Quoting: BlooAlien

Quoting: vipor29wouldn't be suprised if this works thru proton.

You mean in addition to the native Linux port being done by Feral, aye? I myself have had quite good luck with Feral ports running excellently, so the only reason I could see for wanting to use Proton for this would be if the network multiplayer is sandboxed to Linux/Mac players, as some folk suggest may end up being the case. Even then, I'd honestly expect some stupid anti-cheat feature to interfere at that point, so I'm absolutely not pre-ordering this, and may not even buy it at all if there ends up being no chance of playing it online with my Windows-using friends. Much as I love Feral's Linux ports, and supporting Linux-friendly developers with my wallet, multiplayer games in 2022 have zero excuse for not being cross-play between platforms, especially in the case where they're already supporting such similar platforms as PC (Linux), PC (Mac), and PC (Windows). Internet is Internet, and carries the same data in the same ways, regardless of which platform it's sent from or received on.

The article is talking about online play.
In practice, you have to use Proton for multiplayer 99% of the time because most of the other people are playing on Windows.

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I am a simple man. I read Shadow Tactics, I press "like". And it's native.

What were those other games about?

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Quoting: Thane

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijaWhen I look at the Steam catalogue and look at games like Tooth and Tail, The Riftbreaker, Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight.. in fact all indie "something-Knight"'s, etc.
I see more appeal for playing them in a handheld console and at the same time, I think the console increases the appeal of these games.
I mean I would play most them in my phone if I could, and if my phone had a gamepad.

That would be Nokia N-Gage. Not very popular product though and was discontinued back in 2006. Symbian did have some games, even commercial ones.

Android phones seem to have gamepad attachments though, which I'm even less familiar with. There's even some indie games without microtransactions available.

I guess Steam Deck can somewhat act as a phone as these days regular phone calls are rare. If Facebook and Twitter work, that's quite lot of things done on a phone covered.

I can't tell you how many times I wished my surface book 3, GPD win2 or switch had a 5g/LTE modem, I have the ROG phone but premium games continue to be mostly absent from Android. An internal modem is essential for a device to substitute phones.

Exactly. Nowadays we have phones with amazing displays, battery life, optimized cooling etc. But most "good" games are still in x86.
Also an indie studio will want to publish for x86 first (sometimes on x86 only), so that they can get visibility on Steam. For many indie games, the gameplay is the priority, and not the graphics, so a desktop PC ultra-wide screen is overkill, but a mobile form factor kind of fits perfectly.

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Sure, private company, selfish, gaming is not same as hardware, closed garden etc. BUT let's not forget:

- Sony had their own distro, as mentioned:

Quoting: LightkeyFor the younger folks around here, Sony has already released their own Linux distribution before.

- Installing Gentoo on PS4 was a thing for a while [External Link].
- As PS5 came out, we may not get the console, but controllers were in stores, and a Sony employee contributed the controller driver for the kernel [External Link]
- Due to Sony's open device program, Xperia phones have been the de-facto standard for Linux-based mobile OS, especially Sailfish which today supports up to Xperia 1 II.

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Maybe mainstream devs don't care so much because they have a huge market anyway. Kind of the same problem as with anti-cheat software, why should Riot care about a few hundreds of players anyway.

But for indie developers I think it's a different story. Suddenly this console gives their games more appeal, and I think these games give the console more appeal.

When I look at the Steam catalogue and look at games like Tooth and Tail, The Riftbreaker, Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight.. in fact all indie "something-Knight"'s, etc.
I see more appeal for playing them in a handheld console and at the same time, I think the console increases the appeal of these games.
I mean I would play most them in my phone if I could, and if my phone had a gamepad.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumCrash Bandicoot? Wasn't that Naughty Dog? (owned by sony?) :unsure:

As far as I know, latest ones:
- Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (Activision, to be acquired)
- Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! (King, to be acquired as well)

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Quoting: KimyrielleOk, and tbh, is anybody really going to miss what was one of the most toxic companies to work for in America?

Other than that, geesh, did REALLY nobody in charge ever read a Economics textbook to realize that market concentration is bad? Will this stop only when there is only MS and Sony and their two consoles left? Does nobody realize that for a free-market economy to work, it takes a think called competition. And does nobody realize that if companies can spend that kind of money to buy all their competitors, we're not taxing corporations nearly high enough?

Hear, hear.

I didn't see positives in what is a creative enterprise (making games) when one has such a boss, and now even less positives when one has such a boss who also has a boss.

I would like to see more opportunities for small indie developers. I am hoping that the Steam Deck makes certain games more attractive, like Tooth and Tail, Blasphemous, etc... and on the other hand, looking at games like that makes (for me) the Steam Deck more attractive.

In the meantime, the list of intellectual property that would be in the hands of Microsoft after this merge is chilling:

Call of Duty
Diablo
Warcraft
Overwatch
Starcraft
Crash Bandicoot
Guitar Hero
Tony Hawk Pro Skater
Fallout
Doom
Quake
Psychonauts
Elder Scrolls
Prey
Wolfenstein
Dishonored
Minecraft
Candy Crush

Not to forget the XBox franchises:

Halo, Forza, Fable, Gears, Perfect Dark, Age of Empires ...

There is grounds for some lawyers to at least look into this.

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It is big news, yes, but it's hard to foresee a positive impact.

I would rather have game makers get more independence, creatively speaking. That went already downhill during the Activision merge, so this is looking less promising.

Pretty likely, that they got them on the cheap: no presence in the games awards this year, no blizzcon this year. It is a very good move by Microsoft. Reminds me of Nokia...

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Is it perhaps a little odd to be so excited by a mouse?

Not odd at all. Intellimouse 3 came out in 2006-ish and since then the only serious alternative to it have been the Zowies, but even then I feel like some players have stuck to Intellimouse Classic until something like Vaxxee came out.

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Now I want to give the counter-point: what if this has more impact on Linux users than anything else, at the end of the day?

After all, nobody's got the consumer Steam Deck in their hands yet. And there is a good chance that there's so much demand that Valve cannot fabricate enough consoles anyway. Hell, it's been difficult to meet demand even for niche stuff like the Aya Neo.

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