I find myself wondering if this is all going to happen as smoothly as they act like it will. People, and governments, are starting to fear the big tech monopolies; there's talk about waking antitrust up again. This might make a convenient test case, in say the EU--big enough to look like the kind of market concentration that's problematic, small enough that you don't have to lead by taking on frigging Google or Amazon.

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If it does break cross-platform multiplayer, how much confidence do we have that Aspyr will even fix it this time? I mean, probably they will, it's not an exact parallel with the one they aren't. But their actions have made the question worth posing.

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Quoting: 3zekiel

Quoting: GustyGhost

Quoting: 3zekielActually, can you run steam games on powerpc with qemu usermod ?

Or a Wine accompaniment program called Hangover, IIRC. Although I don't personally have any interest in running proprietary gaming software.

Yeah, Hangover is also based on qemu user mode. If it works that's very cool :)
For me, I think games are art, as such, they don't really enter the "proprietary software" category.

Yeah, I'm at least partly on board with this position. That said, a corollary is that it's a very good idea for game engines to be open source. Go Go Godot!

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Quoting: 14Glad to see Steam has a demo button. I want to try it out. Only problem is, my friends and I have a fairly stable schedule of playing board games in person, so playing online isn't a large desire for us. I think I would need to add a different circle of players to get some use out of it.

I was always an "in person" man myself, but with Covid we went virtual . . . we'd probably have gone to in person, at a park maybe, for the summer except one of our GMs is married to a doctor and so is being especially careful.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoAs I said a lot of times:
If Valve gives a good incentive to the big publishers, they will port all the AAA games to Linux.

"If your game has fully functional SteamOS/Linux version, instead of charge you the 30% of the game price, I'm gonna charge you only the 5% of the game price"

But nooo! For some mysterious reason GabeN refuse to do this....

That might work too well . . . well enough for Valve to start losing scads of money. I can see 25% or something.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: slaapliedjeI was thinking about this the other day. While we have both Unity and Unreal engines with the potential of a 'click to export to Linux' have we really seen a large amount of Unreal based games coming natively to Linux?

The major standard engines support Linux, but, yes, a lot of the middleware components devs plug into their games to save time, do not. Since studios tend to develop the entire game on Windows until it's done, even when they promised a Linux version, they often don't even find out until it's too late.

Yeah, but I think slaapliedje was actually proposing a distinction between relatively real Linux support in Unity leading to quite a few Unity-based native Linux games, and relatively unreal Linux support in Unreal not leading to many native Linux games.

In short, yes, it seems porting is largely dead. Thankfully, thanks to Proton, Linux gaming is not. Ironically we can play more games on Linux now than ever.

Porting, in the sense of games being made by Studio A for Windows only and then ported by Studio B to Linux, is largely dead . . . or if not dead (thanks Ethan Lee!), at any rate pretty dashed sick. But except in the AAA segment I'm not convinced that's had a big impact on the number of native Linux games coming out. Porting was always pretty minor compared to publishers making cross-platform games in the first place, and as both game engines and other cross-platform tools have matured that's only gotten truer. Anyone who, when they start making a game, thinks "I want this game to be cross-platform" can now pretty easily do that.

Proton has certainly allowed Linux gaming to include a lot of non-native games though, and that's been particularly helpful in the AAA space where the factors you mentioned, like the failure of the Steam Machine, had an even stronger impact.

I also think that Linux has and will retain a mindshare among developers that, while fringe, is significantly larger than the 1%-ish market share really warrants. That's for two reasons: The strength, even dominance, of Linux in so many other areas of computing, and I think also the continuing ideological cachet of open source. More than 1% of developers want to release for Linux even if it's barely a break-even proposition.

That said, a bigger desktop market share is still the main thing we need.

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Quoting: cbonesNo Linux system requirements on Steam. A simple oversight (which happens too often) but always worrisome. I am happy to see a Linux demo though :smile:

Mind you, it doesn't on the face of it look like the kind of game that's gonna strain most systems.

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Just reading the title I was imagining that you play as a poor, frightened dinosaur struggling to survive.

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Quoting: FoH

Currently has 60 game systems

See, this is a part I don't get, either for this Foundry VTT or Fantasy Grounds Unity. What does it mean for something like this to "have" a game system? I own the rules to the games I'm playing, and it's like, as long as it makes dice-rolling possible, I can decide for myself what dice I'm gonna roll. So what does having the game system do, exactly?
Ed. to add: Sorry, never mind. Went to the site, watched their 12 minute video, I sort of get the idea. Oddly, I feel like it's too good for my taste. Pulls in too much. Too far from the experience of playing a tabletop game, moving too close to playing a computer RPG that happens to have a game master behind it somewhere.

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I've never tried this. My friends and I have been using Roll20 lately, often with Zoom or Jitsi on the side so we can see each other's faces bigger than tiny, and also because the conferencing part has been pretty glitchy.

So what does it do? Is it doing kind of the same stuff as roll20, or different, or just more? Does not being browser-based make it a significantly different experience? Is it more stable?

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