While FOSS has a lot of great software, which often rivals and even betters pay-for closed source software in terms of features and stability, it doesn't offer the widest or greatest range of games. There are games in development and a few have been ported but none that I know of are a match for commerical realeases.

That's not to say that there aren't some playable games out there - just don't expect a modern FPS with all the latest graphics features and a full physics model.

So why are Linux games so far behind when the rest of the platform is almost on a par with other popular operating systems? There are a whole host of reasons why games haven't been developed for Linux. Commercial games developers won't develop for linux because there isn't enough of a user base (although a couple of games have been written using platform neutral toolkits and a few games, such as Sim City 2000, have been ported to Linux). There is also a problem for commercial developers with finding developers that know the Linux game development libraries. At the end of the day it's a simple problem of profit - the game would cost more to make and probably sell fewer copies.

FOSS developers don't tend to write games because they aren't generally useful in day to day life. It's one thing to develop a word processor or kernel because one probably directly needs that it's another to spend hour after hour developing a game. I think games also suffer from the same problem as mail clients - it's easy to get something that is sort of playable so everyone writes there own game rather than helping out with one in development. There is also, probably, an artistic reason why people don't get together to develop a game. Producing a game is like writting a book - the developer (or author) has a vision which they wish to share and which is difficult to tell others.

Whatever the reasons though there aren't many top quality games around for Linux yet. What I aim to do in this section is pick some of the best games currently around. I'm actually not that much of a gamer - I just like the odd bash now and then when I have 5 minutes to spare so a lot of the games will be ones that you can just dip into. If you know of a game that you think is worthy of a mention here please let me know (but bare in mind if it isn't in the AMD64 Debian Unstable repository it's chance of getting listed drops a lot).