Quoting: 0aTT

Quote"Something that we said earlier on is that we really want the entire library to work," developer, Lawrence Yang told us, "and if it doesn't work we see that as a bug and we want to fix it."

https://www.pcgamer.com/if-the-steam-deck-doesnt-run-your-entire-library-at-launch-valve-sees-that-as-a-bug/

Yes. Mind you, plenty of things ship with lots of bugs . . .

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: Purple Library GuyA quick google suggests that there are around 50,000 games

That's an interesting tidbit.

Which, just so we're clear, I do not stand behind in any way.

Quoting: whizseThere's about 5000 (open and closed) game specific issues on the Proton bug tracker, and around 20 000 game reports on ProtonDB. So half the games on Steam have never been put through the ringer?

Well, yeah, but specifically the games nobody cares about.

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Quoting: CatKiller

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.

All of which is probably fine from a Steam Deck marketing perspective. I mean, what do these two article topics have in common?
1. There's a shiny new thing coming that might be great!
2. There's a shiny new thing coming that might have problems!

--> There's a shiny new thing coming!
Win.

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So 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?

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So, four categories of games not working:
1. Anti-cheat
2. Microsoft Media Foundation video bits
3. Old DRM, particularly Valve's own CEG, and launchers
4. Games that just have problems--various odds and ends and weirdities

Of those,
1. Is plausibly going to be fixed by launch. It better be. Time is running a bit short though, so they'd better have some internal stuff happening that they're not releasing yet.
2. Depends how fast their procedure is. A quick google suggests that there are around 50,000 games currently being sold on Steam. Let's imagine that 20,000 of those have MMF clips. If they can do their thing with 100 games per day, that's 200 days to fix them all. But probably only 50 days to fix the ones more than a handful of people ever currently play. That's pretty workable. If they can only fix 10 games per day, that's not so great. Mind you I suspect this vastly overestimates the amount of MMF clips or Proton would work on far fewer games than it already does.
3. You'd think Valve can fix letting its own technology work on Proton. So like, CEG, plausibly will work by launch. But there's a cluster of other technologies here, each pretty small, and the chance they'll get them all seems slim. But it may not matter that much if it's all old stuff that few people play.
4. Obviously they're not going to be able to fix all the little corner case problems by launch. If they can clean up the popular stuff that'll probably be good enough.

What I'm thinking is that some of the posts are a bit too pessimistic. Sure, I don't see Valve getting all games working on Proton by launch. But what we're ignoring is the vast gulf between the sales of Cyberpunk 2077 and the sales of Shovelware 0.8. There are masses of games on Steam that hardly anyone ever bought, or which are old and not one of the relatively few considered classics, that hardly anyone ever plays any more. Even games that are in their Indie way solid little successes, or were that three years ago, are nonexistent in terms of market share. It is plausible that 90% of people could find all the games they want to play on a Steam Deck work perfectly even if Valve fixed less than the top half of games on Steam, especially since a whole lot of games do already just work.

Bottom line: If they have anti-cheat nailed and do the videos for a lot of games including all the most popular and squash a good amount of general bugs, particularly in top-tier games, most people may not notice a problem even if technically there are still a lot of games that don't work well in Proton.

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Quoting: Supay

Quoting: FergleFergleson

Quoteit's come with plenty of bugs across all platforms

This is something I was especially concerned about for this release. Paradox has had a lot of quality problems in the last few years and IIRC this is the first update for Surviving Mars not being done by the original SM team. All of the good SM work up to this point was done by Haemiont Games but for whatever reason they're out and someone called Abstraction is in.

This is definitely a release I was excited for but also definitely one I'm waiting on. :(

Paradox sacked their entire publishing QA department last year with very little warning and didn't even tell their other departments. They outsourced the work instead. They kept their own development QA who I believe work on their own PDS titles but there seems to have been some overlap on work and overall Paradox release quality has really suffered since then with significant bugs in most titles.

EDIT: There have also been issues reported with interal problems including bullying and harassment, and their CEO just suddenly quit citing irreconcilable differences with the board over the company strategy. Seems their incredible growth over the last few years is resulting in some issues, along with similar abuse and discrimination coming out of most game companies.

It's so often trouble when some good outfit grows big enough that the suits come along and start making it over into a "proper" corporation (which is to say, a bunch of aggressive, short-sighted greedhead assholes).

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.UltraAnd to quote Papenhoff for the third time since you keep ignoring it: "So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++." - that is his own words - not mine - and it's from those that I base my comments on that it looks like they indeed did commit copyright infringement.

Isn't that basically the equivalent of taking the original Aramaic version of the Bible, that Rockstar had the King James Version, then dumping it into a translator, then cleaning up the code for modern English? (sorry been on a 'History' channel kick).

Sure, and if the bible was still in copyright that would almost certainly be illegal.

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Well anyway good for them. Both for successfully doing it, and for taking a second look at the situation, which can be psychologically difficult.

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For really totally reliable delivery I'm thinking catapult.

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Gotta admit it takes me a bit of squinting to tell the difference. Look at the girl's skirt and you can kind of tell, but I'm not going "OMG, it was so bad before and it's so grt now!!!"

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