I feel like I already explained why. It goes against Microsoft's business trajectory. Most gamers don't care at all about privacy or ads. The ones who do have most likely already made the switch to Linux.
I find it hard to believe you actually know much about what you are saying. Gaming on linux is a limited, poorly performing, second class citizen experience at best. And the support when you run into an issues falls on death ears. Feel free to look at steam, filter by OS, note that when you remove windows from your selection the majority of top rate popular games all fall away.
It is far easier to limit your ad experience, and have a dedicated windows gaming machine than it is to switch to linux for gaming.
Those only count the games that have native Linux versions. Most games are also playable through the Proton compatibility layer. You can see which games on ProtonDB. For example, the Witcher 3 is listed as Windows-only on steam, yet has a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, which means it works fine on Linux out of the box. Funny enough, the Witcher 3 is also Steam Deck certified.
Sorry to ruin your attempt at a jab, but I've posted proton links in of the few responses here. It is fair to say there are far fewer games that are platinum than gold on proton.
And something working and something being supported are vastly different.
And this may come to a shock to you but many people who want to play games don't want to tweak setting to make that work on a unsupported operating system.
This isn't a case for can you do it, this is based around the vast majority of games work fine on Linux, I don't think the average gamer would include making game specific tweaks as fine.
What bubble do you live in? There are a lot of games that don't work well in Linux in addition to a lot of other issues with using Linux for gaming in general.
For instance: VR on Linux is still a shit show, with only one company kinda supporting it and not doing a very good job of it at that.
The pro-privacy, power user bubble, obviously. The one company that supports VR on Linux you're mentioning is Valve, which lets you use their headsets in any OS with no fuss. They fully support Linux, so I don't really know what you're talking about there. The Occulus line on the other hand, requires a Facebook account and tracks your data constantly. Obviously the overlap of Linux gamers and people fine with the Occulus ToS are pretty small. Conversely, the overlap of Windows users and privacy-conscious people who are knowledgeable enough to modify their OS is also very small.
It may surprise you how many people use Linux and have a Facebook account or an iPhone. You seem to have conflated a standard Linux user with a staunch privacy advocate. There did used to be a strong corrlation, but as lack of privacy becomes more normal, and young people grow up in that world, that lessens significantly.
Even if you accept that only some models of Vive and Index really work...
> They fully support Linux
No power management for base stations, the Index camera doesn't work, asynchronous reprojection causes issues, no automatic audio switching, and a host of other little issues.
The contention was that the gamers who care about privacy and ads have moved on from Windows, I am saying this is not true. Even if you care about privacy and ads you might care more about actually being able to play certain games.
The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays. The only major exception is anti-cheat, but even that is starting to change. Even 343 is working to bring the Halo
Master Chief collection to Linux by moving to EAC’s linux offering (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/09/343-working-on-halo-th...)
With the incredible success of the Steam Deck, PC game publishers would be stupid to ignore it.
VR isn’t there yet, but VR isn’t a massive industry anyways. And besides, Valve is the PC VR company. Anyone predicting that VR is never going to work well on Linux is being foolish. As soon as Valve decides to allocate resources to Linux VR, the problem will be solved. And they have every incentive to do so, since they’re clearly all in on Linux gaming.
>>The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays.
Sorry man, this is false, most games have anti-cheat that simply won't work with linux out of the box, you may get titles a year later (early depending on sales performance) and the ones you get rarely work perfectly out of the box.
The only place the "vast majority" statement may hold is if you count the endless amounts of simplistic/indie games, and do not consider the highly rated, highest selling titles.
The steam deck surely is helping, can't argue against that, as is SteamOS in general, but we are far far away from parity between the operating systems.
Actually I play almost exclusively single player games myself, but even those games typically start with DRM protection that makes Linux difficult at times, Denuvo finally has their native support sorted without significant degradation of performance.
And as for the games you listed I would not say they work great on linux, they require tweaking, adjustments, driver updates, switching to experimental builds, etc..
I am not saying gaming isn't possible on linux, I'm saying it isn't as easy, and the results are not on par out of the box with windows. And the things you have to do getting it working are going to typically be provided by game developer support, but by community members figuring it out, and then that having to trickle out to forums and the like.
ProtonDB would typically agree, you can look at the games you listed and see that many of them require specific adjustments to get decent frame rates, avoiding lag spikes, etc...
Now, given the option of having a gaming partition that runs windows and is only used for gaming, or trying to force the games to work on linux. What do you think the majority of gamers would rather even those who are privacy minded.
I'm hoping in the next 5 years are so that this will change, and that windows looses its grip on this market, but currently I don't see many people switching their platforms over what windows is doing.
> Most games aren't multi-player? I could only wish
I believe so. I couldn't find statistics but going by the new releases on Steam and seeing the pre-existing releases, most games on Steam are single player games.
Like even now, you can check the games released in 2022 and see how many of them are multiplayer.
