Currently, it seems to me that the whole "exclusives" question is rather beside the point. SteamOS is missing so many games that other platforms have . . . it's like everyone else has tons of exclusives over SteamOS. One or two in the other direction, it seems to me, would have a relatively minor impact at this point. Which doesn't mean I don't think it can sell right now, but I don't think it can sell to the sort of people who would care about exclusives unless they have so much money that they can buy every platform without noticing the cost, including however-many-dollars for a Steam machine just to get one game. Mostly, it would just piss people off.

If the various hiccups the article mentions can be fixed, and then the general situation in terms of games on SteamOS continues to improve (as it has been rapidly so far, and Vulkan may well help things keep on getting better), then at some point it might be worth starting to argue about exclusives again. Until then, I think exclusives would be basically pointless. Even then I'd likely be agin' em 'cause they're evil, but for now it's just not even worth arguing about.

For right now, improve polish, improve multimedia, push for better drivers, push Vulkan, get lots of games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: drjomsi am on Gentoo, so those drivers are not installed by default.

Gentoo has a "default" state?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Cybolic

Quoting: drmothI don't particularly like Mark Hamill as an actor, but he's seem really great as a voice actor, impressed.

Oh, he's a fantastic voice actor! Surely you know his performance as The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series (and its films) and the Arkham games.

Oh yeah. Iconic Joker. I can still remember his performance in that episode when he thought Batman was dead and he had the guy who "killed" him. Puzzlement, disbelief, increasing unease, anger shading to total flipout, and then "That was fun. Who's for Chinese?" It was a thing of beauty.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

That's impressive. Betcha it was easier to get them because it's MOO and half these people are nerds who probably used to play hours and hours of it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does anyone else find it a weird contrast that AMD are busy putting out all these no doubt highly useful resources about how to do stuff with Vulkan, but can't seem to put out a driver that does stuff with Vulkan?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Always wanted to meet Alf, the sacred river.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I will definitely be buying this before I buy XCOM2. Something about price tag . . .
Harebrained Schemes rock, I've really had fun with the previous two games, they work great on Linux and it's great to see this kind of stand-up support for their games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thank you very much, Dr. McCoy, that elucidated exactly what I was wondering about very clearly.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does anyone have some context for this? I can't quite tell whether this means "Xoreos generally works at least on certain games except for various annoying glitches, and we just cleaned up some of those", or whether it means "Xoreos technically makes certain games run but they are unplayable, and this release cleans up certain issues but leaves that broader unplayable status largely intact".
The progress described, not to mention the tools for easing the continuation of progress, sound very positive, but I can't tell what that means for the general prospects.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KeyrockThis doesn't surprise me one bit. This is the latest in a string of articles from Ars centered around gaming where it was readily apparent the person writing said article was woefully underqualified/underinformed and they've been dipping into click-bait territory with their article titles.

Overall, one wonders if people won't soon be starting to add a letter to "'Ars' Technica".

View this comment - View article - View full comments