Quoting: Purple Library GuySo this is very popular. Can someone explain to me the appeal of a game where you drive trucks around, much the way real people only do when they're being paid and have few options?

There's a lot to like.

Obviously lots of people are enjoying it for the meditative experience of watching the scenery go by.

Min-maxers will be solving the Travelling Salesman Problem.

Business sim people will be building up their logistics empire.

Doing a three-point turn with an articulated lorry to put the load exactly where the customer wants it is at least as much of a technical challenge as hitting every apex in a racing game.

It's not for everyone, but the people that like it really like it.

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Quoting: MicromegasAnd of course: The success of ATS and ETS is unthinkable without the success of podcasts. :wink:

Alice Isn't Dead being ideal, obviously.

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Quoting: andregregorherrmannI wonder why all the news sites jump on...

Because they want the clicks.

The Steam Deck is a hot topic, but there's no actual news till December, when it's in testers' hands. Maybe Valve will release SteamOS 3, or a significant update for Proton, before then, for early testing, but they might not. Maybe a game dev will show their game running on a dev kit, but they'll probably keep that internal. Websites want to say something.

Misleadingly overhyping something, and then tearing it down later through something else misleading gives them controversy and drama, which they can turn into clicks. I'm really not surprised that it was the NME that was one of the first outlets to jump on a not-particularly-groundbreaking interview on a small Steam-enthusiast website: that cycle was NME's Standard Operating Practice back in the day.

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The wiggle room for Valve isn't "just install Windows."

They want customers to be able to install Windows on it, because that flexibility is a key selling point, and they have been testing the hardware with Windows, but they don't want people to actually do that. It's bad strategically for Valve, and a terrible user experience for their customers, if they have to.

The thing they'll have in mind when they say "your Steam library is available" is that those customers who've bought Windows-only games that don't currently work on SteamOS 3 will have bought them for their existing Windows PCs. The simple solution (definitely way easier than faffing about installing an OS) is to just turn that computer on. In Home Streaming is already built into the Steam client, and will work from the Deck. All your library, not the whole Steam catalogue.

They want everything to be able to run on the device itself. Both in terms of compatibility and in terms of performance. Their "good enough" for performance they've stated as 30 fps at the device's native resolution, but there isn't a "good enough" for compatibility; they are trying to demonstrate Linux as a viable gaming alternative to Windows. While they're asymptotically approaching full compatibility to identify the threshold that customers will feel is sufficient to not be reliant on Microsoft, they already have a solution built in to let the non-compatible games run. No extra work for customers, and they don't have to leave the Steam ecosystem.

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The art style is super cool. It's one that I'm planning on getting back to on the Deck: I think the touch screen is going to feel very natural for it.

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Quoting: HoriWhen the Deck releases and Linux becomes "mainstream"/"popular" we'll all need to migrate to BSD and start asking for support there.

+1 Haiku

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It seems that a chunk of Linux Steam users are running it as a flatpak.

Description:Freedesktop.org 20.08.14 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.58% +5.58%

Other is still the most popular distro, with more than a third of users. Ubuntu-based is close, though, with 35.23%.

Much as I appreciate the variety of Linux distros, it would be good if that was, say, 60% Ubuntu-based and 30% Arch-based (or the other way round: I'm not pushing a particular distro) and 10% Other. That way developers only need to test one to be representative of most users, and two to be representative of the great majority of users. We can say that's what they should do, but it's better if Steam's charts show that too.

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Quoting: scaineThey chose to simply ditch a platform. The people on that platform have been shafted, treated like second-class citizens. Of course they have a right to demand their money back.

Quoting: scaineIf you take, say, £50K sales, and assume we're 1%... that's £500. Sure, that's a chunk of money to an individual, but c'mon. If you run your studio like a business, and your experiment with Linux didn't yield results - pony up the five hundred quid. Take the hit and move on.

Exactly.

Are we tiny minority that doesn't matter, in which case pony up. Or are we actually often a reasonable portion of sales and the dev outfit just can't handle the support burden?

They aren't planning on any support burden. I don't know why people would think that you could skip testing and have no bugs in the result, but here we are. Testing brings its own benefits outside of the final sales, but bugs after release that you couldn't be bothered to test for? 1% extra ain't never gonna cover fixing that.

Even Valve's don't port your single-platform spaghetti code, just use Proton advice says that you need to actually test the thing, and they even give instructions on how to do it [External Link].

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Quoting: ShabbyXIf a developer supports Linux, I buy and play the game to the end, with no intention of replaying it, then they remove Linux support, should they give a full refund?

Yes.

They've had an interest-free loan from all their affected customers, and they get to not be dicks. Easy choice.

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Quoting: ShabbyXI get your point, but your assumption is that any developer who drops Linux support has a malicious intent, and they were trying to cheat people out of their money right from the get go. That's where the disagreement really is. I don't believe for example the developer in this article intentionally thought "let me boost my sales by 1% through lies and deceit". They simply bit more than they could chew.

And regarding refund, I do wish there was a refund system for this, but it's not simple to be fair. For example, I had a lot of fun with Rocket League before they pulled the plug, is it justified that I get a full refund? I don't think so. Some cases are very clear to me though, if I bought the game and haven't played it yet, and support is dropped, then yes a full refund makes sense.

Being unwilling to keep their promise through incompetence isn't actually any better than being unwilling to keep their promise through malice. They don't have to break their game, and they don't have to pull support. If they want to change their game in a way that they struggle to do on a particular platform they've committed to support they can either push on through to make it work, or not make that breaking change, or apologise and return the money to those customers affected. At no point is falsely claiming support and then just keeping the money acceptable behaviour: you wouldn't let a child act like that, much less a professional software developer.

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