Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, it is a British game, so I'm sure there's an echo there. But it's different too; The Prisoner was this separate space from the world, this elite prison thing run by the near-infallible organization. We Happy Few is in the world, a dystopia thing where the government is doing this stuff to everyone--plus the trailer gives me the impression that, being British, it's done pretty inefficiently, so rather than near-infallible things are going to crap. Rather "Brazil"-esque.

The studio is Canadian actually. :) And yes, they said [External Link] several works were an inspiration for them including Brazil, The Prisoner, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, 1984 and Doctor Who.

Canadian? Well, hurrah!
It does have a rather "Clockwork Orange" feel to it too, doesn't it?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: legluondunetIs WIne and its derivated (DVK...) the future of Linux gaming?
Game developers could find here an easy way to port their games for Linux gamers.

In the end, the only thing that should truly matter is the actual end-result. Does it work, does it work well and is it supported? If a game developer packages it with some form of Wine and you can tick those three...then it shouldn't really matter much.

We're all aware of the games that has a Windows version working better in Wine than the native version. While it's kinda shame, if you think about this for a minute it only means that sometimes Wine is worth a shot. Native versions and purity is good to have but not always an option, really. Wine is mostly considered a necessary evil because it's often cumbersome to set up and mess with the library overrides and tweaks. If the developer/publisher/porter do that for you so that your experience is the same "click the play button", does it still worry you? I think I can happily live with that. And I guess Gaben is moving in exactly that direction.

I think, though, that basically it's impossible for a thing like Wine to result in equivalent performance. This is not a problem for games where performance isn't an issue either because they're "smaller" games not demanding too much of the hardware, or older games that demanded a lot of old hardware. But when it comes to the "latest and greatest", Wine-based releases would mean Windows games would be consistently faster than Linux games, and the basic gamer position on Linux would then simply be "it's slow".
I still like Wine, though. But I don't like the idea of Wine as the default "release" method for games on Linux, no matter how good Wine gets. It would relegate Linux to a ghetto.
I guess the main reason this bothers me is that to a fair extent I see games on Linux as more of a means than an end--I want to see the Linux desktop grow to the point of being a recognized serious platform with a big share of desktop use. I want this because I support Open Source software, because I dislike monopolies, because I specifically dislike Microsoft, because more Linux desktop users means more Linux desktop development and bugfixing, and because many of the remaining problems of the Linux desktop are related to it being too small for outfits doing desktop-related things (software, hardware, standards) to have to take it into account. A Wine-based gaming solution would in theory solve the problem of game availability for existing Linux users, but with inferior performance would be less good in terms of the problem of gamers being willing to switch to Linux, so it wouldn't help grow the Linux desktop.

Mind you, there is a related issue where Wine could be a big help to Linux desktop adoption: The situation where Wine will easily play older Windows software, and newer Windows versions won't, either at all or not easily. This seems like it's going to become more and more common.

Hmm, I do dual boot and have noticed equivalent performance running some windows games using wine

Take DOOM 2016 for example, I have monitored gpu and cpu usage for it using hwmonitor on windows 10, and then the same on linux mint using psensor and cpu and gpu usage seems to check out about the same.. and an extra bonus, doom 2016 actually loads faster on linux for me

And . . . framerate?

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Quoting: qptain Nemo

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: GuestI just look forward to a day where I don't dual boot to play with friends. It's the only thing I dual boot for. Plus as a bonus aged software that is no longer supported should live on for us using wine well after windows users stop being able to run it.

Well, stranger things have happened. DOSBox is around for a reason, perhaps one day Wine will be such a tool. It is an interesting thought, but we're likely thinking quite a long time in the future with that.

As far as I know it already happens. I remember hearing about people having to fiddle and struggle with games that I can play in Wine just fine.

Happened to me once, three or four years ago. I was happily playing original Starcraft on Wine, and my daughter's boyfriend thought it looked cool so I lent him the CD. He took it home, couldn't get it to work. I think probably he could have, there was like some kind of compatibility mode or something, but still.

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I want the Hello Kitty version.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: legluondunetIs WIne and its derivated (DVK...) the future of Linux gaming?
Game developers could find here an easy way to port their games for Linux gamers.

In the end, the only thing that should truly matter is the actual end-result. Does it work, does it work well and is it supported? If a game developer packages it with some form of Wine and you can tick those three...then it shouldn't really matter much.

We're all aware of the games that has a Windows version working better in Wine than the native version. While it's kinda shame, if you think about this for a minute it only means that sometimes Wine is worth a shot. Native versions and purity is good to have but not always an option, really. Wine is mostly considered a necessary evil because it's often cumbersome to set up and mess with the library overrides and tweaks. If the developer/publisher/porter do that for you so that your experience is the same "click the play button", does it still worry you? I think I can happily live with that. And I guess Gaben is moving in exactly that direction.

