Quoting: tfkForget the art. Will it be playable on the deck?

One of the announced platforms is the Switch, so as long as they don't break it from working on Linux it should be fine from an interface and hardware requirements perspective.

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There's some annoying flicker on the collectibles quest giver screens, and the resolution tops out at 2400×1350 for some reason, but otherwise it plays well and is fun. It also picked up my PS4 controller and showed the correct controls, which is sadly unusual.

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Quoting: EikeI feel it would be something different though, on one hand just selling the game for less somewhere else, and on the other hand explicitly telling the customers "If you you would buy on Steam, you would pay more for our game!" The latter sounds like actively hurting Valve's business.

Of course it would be. But you get way less sympathy with, say, a judge, or the gaming press, if you say "we threatened to piss a business partner off so much that they wouldn't want to do business with us any more" than "big bad Valve is pushing around the little guy." They said

When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game "Overgrowth" at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results. But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam.

This is the don't take the piss provision about Steam keys that Wolfire had already agreed to:

You should use keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal.
It's OK to run a discount on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
Occasionally it may make sense to offer your game in a bundle or subscription, timed at the right point in a game's life cycle. Keep in mind that the perceived price in the bundle/subscription should be a price you are willing to run the game at a standalone price or discount on Steam. Philosophically, you can think about it like any other discount: if you’re making an aggressive offer in one place, make it elsewhere too. We want to avoid a situation where customers get a worse offer on the Steam store, so feel free to reach out to us via the Developer Support tool if you want to talk through a specific scenario.

Wolfire's specific scenario of "I'm going to publicise how I'm giving Steam customers a worse deal" was never gonna fly.

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Quoting: scaineYep, that'll be it.

Thankfully, there are sites where you can see the price history for, say, Overgrowth [External Link] and see that there have been plenty of times that the standard price on Humble was lower than the standard price on Steam. And that's using Steam keys, so it's subject to Valve's don't take the piss provision, which games that don't use Steam keys aren't.

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Quoting: GroganI don't see why Valve would delist games for being sold cheaper elsewhere, that wouldn't help them at all. (obviously they'll get zero sales from those games if they don't sell them). That sounds like bollocks to me.

Wolfire's public assertion (which they've rather sanitised for their court filings) was that it was when they were announcing to some customer service person their intention to write a blog post about how they were going to give Steam's costumers a worse deal, that said person said not to do that and that doing that would mean they couldn't be friends any more.

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Other claims like the 30% cut Valve take being "supracompetitive", and another antitrust issue of Valve tying together the Steam Store and Steam Platform seem to be dismissed.

The royalty rate is still in, although the tying has been thrown out. Last time, the judge concluded that Steam didn't become a dominant platform until 2013, so the rate not changing was sufficient to determine that there wasn't anything else to address. In their amended complaint the plaintiffs claim that because Valve bought WON in 2001, Steam has been dominant since 2 years before it existed. And everything the plaintiff says is true is assumed to be true in a motion to dismiss.

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Quoting: TermyI'm just confused that the judge didn't ask for any sort of evidence (which wolfire wouldn't be able to provide of course) - guess he wants to keep enough work for the court going? ^^

Quite the opposite. This is a motion to dismiss, which is to get cases sorted out quickly (and cheaply for the parties). In a ruling on dismissal, the judge assumes that everything the plaintiff says is true, and then sees if there's a reasonable likelihood that they could win: if not, the case gets thrown out. Which is how it got thrown out before. That time, the judge let Wolfire amend their complaint and try again, which is how we're at this point where the case has mostly been thrown out.

Seeing if what the plaintiff has said is actually true comes later.

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Quoting: UsernameUsernameWhy did they make them as ELF in the first place if PE is better?

PE isn't better, it's just more Windowsy. The executables and libraries were ELF because they're Linux executables and libraries, and ELF is the Linux format.

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Quoting: kuhpunktI'm just curious how they handle people using multiple OSs.

Like plenty of people use Windows on their desktop, but switch over to Linux when they use their Steam Deck. How does that count?

It's a hardware survey rather than a user survey. If you have two machines (including one machine that runs two OSes) then they both get counted.

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Quoting: a0kamiI know market share is a meaningful information but has anyone been keeping tab on absolute linux user number estimates ?

Because Steam userbase is constantly growing so a market share growth within a absolute numbers growth is kinda cool actually.

From Liam's handy-dandy Steam Tracker page:

For an estimation of the total number of Linux users on Steam, Valve reported they had 132 million "monthly active users" in March 2022 (source).

Using the latest months recorded share (Apr-2022 - 1.14%): 1,504,800 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.

To be clear, that is not the total, that is monthly active.

But I do keep in mind "being this or that OS user" does not necessarily mean "there have been sales for this or that OS" or "people equally play that amount of time regardless of their system".
I mean there are tons of statistical biases which prevents us to ultimately declare whether Linux is doing well or not but with some hindsight it's looking good.

Some developers talk about sales per platform, but most don't. Of the ones that have gone public with their sales data, those that don't market to Linux users specifically have sales proportions in line with the Linux marketshare, or sometimes a bit lower; those that do market to Linux users specifically tend to have sales proportions higher than that, sometimes significantly so. And in both cases those are generally given as unit sales rather than revenue.

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