As mentioned a few weeks ago when I presented the racing wheels Linux gamers use, I am still going through the analysis of the the End of March 2017 survey we have conducted, and while there’s a much bigger article coming down the road, I will share some specific results week after week that can be treated as separate subjects.

This time, we had a new question, where we asked:”What specific games would you like to see on Linux, regardless of the likelihood of such ports ever happening?“.

All answers were accepted as free text (base size n=612), which means a respondent could just give the name of a single game, or several ones. The results for the top 20 games are presented below.

The following answers are NOT surprising, but it’s interesting to have some kind of instrument to gauge the popularity of certain titles versus others. And the winner is…

[table colalign=”left|center”]

Game,Frequency (in %)

Witcher 3,23.5

Grand Theft Auto V,16.7

Fallout 4,12.3

Doom,12.1

Skyrim,10.9

Overwatch,10.8

Final Fantasy,10.8

Dark souls,6.7

Nier Automata,6.5

Mass effect,5.7

Elder scrolls,5.7

Rise of the Tomb Raider,5.7

Star citizen,4.7

Battlefield,4.4

World of Warcraft,4.1

Starcraft,3.9

League of Legends,2.6

Deus Ex: Human Revolution,2.3

Dishonored,2.3

[/table]

Well, we did already know that the Witcher 3 was extremely popular, but that’s just another confirmation if we needed one.

My other take-aways:

All of these titles are AAA games. It seems no-one is really craving for specific indie games. Probably because we are already well served in that area.

RPG and FPS dominate the rankings.

Bethesda games. Many linux gamers want them bad. Not too much hope there, however…

Overwatch is one of the most popular requests, and that would explain why so many Linux gamers are trying to make it work under WINE.

Some Japanese titles seem to have broad appeal, like Final Fantasy and Dark Souls. Surprisingly Nier Automata is sticking out fairly high – I would have thought games like Metal Gear Solid would come up instead.

Hopefully such rankings can help some porting companies (Feral, Aspyr, VP, Valve, Codeweavers, *wink* *wink*) to target what to offer next.

BoilingSteam lets you access our content for free, but writing articles is a constant investment. We don't use ads or sponsporship, help us make our activities sustainable by donating via LiberaPay. You can follow what we do via our newsletter, our RSS feed, our Mastodon profile or our Twitter feed. We also have Peertube and Youtube channels. If you'd like to chat, you can also find us on #boilingsteam:matrix.org.