The February 2013 hardware and software survey has been counted and Linux users now comprise 2.02% of all users that are making use of the cloud based Steam platform to play games. This is a good result; the Linux platform is very stable and reliable and it is less trouble than the Windows 8 operating system is. Game such as Amnesia the Dark Descent and Team Fortress are very popular on Linux as well as the ID game Doom 3. I hope that Doom4 is released with a Linux binary, that would be a good game to play on Linux. Linux can be stripped down to a simplistic window manager like Metacity or Fluxbox to run games; you do not need a complex GUI running like you have with Windows to get in the way of your games and you have less malware to deal with as well. In the future I would love to see many more games released for Linux that take advantage of this secure and reliable operating system to give enjoyment to even more gamers in the future. All we need now is good open-source drivers for ATI and Nvidia hardware and the Linux platform would be complete. I wonder if you could somehow install Linux on the new Playstation 4. That will include an AMD x86 CPU. That means that PC games would require minimal rewriting to function on that console.
A very promising future indeed. There are some thoughts on this thread concerning the installation of a homebrew Linux distribution on the Playstation 4, but that depends on what kind of bootloader the console has and how difficult jailbreaking the console will be. Consoles are rapidly overtaken by PC hardware in short order; due to the power of modern machines a Playstation 3 is now an outdated machine and the relentless march of hardware engineering continues to make the PC platform the most powerful on the planet. This screenshot is an example of the graphical quality displayed by the Crytek engine: http://cdn.overclock.net/f/ff/fff1d246_2012-04-26_00003.jpeg, this is running at 2560*1600 pixels resolution and is far better in terms of graphical quality than a console game in my opinion. The future of PC gaming will be photo-realistic graphics and enormous levels. The Unigine Valley benchmark is a 64 square kilometer game map that you may freely roam at your leisure and look at all of the trees and beautiful flowers all over the countryside.
Get this graphics demonstration here: http://unigine.com/products/valley/. This is available for Windows and Linux and may be enjoyed either as an on the rails demo or you may hike around in the exploration mode that allows the player to walk freely around the whole map. Unreal Tournament 2004 has some large maps in the Onslaught mode, but nothing as big as this. If this was an available map for a shooter game it would be awesome indeed. it would be very realistic, especially if it was a mission where you had to sneak up on an enemy camp with a Dragunov SVD sniper rifle and take out an enemy combatant with a 7.62mm steel cored round and then get away safely. Or drive around in a truck to get from your base to the objective. That is what a fun game would be comprised of. Not a stupid locked down experience like Call of Duty. I prefer huge open maps and freedom to do what ever I want in the game. This is why I enjoy the Unreal Tournament 2004 Onslaught mode so much, the maps are huge and the freedom to soar high over the map in a flying machine is the epitome of fun.
That is what I really want from a PC game; huge maps and the freedom to roam around the map and explore.