Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI know nothing about the specifics. However, one thing that's certain is that the Koch brothers are assholes. So all else being equal, things relevant to us not being owned by them should be a good thing.

Koch Media(1) is not owned or founded by any Koch brothers. I guess you're confusing this with Koch Industries(2)?

(1) a not too big German media company, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Media [External Link]
(2) an big US corporation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries [External Link]

Ah, thank you for the clarification. Yes, I was (well, I was assuming that Koch Industries had lots of little subsidiaries of various sorts, which it may but clearly not that one).

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I know nothing about the specifics. However, one thing that's certain is that the Koch brothers are assholes. So all else being equal, things relevant to us not being owned by them should be a good thing.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: KuduzkehpanWhat if Valve buys microsoft first, then open sources it and removes found unsafe codes :D yea welcome to GNU/windows. maybe then we replace kernel and upstart bla bla bla. dx12 with Vulkan. Yea LoL for the night.

Ha, Then it is discovered that it has been BSD with a shell on it since Windows 8, because they copied Apple?

Just as likely...

Well that would be history repeating itself given that Apple gave ms the GUI and the mouse interface while MS was being courted by apple way back in the late 70's

Not that Apple invented any of those things themselves.

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Quoting: razing32Hmm. Can't really bring myself to kill humans. But maybe I'll give it a go.
The game that is , not killing humans.

Don't most games involve killing humans? It's just that in most of them, you're a human too. But does that make it so much better?

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Quoting: KimyrielleIt -is- a sound strategy, and I think a lesson learned from their failed attempt to push SteamOS-based SteamMachines at a time when the product wasn't yet ready to compete with established systems. If you want to gnaw away at Windows/XBox's market share, you need to present customers a fully functional system that's -at least- on par with what you're attacking. We still lack a convincing argument for gamers currently (more or less happily) using Windows for gaming to switch to Linux. Every single game available for Linux is also available for Windows, so we need to beat Windows as a -platform-.

Mind you, we may have a couple of arguments for gamers currently (more or less happily) using consoles for gaming to switch to Steamboxes. At original release those arguments weren't strong enough to stack up against the Steamboxes' disadvantages (polish problems, lack of multimedia integration, price etc), but those are the kind of thing this long game is meant to get rid of, except multimedia which will take a bit of work with the multimedia providers. Get rid of those disadvantages, and you have a console with a big library that, with the Steam controller, allows you to play games you can't normally play on consoles (like complex strategy games) and play other games better than you can normally play them on consoles. And also with games that are often cheap.

I think a future re-release, with issues fixed and a lot bigger marketing push, would have a decent chance of making a dent.

I do hear you about a feeling of lost momentum, at least in the AAA space. I'd say that, more and more, anyone much smaller than that--specifically, anyone using one of the major game engines--is likely to take a "why not?" approach to Linux just because it's so much less work releasing multi-platform than it used to be. Ultimately, though, I don't know that it's going to be a story of this studio waking up or that studio throwing a crumb. We'll see more momentum if Valve starts feeling a pinch from moves by Microsoft and decides they better get Plan B (Linux) under way seriously, or if Linux just starts organically increasing its desktop share. There are some indications that may be slowly happening, but I'd sure as hell like to see a faster shift and less ambiguous data.

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Quoting: GuestThese are good news for us!Open shampagne bottles!

As a battle-hardened Linux user I accept only real pain, not the sham stuff. ;)

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Really, from a "promoting Linux gaming" perspective I'd probably be more interested in Valve stats of how much money is spent buying games from the different platforms.

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Old villagers who don't work but help with their wisdom. That's kind of cute.

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Trade steering! Now that's realism. That's what imperialism is all about, baby!

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: liamdaweTo add my own experience, on Linux I've seen the survey maybe 3 times in 3 years and yes I also saw it a lot more on Windows. I don't know what that says, I don't know their methods or how they do their sampling.

I noticed that survey usually asks for things that can't be detected reliably enough, like your connection speed, microphone use, Steam Link ownership and such. I now strongly believe the survey has nothing to do with calcualting the market shares. As a developer, why would you show a user a survey only to account for their platform? It's already known to the Steam binary! So I think the survey itself is overrated and if you haven't got it even once in years it doesn't mean a thing.

As to what the Steam binary "knows"--I work in a university library. Our thing is to keep track of a few million books, journals, DVDs, electronic resources of all sorts and so on. To do this we have an extremely complex and pretty damn expensive software system. And in my job I frequently come face to face with the strong distinction between what "the system knows" as in, the information is definitely in there somewhere, and what "the system knows" as in what there is any way for me to retrieve. Doesn't help that our current system kind of sucks, but it's a general problem with complex software.
So the Valve people may or may not actually know the platform information that the Steam binary must obviously have. Someone could surely code a way to retrieve that information, but whether they have actually done so or whether they just rely on the survey because it's there, we don't know. All we know is, the only data they're telling anybody is the stuff from the survey. Which may or may not be accurate, because they're also not telling us how the dang thing works.

Thinking of the survey, I think I've gotten it like once in the last few years. I don't even get it when I buy a new computer, install Linux on it and start gaming fresh. OK, my /home gets installed on the new computer from backup, but still. Not much surveyage here.

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