Category: Editorial

Yesterday, January 7th, Steam hit a new all-time record for concurrent users online showing that nothing can stop Valve's growth here thanks to the popularity of video games.

Valve's latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out now for December 2023, and it shows that Linux and Steam Deck overall finished 2023 on a very positive note.

A common refrain has always been that if developers would just provide access to their source code, then the Linux community would be happy to step in and do the heavy lifting for them; and when Slingshot Game Technology decided to call our bluff and released Soul Ride under the GNU General Public License in 2003, the Linux community did indeed rise to the challenge.

Hoping at some point to play Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck without the use of Cloud Gaming services? Well, it's probably quite some time away, if ever.

While still being the most elaborate, 100 Great Linux Games was far from the only shovelware set of games released for Linux, with several UNIX CD-ROM vendors also seeking a piece of the action for themselves.

You'll have to forgive me, dear readers, because I am a little confused on what's going on at the moment. What the heck actually is an indie or independent game nowadays?

The Steam Deck OLED releases officially from Valve today, bringing with it numerous improvements to my favourite Linux-powered gaming handheld and here's my initial thoughts on spending some time with it.

Just like with the original Quake, it did not take long for established publishers to seek out new and aspiring game development talent to create third party expansion content for Quake II. The first out the gate was Juggernaut: The New Story For Quake II released by HeadGames Publishing in early 1998, soon to be followed by a number of other packs including Zaero developed by Team Evolve.

Having already played the Abuse Linux shareware, the next step seemed to be getting my hands on the registered version. Abuse was later picked up to be published by Origin Systems and Electronic Arts in 1996. Clearly not everything was an improvement, but it was this release that would have its source code opened up in 1997, allowing for the creation of source ports.

We have another fresh Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2023 and the results show that Simplified Chinese as a language on Steam has another sharp jump resulting in some odd results.

After I installed the Flash Player plugin my first thoughts were of Garfield.com, an award winning website which, while a bear to navigate back in the day, was home to a wide array of Flash based games and amusements based around the titular comic cat created by Jim Davis. Caches of the old Garfield.com content can still be found hosted on the Internet Archive.

I think I'm going to need more coffee to process this. Did I wake up in opposite land? Microsoft actually genuinely have a tutorial up on how to install Linux.

At one point it seemed like there was just no stopping the Steam Deck but now it seems after being available for 1 year and around 8 months or so, the Steam Deck has started to move down the top sellers on Steam.

Recent industry news doing the rounds is from Epic Games, who yesterday publicly shared an email that was sent by Tim Sweeney about laying off 16% of the company.

Well, that's certainly an article title isn't it. But I mean it. Microsoft, don't you dare touch Valve. You're fat enough already and too big as it is.

In the ongoing saga of changes with Unity's revenue model, Unity seem set to make some changes but not a full reversal so here's the latest.

After leaving developers furious for nearly a whole week after the recent announcement of making developers pay for game installs, Unity put up a fresh statement.

The saga with the Unity game engine continues, after their completely botched announcement of a new fee system game developers will need to pay.

Over the past few months I have been making a number of upgrades and changes to Dianoga, and the time has come to lay them all out. The first upgrade I purchased at the start of the year was a simple one, but I now had more than doubled the amount of hard drive space Linux had available, and could enjoy more games with my CRT monitor.

Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.