Quoting: RomlokIn many cases, people would have to play the entire game themselves before they know if it contains inappropriate content

What content, in a game, is simply "inappropriate" universally and for everyone?

The motivation for this appears to be that most games randomly contain nuggets of Objectively Harmful Content that Evil Publishers are trying to mislead the public about. Since we aren't allowed to ban them, we can only force them to disclose on the cover that they Literally Cause Cancer.

In reality, some people don't like some content sometimes. But anyone could dislike anything, with no consistency or reason. There is no way for any work of art to please everybody, and there is no way to predict exactly who will have some objection. The real problem is that some people promote their personal dislikes to a political cause. If they cannot simply ban it, they will apply a stigma to it so that it is effectively boycotted by people who don't actually know anything about it.

Most of us could see how "inappropriate" it is to do this to novels. Why is this kind of political censorship accepted for games?

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It should be true, in principle, that support is the issue and not whether Proton is used per se. In theory, if game publishers agreed to support their game with a port using Proton as a wrapper, to warrant it will run acceptably well and keep it running, that would be fine. Many Linux ports by WB and some other publishers from the pre Steam Deck era used wrappers. But, now that Proton is here, nobody is doing that, and the possibility is really only theoretical. All publishers are doing is dropping plans for Linux with Proton as an excuse.

Because with Proton pseudo-support, no publisher ever has to do anything to make the extra sales. They don't have to spend a dime. People will line up around the block to pay for games that aren't supported on their computer. As long as Valve is encouraging Linux users to buy games that won't run on their platform, the publishers can just sit back and rake in the money without any obligation to handle returns or keep the games working. Valve of course takes its cut as the middleman.

Valve cannot support games without the active cooperation of the actual game publisher. It will always require publisher cooperation. Which relies on publishers having an interest. Which relies on Valve not taking that interest away. As long as Valve takes away the publisher's incentive to do better, they will never do better.

Unfortunate as it is, this is why Linux native actually is better. Socially and economically, it is the only reliable way publishers indicate actual support for Linux. They don't just throw out some software and let Valve put a checkmark on it. If they use a wrapper, it is part of their internal build, and doesn't appear to be a "Proton game." And all this was entirely predictable from the beginning. If any Linux user says "I won't pay for games that aren't actually supported on my computer" then other Linux users routinely ridicule them on sites like this.

If Proton is there forever and Valve does nothing to shift publisher behavior then we are all just waiting for Proton and Steam Deck support to inevitably die due to the failure of Valve's subsidy. Then the carriage which brought Steam Deck users to the dance will turn back into a pumpkin and the entire Linux gaming market, now hollowed out by the exodus to Proton, will disappear as the entire Steam audience switches to Windows on some small device suspiciously shaped like a Steam Deck.

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"Without going through GZDoom and others"? What's so bad about GZDoom? This makes it sound like they are some kind of torture. People who don't know are going to read this and assume they're horrible.

GZDoom has natively supported Linux for ages. Bethesda had to actively AVOID support for Linux in decades-old DOS games which have excellent Linux-native source ports or could run on Linux-native DOSBox. Clearly, the right move for GamingOnLinux is to portray the Linux option as icky in order to promote Windows software.

The same Bethesda which is censoring historic DOOM wads for political parody about Margaret Thatcher.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI do sometimes say or write "USAians", if I want to emphasize that contrary to what many of them seem to believe, they don't actually own all of America.

The idea that "America" is one continent is pure Eurocentrism, as is the idea that Europeans should be dictating how people in the Americas should speak their native languages, name themselves and name their places. Unfortunately, this silly idea of a unitary continent called "America" is still taught in schools in Europe, reflecting the attitude of disappointed colonialists that this hemisphere is one homogeneous mass that should look to Europe as a model. Some non-Europeans do see the imitation of anything European as inherently better.

The widely established colloquial usage of the word "America" (in English, particularly American English) has never entailed a claim to sovereignty over the entire "new world." The word lacks that content, nobody is using it that way, so to read it that way is to willfully misunderstand the intended meaning.

Almost every government and people in the Americas, in all their variety, celebrates its independence from European bullying on such topics as how they should refer to themselves in their native languages. Someday even Canada will formally repudiate monarchism. That will be a great day.

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When it does release, I'll buy it.

I'm just glad nobody has yet yelled that I should just run it in Proton.

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Quoting: Liam DaweIf it was financially worth it, they would do it and they would have kept it up with other changes in the background. Debate the finer details of what it all would entail, and what they should have done, but the reasoning is exactly as I said and anyone saying otherwise at this point is deluded.

As the renowned Dr. Pangloss teaches, this is the best of all possible worlds. It follows that no company would ever do anything unwise or unpleasant, unless it was to do something even wiser and more pleasant. If they removed the ability of a large number of existing customers who bought a game as Linux native, they must have had sufficient reason. No game publisher can ever be criticized for anything it does in this, the best of all possible worlds.

But doesn't this argument mean that nobody should ever write Linux native games? And can't we extend the same argument to cover other software as well? If we have Proton, why do we even need the Linux userland? The entire purpose of Linux is to run Windows applications.

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As a Linux user, why pay for or recommend games that don't actually support your platform? The way native Linux games have been sidelined from the awards is extremely disappointing.

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