It seems to me that with the weekly stuff going on, this provided an opportunity for allowing Humble to explore non-cross platform space whilst still always having at least one cross-platform promotion happening at any given time. That the value of this wasn't seen (or wasn't considered high enough) troubles me.

I'd like to say that I don't care about the THQ weekly promotion, but as others have said, not being DRM free certainly feels like it diminishes the Humble brand. One thing I don't see asked enough at the moment is that with THQ defunct, mostly sold off and awaiting auction of its remaining IP next month, where is the money going? Transparency of allocation has always been a (perhaps unintentional?) prominent aspect of Humble Bundle promotions, and I find this business unsettling. Sure, the games are good, but the philosophical aspects of Humble are what resonate with its community, and I've never been comfortable with the notion of expanding at the expense of your existing followers (loyalty really does need to run in both directions).

I find the mobile bundle to be a bit confusing as well (and certainly inappropriately named), though with Popcap involved and Contre Jour championing IE, it feels a bit like cross-platform PC support for all titles would have been difficult to wrangle, and at the end of the day, I'd rather not have games that developers aren't interested in maintaining appear on Linux. We've seen this before, and it doesn't really result in positive outcomes for Linux gamers.

Septikos, it's very important to express opinions and give feedback. Simply setting the tip to zero is not enough. Not buying a bundle also doesn't really help anybody understand why they missed your sale, or how they could have gone about getting it. Whether they choose to take feedback onboard and look after their long term fans is up to them, but at the very least, they deserve to be able to make that choice.

Edit: Also, on the note of "copying" other promotions, I'd say that the industry probably owes Humble a few get-out-of-ripping-somebody-off-free cards.

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I wonder where the money for the THQ bundle will be going.

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Well, I managed to pull hourly stats for this sale. It's interesting to see the behaviour of averages compared to other recent Humble Bundle promotions.

http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humble/ts/?bundle=Bastion [External Link]

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Woo!

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Quoting: edgleyTrue but other than it being tied to an account, I don't seem any other serious issues -- I'm not 100% sure at what point a game is "activated" (whether it's at checkout or download initiation), but as soon as it's downloaded you can go offline and play forever and as Steam requires a restart to go in to "Online mode", you can't completely unknowingly loose access to your games from that.

So far as I'm aware, there is (or was) an expiry period after which you had to return to online mode to be able to play your game. Offline mode also precludes players from being able to play multiplayer games for titles that use Steamworks for multiplayer stuff.

Quoting: HamishPersonally what annoys me more is not users being seduced but developers. I would not have a big beef with Steamworks and the like if developers still put out non-Steam versions for those of us that find the "pitfalls" unacceptable.

I think almost everything I own on Steam has another version available ^_^

Vote with your wallets, friends :)

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It'll be very interesting to see how this moves forward and how it competes with/supports Greenlight, and what kind of opportunities it exposes for developers. I do feel a bit like Desura's "Alpha Funding" programme isn't as polished as it could be, and it'll also be interesting to see if Desura react to this.

Steam's DRM is insidiously seductive - it comes alongside features and services that gamers embrace, and it can be very easy to overlook. Like all account based DRM/subscription systems, it can be very easy to lose access to your games, and it seems that many remain unaware of the potential pitfalls (which is never a good thing).

Personally, I prefer to buy DRM free and retail games over buying titles on Steam (I also prefer to buy directly from developers so that they get a bigger cut), though when I get Steam keys, I'll often play through that.

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I don't suspect that releasing L4D2 first was ever the intention - it was just the first title they announced to build up hype.

Also, who wrote that blog post? "MAC"? >_<

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Quoting: GuestQuote from CheesenessActually, when they first included Linux stats, I started manually pulling the data in the hopes that I'd be able to do something with it later. I haven't been very diligent with that, though it's still on my todo list
Well to be fair, there wasn't a lot of data to go by until now. With the latest survey, we finally have a good idea of what's going on. It would be cool to see things such as 32 vs 64 bit adoption over time, distribution usage over time, etc. Now that we can actually see a bit more data.

For sure. The first few months' worth of data is definitely interesting in its own right though.

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Quoting: GuestWow, looking pretty good so far. I'd imaging that these numbers will keep increasing slowly month by month, and it'll be really interesting to see where they go. If I'm hopeful, I'd imagine they will grow very slowly each month, with a slight bump whenever a high profile game is released on Linux.

Hey Cheese, what do you think about a Steam user share visualization for Linux? It might be interesting to watch from here on out.

Actually, when they first included Linux stats, I started manually pulling the data in the hopes that I'd be able to do something with it later. I haven't been very diligent with that, though it's still on my todo list :)

Quoting: GuestHow can they count OpenSUSE user ? OpenSUSE is not in the UserAgent !

If you find your Steam install, and then open steam.sh, you can find the methods that Steam uses to detect distros starting at around line 124.

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Quoting: SabunQuote0.00% Linux 3.2 64 bit
What distro is called Linux? Or is this referring to older Linux distributions in general based on Kernel version? I am curious why they'd include stats for distributions that are practically at 0.00%...

I wonder if there's a future where we'll see 20-40% of the desktop market owned by Linux distributions, in a time where desktops are still important that is.

If you look at Steam.sh, you can see the methods with which Steam grabs this information. When results were published at the beginning of the month, some of us within the SteamLUG community were able to identify that Arch users without lsb-release installed were showing up as "Linux 64 bit" (other distros may show up differently).

It's also pretty easy to put your own text in places where Steam will pick it up. It'll be interested to see if/how Valve go about preventing people from submitting silly distro names.

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