Recently I asked Ryan C. Gordon some questions about his work in porting games, the current state of gaming in Linux, and where he sees it in the future. For those of you who aren't familiar with his work, Ryan has been involved in porting many games and other software to Linux and Mac OSX. Most recently he has been working with the folks at Humble Bundle to ensure their games are cross-platform.Without further ado...It's making progress. We're turning out to have a pretty big year, with Unity3D coming to the platform, and Valve preparing to release Steam. These are just good foundations to an awesome 2013.Ask me again in three months. :)The question will be: will everyone's enthusiasm infect companies like Electronic Arts? Activision? Ubisoft?Will it bring back Epic and Id?Time will tell.I confess to not knowing much about Windows 8, except that I think I've seen more Win8 commercials this month than I saw political ads leading up to the election.I _do_ think that Valve is making this move to Linux _specifically_ because of the Windows Store. If your product is a store that sells software, can you survive on platforms where the platform maker is concerned with controlling (and getting a cut of) software purchases? Between Apple and Microsoft, Valve has to fight for a less restrictive platform.If they are moderately successful, that's great for Linux gamers. If they are wildly successful, that's great for _everybody_. Someone has to push back on these walled-garden app stores that are popping up on every platform.Absolutely, but there's actually a few factors at work:- Steam on Linux, as you mentioned,- Humble Bundle pushing really hard for Linux ports,- Unity shipping a Linux port of their engine,- Kickstarter being flooded with Linux customers.There's just a lot of data (and specifically, data about money) this year, and it's motivating a lot of developers to test the waters.Humble Bundle is really great to work with. No one is advocating the Linux platform more than they are, and something like 25% of their revenue comes from Linux gamers, so it's paying out for them.I don't know if the indie gaming scene is having an effect on Linux adoption, per se, except when we think about Humble Bundle, we tend to think about the Humble _Indie_ Bundles. And these have given developers several million reasons to be interested in Linux. :)