I think, though, that basically it's impossible for a thing like Wine to result in equivalent performance. This is not a problem for games where performance isn't an issue either because they're "smaller" games not demanding too much of the hardware, or older games that demanded a lot of old hardware. But when it comes to the "latest and greatest", Wine-based releases would mean Windows games would be consistently faster than Linux games, and the basic gamer position on Linux would then simply be "it's slow".
I still like Wine, though. But I don't like the idea of Wine as the default "release" method for games on Linux, no matter how good Wine gets. It would relegate Linux to a ghetto.
I guess the main reason this bothers me is that to a fair extent I see games on Linux as more of a means than an end--I want to see the Linux desktop grow to the point of being a recognized serious platform with a big share of desktop use. I want this because I support Open Source software, because I dislike monopolies, because I specifically dislike Microsoft, because more Linux desktop users means more Linux desktop development and bugfixing, and because many of the remaining problems of the Linux desktop are related to it being too small for outfits doing desktop-related things (software, hardware, standards) to have to take it into account. A Wine-based gaming solution would in theory solve the problem of game availability for existing Linux users, but with inferior performance would be less good in terms of the problem of gamers being willing to switch to Linux, so it wouldn't help grow the Linux desktop.

Mind you, there is a related issue where Wine could be a big help to Linux desktop adoption: The situation where Wine will easily play older Windows software, and newer Windows versions won't, either at all or not easily. This seems like it's going to become more and more common.

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Quoting: lucifertdarkThis is the game version of the tv series The Prisoner from the 60s, right down to the main character trying to escape from The Village while they try to break him with mind altering drugs & force him to stay, the only difference is he has a name instead of a number.

Needless to say I love that series & I can't wait to get my hands on this game.

Well, it is a British game, so I'm sure there's an echo there. But it's different too; The Prisoner was this separate space from the world, this elite prison thing run by the near-infallible organization. We Happy Few is in the world, a dystopia thing where the government is doing this stuff to everyone--plus the trailer gives me the impression that, being British, it's done pretty inefficiently, so rather than near-infallible things are going to crap. Rather "Brazil"-esque.

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It just struck me that "redemption" is one of those weird words, like "disgruntled". Like, people often get "redemption" but you never hear about them getting "demption" in the first place. Or de-demption.

I, myself, am feeling quite gruntled this morning by the way.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80There are a lot of barriers to coming over to linux full time, there is a learning curve I remmeber using wine for the first time i was looking at people talking about wine bottles and depenendancies and i remember thinking fuck this am out. At least on windows all i have to do is double click and wait until it installs then am free to play. But i stuck with it because well windows 8 was an abomination and windows 10 is even worse and learnt a new platform from scratch.

To this day I basically avoid using Wine. Only thing I ever used in Wine much was Starcraft (I). I mostly just made do with whatever software was available on Linux; before there were games on Linux I pretty much didn't play games. Except Alpha Centauri and one other title from back when Loki was a thing, before it imploded.
That used to be something of a sacrifice, but these days (for my use case) it really isn't; the Free Software ecosystem for (everything except games) has matured and the games are now well past the "more than I can ever play" level. Meanwhile, Mint at least is a really easy transition from Windows (which I use at work, more's the pity). Both Cinnamon and Mate are old style interfaces like a nicer, prettier, more powerful and more configurable Windows 7. Everything works about the same except a bit better; there are occasional minor polish issues but they pale in comparison to the issues Microsoft deliberately builds into Windows. I started using Linux for political reasons and it's really been great in recent years finding that the OS I was using for theory had delivered on its promise and was now the OS I would use purely from preference.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou have, like, SteamOS (or, better, Mint--heh) bundled with the new game. So then, when you go to install the game from Windows, the game installer defaults to installing SteamOS as a dual-boot and then installing the game on it. You can choose to install it differently, such as on Windows as a Windows game, but you have to make a positive choice to do that.

I know it's Linux we're talking about, but a game installer messing with my partitions and boot loader to install an operating system? Evil! Okay, maybe that's a strong word, but I really think the backlash would be worse than any positive effect.

Well, perhaps you're right.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: KetilI don't think daily active users mean too much when it comes to active users in general. There are plenty of users on all platforms who play a few days a week, or even a few times a month who should be considered active, but doesn't contribute much to the average daily active users.

It is an interesting thought yes, but we don't really know what Valve is counting here. Are they only counting users on every day, at least once a week or what? As usual, a lot we don't know :)

However they count it, it doesn't matter that much as long as they count it the same for every platform (technically, we don't even know that that's the case although it would be pretty ridiculous otherwise). I suppose it's possible that usage patterns on Windows, MacOS and Linux are quite different, such that "daily active users" (however counted) had a different relationship to "total users" on each platform, but it seems kind of unlikely.
Also, I can't prove, but I would suspect, that on average there is a rough correlation between frequency of play and frequency of purchase. If that were true, then someone only on a few times a month would on average be less $$ worth of customers than someone on nearly every day, and even if usage patterns were different on different platforms a plausible version of "daily active users" would say something fairly consistent about purchasing power of consumers.

Here's a heaping spoonful of salt to take all that with . . . one counterpoint would be the possibility that, for instance, a big proportion of that still-very-significant 30%-ish Simplified Chinese Steam users, almost all on Windows, (thanks for the figure anth) spend a lot of time online while buying relatively little. That would skew what "daily active users" represented on different platforms from a "selling games" point of view.

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