Looking at the trailer, it seems a lot more abstracted than Stellaris; the gameplay seems kind of simple as a result, despite the description focusing on titanic scale.

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Holy Fury, huh? Kind of putting the "Crusader" back in "Crusader Kings".

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tuubiI don't get all these doomsday attitudes. We probably won't see any more games from these developers on our platform (which certainly makes me sad as a fan), but that's all this means.

With Larian not Porting Divinity 2, that's basically a whole genre (classic CRPGs) gone, no?

With Proton there is just a few games / developers behind walled gardens. The boundaries become more and more not technical.

Well yes and no not having native ports is a big problem because its valve they get white knighted and true they have helped linux because it helps them have an alternative to windows if MS decide to make it difficult to work on windows. Proton is funded by valve and valve does have a patience meter just look at steam machines gone no marketing no mention of them on steam store anymore steam link failed barely mentioned and sold for under a pound last two steam sales. Valve have money and resources but they seem to have a very limited amount of patience.

By closing down Windows MS threatens Valves busyness foundations. So there is two possible ways for Valve to act:
1. Become part of the MS store.
2. Find another open OS base.

I think what Valve does, and did for the past few years, is a very long term enterprise. They never shifted from it, as we can see when we look at Proton. They need Linux, and I think they understood Linux needs more users to be attractive to developers. With the visibility of their strategie they naturally reinforced MS on their strategy. So I guess it's no wonder we see a lot of movement these days:

- Proton makes games playable we never dreamed of.
- Proton makes developers ditch native versions.
- Linux userbase might (hopefully) rise because people that wanted to change to Linux get to play more of their Steam libs on Linux.
- MS might try to deny more games on Linux.
- MS suddenly loves Linux (where it's useful to them).

What we won't see, I think, is Valve stopping what they do.

So from my perspective: F*ck inXile and Obsidian and move on.

Mmm we def see valve differently I see it as a company that abandons products and projects with out any notice after previously being keen and holding press conference after press conference. Valve have helped the visablity of linux gaming for sure but I will never white knight a corporation yes they are helping linux because they expect that investment to pay off. Of course that is to be expected valve is a corporation and needs to make profits yearly I get it but I treat annoucements of support as promises people make in the pub ie it might happen it might not.

Valve is not a corporation! I'm not white knighting them. I say they can't go without an open platform to exist on.

Yes it is

Valve Corporation
Video game company
Image result for valve corporation
valvesoftware.com
Valve Corporation is an American video game developer, publisher and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, that took 3 seconds from wiki

I believe Nevertheless' point is that it's not a publicly traded corporation, the stock is held by Gabe and some Valve employees. Therefore it does not need to worry about the share price or about what traders think of their quarterly results. They do not need to make profits yearly. If they decide some massive investment is worth taking a loss for a couple years to gain future growth, they can do that. Heck, if Gabe and a few others were to decide they don't feel the need to make a profit ever again and want to just wind the thing down slowly and retire, they could do that too. It's not very likely, but they have no outside responsibilities that would actually stop them.

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I'll be interested to see how Valve reacts to this, if at all. Of course, they're unlikely to say that any move they make is a reaction to this, so it will all be just reading tea leaves. But the point is, as someone said earlier this is a shot at Valve's business model. MS strategists may not even be thinking in those terms--I wouldn't be surprised if this is aimed more at the console market and catching Sony. But if they're doing exclusives for Xbox they will make them for the Windows store too, and if Valve see MS trying to promote their store with exclusives . . . well, that's exactly the sort of thing their long patient game with Linux has been intended to counter.
In which case, plausibly they will kick it up a notch or two. Gradual improvement of infrastructure has been happening all this time so they'd have a base for action should they wish to take it. It may be time for them to start taking some actions. I don't think they're quite ready yet--Proton needs to be firmed up a bit more, Big Picture I've heard needs interface improvements, and so on. But you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wished for.

Mind you, I don't think these companies will provide exclusives significant enough to actually shift any centres of gravity away from Steam, so Valve don't need to panic yet. But I'd put in a few more resources and attention if I were them.

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Quoting: JiskinIt's funny how some people reacts to this news: "I planned to buy their games but as Linux support might be dropped, I won't.". This way you reduce the Linux market share and you give another excuse to drop it.

You are mistaken. First, MS don't need an excuse. Second, it was pointed out earlier in the comments that "exclusives" and such was right in their press release. Third, any given person is only going to spend so much on games, so no, such a decision will not reduce overall Linux market share. If they don't spend on games owned by Microsoft, they will likely spend more on games not owned by Microsoft. There's plenty of Linux games to buy.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Botonoski

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

That is not very true, many counterexamples have been given - i think even on GoL - where some people play games in wine because it runs better in it than on windows.

This is true enough but not really a counterexample. Wine is specifically designed to operate as old versions of Windows. Windows could be better at running old Windows programs than Linux is at running old Linux programs, and yet Wine could be better still. And of course it traditionally isn't as much of a problem on Linux because active parts of the open source software ecosystem get maintained and updated along with the OS, so there is very little "old" software. But with games and other closed things, it's a bit different; maybe we need a "Wine" for running old Linux software.

Also of course incompatibilities have gotten significantly worse since Windows 7. But Microsoft used to work hard on making sure old stuff still ran.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: GuestI enabled sync with steam once a long time ago and my Lutris library is now populated with about 600+ games. The only way to delete them seems to be one at a time via the web interface or the client. There doesn't seem to be a way to mass delete games in your library :/

You could always just set it to show installed only (ctrl+H). or do you actually have 600 games installed?

I have about 100 odd games installed on steam

No normal games, just odd ones? A person of eccentric taste. :D

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Quoting: razing32Looks promising.
Only issue i have the factions looks very samey. Like they only changed the color palette.
Hope they give a bit more variety to the cults and make them customizable.

Cult leader: "Hey, work with me, baby, work with me! Three days ago these guys were atheist punks on the street. All I could do to come up with spiffy new threads, you know what I'm saying?"

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Quoting: Guest

We've got sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, baked beans, sex, sex, sex and sex.

I'll have the sex, please.

Bloody Vikings!

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Quoting: g000h

Quoting: GoboYou want a cake? You know the drill!

Ah. The "good old days" of Linux - compiling your own stuff. Sure, you can still do it now, but most distributions give you awesome package management instead.

I haven't used "make clean ; make menuconfig ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules ; make modules_install ; make install" for a long time.

I'm generally so, so happy with the Debian package management. Considerably less irritating than Windows updates.

And now: Steam client with Steam Play/Proton/WINE technology which gives us the opportunity to play games which will never make their way directly onto Linux, with no need to tweak WINE - Just launch the installer and play.

Happy Birthday, Steam client for Linux :)

I'm also really happy with modern Linux package management. What with the gui front ends, it's changed my habits. Used to be, when I installed a new distro/new version, I would set aside a chunk of time to get all the software I probably needed installed and running and make sure it showed up on menus or I had an icon somewhere to find it with, so I wouldn't have to faff around when I actually needed it. Now I don't bother. If I need something, I'll look it up in the software manager and click "install".

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