Could gaming on Linux become a reality?

We've seen a lot of big news lately about gaming on Linux - a lack of games available on Linux has been the reason for many people sticking with Windows, or at least keeping a Windows partition. For a long time, your best bet for playing games on Linux was Wine (used to run the Windows version of the game on Linux), which has severe limitations. Only older games would play, and even then they would often be glitchy.

Now though, it looks like game developers might finally start to support Linux natively. Anyone who's been engaged in the Linux community will probably have heard of the Humble Bundle - a collection of Indie games which would normally set you back $155 in the US, the fifth edition of which was recently made available on a 'Pay What You Want' basis, with some of the profits going to charity.

'Super Meat Boy', one of the games in Humble Bundle V

Overall, people across all operating systems people paid a total of over $5 million for the bundle. Interestingly, on average, Linux users paid more for the bundle than either Mac or Windows users, and almost 10% of the profit came from Linux users. It seems that this statistic was too much for the developers of Unity3D to ignore.

No, not the Ubuntu desktop interface - Unity3D is a huge gaming engine which currently supports Mac and Windows, and is also used for some browser games, console games and phone games. Now though, it's been announced that version 4 will support Linux, which will give developers a huge boost of encouragement to make their games support Linux.

But some big game publishers have already showed signs of interest in the Linux platform - EA, known for such giant games as Battlefield, Sims, Crysis, Need For Speed, Harry Potter, Mass Effect and a huge range of sports games (FIFA, NFL, the list goes on), attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May, and have released two games in the Ubuntu Software Centre. OK, so they're essentially just links to browser based games, but it's a step in the right direction!

And they're not the only ones - Valve, the company behind the 'Steam' distribution platform, is currently working on a Linux port, so perhaps we could be seeing games like Portal, Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike on Linux soon?

The ball is definitely rolling - maybe soon a vast number of Linux gamers could be waving goodbye to Windows altogether...