unencrypted for people to snoop on. No one, especially big game developers, are that stupid.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
gta does actually, if you and people in yout session block punkbuster
btw anyone wants to do a heist with me at 2am (in gta)
Most of those games have the majority of their player base on console, not on PC. Obviously people still play them on PC, but, the fact that they’re “the most played” ignores the breakdown of where they are played and how big of an audience will be swayed by their exclusion.
LOL not allowing Linux is probably a much bigger issue over all given that it’s player base is PC dominated and it’s still a huge presence.
I've played warzone, battlefield, and apex on Linux in the past. I don't anymore because I don't find them fun, but they definitely worked fine. These days I mostly play Overwatch and Marvel Rivals, which are also some very popular online shooters, and they work as well on Linux. Kinda weird to be making claims like that in such absolutes.
None of them work on Linux, so no, you haven’t or at least you can’t now. No one cares if one of them worked years ago on Linux, that doesn’t make them work now.
LMAO I can promise you, they worked at one point, and I did play them. I know apex doesn't work in Linux now because the devs purposely decided to break Linux/Proton compatibility, and I believe Warzone is the same way. Battlefield was a buggy mess and not very fun to me when I played it, so I didn't really keep up with what happened there, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was dev incompetency as well. Why blame Linux when it's the devs of those games that are breaking compatibility, either purposely or out of incompetence?
Battlefield 6 has literally never worked on Linux. Kernel level anti-cheat has been required from day 1. COD too, has had it for years. BO7, BO6, MW3, MW2, etc - you haven’t played them on Linux.
I think I'm thinking of Battlefield 2042, the one with the huge maps and like 128v128 matches. Never said I played any of the COD franchise, those games are dog shit
Nah BF2042 has kernel level anti-cheat in MP.
BF1 and BF5 I believe worked on Linux.
Warzone has never worked on Linux.
Lol k, keep making assertions about my personal experiences. Anything other than admit there might be some nuance you're not seeing
You can’t have “personally experienced” playing games on Linux that do not and have not ever worked on Linux. There’s no “nuance” here.
I wonder what has to happen to someone to make them deny someone's personal experiences in order to defend kernel level anti-cheat
Me saying that you clearly haven’t played a game that doesn’t work on Linux, and has never worked on Linux, on Linux, isn’t defending kernel level anti-cheat. It’s simply correcting your misinformation.
If I said that Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t work on Series X now, but I definitely played it on there a few years ago, would you agree with me so as to not deny my personal experience?
I promise you, you don't know what you're talking about, but you're dug in because any amount of nuance threatens your stance of "Linux bad because no play popular games, grr"
So this conversation isn't going to go anywhere. Feel free to continue, but it's already effectively over. Nothing I say will change what you think because you're entrenched, and nothing you say will change what I think because it won't be based in reality or reason.
I do though, because some of these games you claim to have played on Linux literally do not work on Linux. Even Steam says they don’t.