Like Steam Deck Verified/ProtonDB, I treat steam reviews like a suggestion not a concrete law.

I would hate to see a world without them since I don't trust publications like Kotaku, Polygon, or IGN these days; When I see Mostly Positive or Mixed, I start reading the reviews to see what exactly is wrong with it, maybe there's a big technical issue, maybe the developer abandoned it, maybe the developer was acting rude to people on social media, maybe the game is only 3 hours long while costing $40-$60.

Reviews tell me, and by extension the developer, important information. I understand why people want to demonize the review system, but they should instead be demonizing the people who are treating it as a general indicator of sentiment rather than a tool to become more informed about what you are buying. It'd be catastrophic if they were ever removed, in my opinion. I would buy way less games cause I wouldn't be able to trust much.

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Quoting: GuestHow about not aggressively pushing Proton as the perfect solution to both developers and end-users.
Dropping the requirement that every game sold on the Steam Store has to have a Windows executable.
Make it so every game sold has to have a GNU+Linux native executable.
Mandate all games use Vulkan for their graphics API.
Stop farming out 90% of the work to outside parties.
Ban third-party launchers.
Mandate all games use SIAPI for control inputs.
Ban games that switch to an Epic Exclusivity agreement.

Shall I continue?

That's not realistic, all that would do is piss off developers and make them go to other stores like epic and for longer.
The only thing they basically can do is offer a higher cut to developers who make linux versions, which would be nice, but even that is kind of pie in the sky stuff, and outside of that most of the stuff that you're suggesting is like a child's view of how game development, storefronts, and publishing work, or at the very least "It would be so cool if I had a billion dollars"-tier wishful thinking.

The only valid part of your post that is actually realistic is dropping the outright requirement of needing a windows executable which does seem like something that isn't really necessary, if the dev wants to deal with review bombs from ignorant windows users that can't run their game they should be allowed to.

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Quoting: GuestValve didn't try hard enough getting developers to code GNU+Linux native games as they're selling Windows games. Heck it's telling when the Steam Machines actually shipped with Windows installed because Valve are inept and cannot be trusted to actually deliver or maintain a GNU+Linux based distro.

Just look at the mess that is SteamOS 3.0, shipping with out of date packages and security holes big enough to drive a truck through.

The SteamOS 3.0 security holes suck, yeah. Especially with retbleed out there right now. That's a good thing to bring up.

But "Valve didn't try hard enough getting developers to code GNU+Linux native games as they're selling Windows games", Do you honestly, with 100% conviction, expect any company that has a platform as big as steam, to go "hey let's suddenly lock this store away from 98% of our userbase because we really don't like windows"?

The only other notable storefront most people know about that even supports linux at all is itch.io, yet you're acting like even after everything they did, valve just doesn't care about linux or something, even though they released a whole PC form factor with their own spin of arch.

Don't get me wrong, valve is a company, they're not our friends, they're not a big sibling, so this isn't a "how dare you not be grateful to [company who tried to push paid mods with only a 25% cut for the actual creators of said mods at one point and is currently selling TF2 lootboxes]" fanboy post, I'm just genuinely perplexed at what you exactly expected them to do that they're not already doing.

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Quoting: subAgree. In most cases it looks like only Valve feels responsible to make a game supported by Proton, when it would be a good start if the devs also do their share.

Thing is, they actually tried to get native support. Remember Steam Machines? The Tux item in Team Fortress 2 to get people to switch over? They legitimately tried to make devs natively support linux. Didn't work out. Proton is the nuclear option.

Spoiler, click me

Personally, I'm of the opinion that if a game runs indistinguishably from windows on proton, there's no issue since proton only gets better and better as the years go by (even today there's the occasional example where it runs windows games better than windows) but that's just me.

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Dicey Dungeons is amazing, I'm glad to see this, I'm also glad to see the android port is out now.

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Ugh, even more games to boycott. Great.

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Quoting: denyasisSo that's about 118,000 Deck Users. I guess that's a good number for sales, but I guess I was expecting the over all Linux % to be more positively affected by the Deck. I guess it'll take more time. Hopefully it translates into more mainstream Linux use as well.

A lot of people are just waiting for the mere opportunity to pick up their Steam Deck. The platform's rolling out so slowly, though I'd prefer they do it this way over just bulk releasing them and have scalpers snatch em all up and run into the same problem anyway.

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It's funny, I had a hankering to play Crypt of the Necrodancer again for the first time in like 4 years while trying to think of games I wanted to play on my steam deck and got back into the game, and like 2 months later, we get this surprise update. I love when things like that happen.

Really an excellent game all around that only got better during my absence from it. Funnily enough a lot of memes nowadays use Phonk music and it goes really well with custom music choices in this game atmosphere wise. I was also pleasantly surprised to see there's an official phone version of the game so I can play it wherever even if I don't have my steam deck yet.

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- Implement network video support for The Good Life and VRChat.

If this means that video players are fixed in VRChat this is massive enough news to me to warrant it's own article, because VR related things are the only things that have me keeping a windows partition around at all, and VRChat's inability to play video players in proton is one of those VR related things. To me this is like on the level of if Halo MCC's multiplayer suddenly started working on linux.

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Frankly I couldn't give less of a crap (at the moment). I expect a loading time difference of like half a second or at least within margin of error, most of what I'm gonna be running I'm gonna be running off of a MicroSD anyway. I can see why people might be upset but we haven't seen benchmark differences yet as far as I know so it's too early to tell if this is a "It's whatever, I'm just glad to get my steam deck sooner" or "oh man what were they THINKING"

Don't get me wrong, this isn't me defending playing two barrel russian roulette with hard drive quality within the same pricetag skews, I know how it feels like to watch someone defend a really bad decision and I don't intend to frustrate people in that manner, it's just more me saying we don't know if this will really make a meaningful enough difference to get the pitchforks out yet like we had to with what happened with the REMake games and their bad engine updates that doubled the filesize of the games and introduced bugs.

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