After curiosity got the better of me, I decided to have a little fun checking out just how many popular games are available officially on Linux.

We’ve tracked before how many Linux games there are, we often give our opinion on various games in reviews, thoughts posts and so on. However, what about looking at how many Linux games there are as a whole when compared with the most highly rated games on Steam? Interested in the figure myself, I’ve taken a look over it all tonight. Thanks to the efforts of the Steam 250 website which tracks it automatically, we can find this out reasonably easily.

Before getting into it, just a note: I’m only counting games that are officially supported with a Linux icon. There may be some that have a Linux version but they’re not advertised on the Steam store for whatever reason, just to keep it simple.

As it turns out, there’s quite a lot! A lot higher than I was personally expecting it to be, it’s one of those times where I’m happily wrong. Overall, out of the 250 most highly rated titles on Steam as reviewed by users, 132 of them have official Linux support. Compared with Mac which has 156, we’re not far off there at all. Let's just remember how small the Linux gaming platform is compared to Windows, over 50% there really is impressive.

There are a couple titles like Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and Left 4 Dead where we have the later versions officially. We have all the Serious Sam games on the revamped Fusion version and Left 4 Dead 2, so there’s possibly others like that.

Now, let’s take into account the titles in that top 250 list that do not have official Linux support, what about Steam Play? When comparing titles to their rating on ProtonDB where they have a Platinum rating overall (meaning they should “Just Work”™) that’s an additional 21 titles. These include games like Castle Crashers, Beat Saber, Orcs Must Die! and so on.

To put it all together then—Linux titles that are officially supported plus Steam Play titles with a “Platinum” rating together make 153 out of 250 of the most highly rated Steam games. Overall, that's a pretty decent number of highly rated games available to play on Linux.

There could be even more there, some titles on ProtonDB didn’t have enough reports to have a rating. I’m still surprised DOOM only has a “Gold” rating there, as it’s basically flawless for me outside of one windowing issue that was solved with a simple ALT+Enter to re-do the fullscreen.

The list is subject to change obviously, that’s just the state of things in January 2019. I will probably take another look at the end of the year to see how far things have moved either way if anyone is interested in me doing so.

Ps. By doing this it seems I helped the Top 250 website find a bug too.