Quoting: GuestThat looks great. Has Stellaris become fun yet? Or does it still take forever to get something going just to have nothing to do for the longest time and then start experiencing excessive amounts of micromanaging and insufferable lag?

Clearly it's never been fun at all and all the people with hundreds of hours of play are just a bunch of masochists.

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAnd that 5% isn't a purely random figure. We don't know how much the Steam Deck is going to sell, but I don't get the impression 4 million or so Steam Deck sales in the next year or two is out of bounds. That kind of number would boost the number of Linux gamers on Steam to around 5% from its current ~1%. And that massive increase could not have happened without Proton.

I know we’re talking estimates and projections anyway, but do your numbers take into account the fact that a large number of Deck purchases will be by people who already game on Windows Steam?

No. Yes, that will get messy in terms of doing counts and whatnot, but for me the basic point is: Every Steam Deck sale represents a person with a reason to care if a game runs on Linux (even if they don't know what Linux is). 4 million sales would mean 4 million more such people, and so on.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Liam DaweInstead of launching through Proton it would run it through a compatible native game engine.

To rephrase it, it takes the game data from the Windows version, which is (supposed to be) OS agnostic, and throws it at the native version of the game engine.

One distinction here is that the game engine does not have to be identical to how the original game worked. So for instance, it can do modern interface things even if the original old game was made before those modern interface things existed. Or it can change that one thing about the controls that gave everyone a headache back in the day. Or it can not have bugs that were in the original (or, have bugs that weren't in the original . . . oops!)

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Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: KorsI'm counting on Steam Deck to skyrocket Linux usage, or at least to bring more games to linux based OS

I don't see that happening at all. There is a better chance of customers installing Windows on the Steam Deck than that happening. Proton has shown that it will only lower the amount of native Linux titles being made not increase it.

This will be a new situation. What Proton "has shown" so far will not apply to it.

More analytically--yes, Proton probably lowers the number of native Linux titles made for any given market share. So if you compare a situation where Linux gaming has 1% on Steam and no Proton vs. Linux gaming has 1% on Steam and there is Proton, it seems reasonable to say the second situation will result in fewer native games.
Same if you compare 5% without Proton vs 5% with.

But that does not tell us that a situation of 1% Linux gaming on Steam without Proton will have fewer games than 5% Linux gaming on Steam with Proton. Proton tends to result in fewer native games, higher market share tends to result in more, and we don't have a track record to tell us which effect would be stronger.

And that 5% isn't a purely random figure. We don't know how much the Steam Deck is going to sell, but I don't get the impression 4 million or so Steam Deck sales in the next year or two is out of bounds. That kind of number would boost the number of Linux gamers on Steam to around 5% from its current ~1%. And that massive increase could not have happened without Proton.
I strongly suspect that if the Steam Deck sells at that level or more, the impact of higher market share pushing for more attention to native Linux will be greater than the Proton effect reducing it. And it will have significantly eroded the chicken/egg growth problem for Linux gaming either way.

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So I see two advantages over ProtonDB that should make the whole setup a lot more viable.

First, the Steam Deck being just one thing, one target--same OS, same hardware. It works on it or it doesn't, no worries about what your graphics card is or are you using Arch or Ubuntu or Suse or whatever.

Second, this setup motivates the developers to come to them. With luck and reasonably strong sales (which seem pretty likely), developers will be making sure their game runs on the Steam Deck, and going to Valve to get "verified".

Well, a third: There's something to be said for it being someone's job to get it right. Crowdsourced stuff is great, but quality can be variable.

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Thinking about Blender just made me realize something: When a category of software is dominated by closed, commercial software, sometimes an open source offering will catch up, gain mind share, and replace the main closed offerings as the standard.
But it never happens the other way, that I've ever seen. Once a category's lead offering is open source, that's it, closed has lost. Sometimes something new will displace it, but if so that new thing will also be open source, sometimes a fork of the old thing. Closed source commercial software never displaces open source category leaders.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI must be out of the loop. What's an NFT? I'd look it up, but acronyms are notoriously bad for searching.

Non-fungible token [External Link].

Thanks!

Quoting: NezchanEssentially it's a unique link pointing at a copy of some kind of artwork or other JPG, which is sold and traded among the suck...investors. They, and often the seller, do not have rights to the art itself, what they're selling is just the link to it.

It's as foolish as it sounds. And why they derisively (and hilariously) call people not into the scam "right clickers", because they can just save the jpgs and have just as much right to them.

Thanks! That's . . . um . . . amazing.

Quoting: eldakingImagine the bullshit of rich art collectors and the bullshit of cryptocurrencies. People are spending a ton of money in NFTs because of the promise of selling their "unique pieces of art".

Thanks! I'm trying to figure out whether this counts as something new (if ridiculous) under the sun, or only counts as one more manifestation of the very old concept "There's a sucker born every minute".

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I must be out of the loop. What's an NFT? I'd look it up, but acronyms are notoriously bad for searching.

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It has to hurt for Apple to do that. It basically says "Yes, Apple doesn't have anything that can compete with this even though it's a core kind of software for Mac users, so we have to act like we're happy about something outside our walled garden succeeding. Isn't it bad enough we don't control Photoshop?"

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: foggerYou can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.

Ha, Archive.org is an interesting situation. There is no legal definition of 'abandonware'. But archive.org also won't listen to dmca take downs from what I've seen.

But let's be fair here. Steam is a click and play set up, and with Boxtron you can even have extras like MIDI autodetected and set up for you.

Be nice if the Steam Deck had Boxtron already installed so you could just pick that option for games using DOSBox. Actually, it'd be nice if my distro had that.

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