Quoting: Keyrock"The full gamepad support makes me very happy, especially as they have adjusted the UI for it too."

This makes me scared. I hope the UI will be adjustable or have modes to accomodate both controllers and m&kb. My fear is that the UI will be full controller-centric and I'll have to play this with m&kb with a ****ty "streamlined" UI for controllers that doesn't let me take advantage of the fact that I have more than 12 buttons to work with.

Same here. "Game controller/console support" and "dumbed down garbage UI" go hand in hand almost 100% of the time. I hope that's not the case here.

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A survival game not involving zombies for a change? Wow! Call me interested!

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In short, they use DirectX because that's what they are used to, and also because everyone else is using. Same reason why people keep using MS Office.

Thing is that these days there is an increasing incentive to use cross-platform APIs, because in the -overall- market (if you include mobile devices), Windows is actually a niche product these days and DirectX doesn't work anywhere outsides of the MS ecosystem. Time is working in our favour. ;)

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Just bought and tried it (I am a huge Risk fan, but I have never heard of this game before). It's definitely fun!

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<wishful thinking>
It would be awesome if in this time and age, developers would develop with cross-platform deployment in mind right from the start. One should think it's ultimately cheaper than porting a platform-dependent game after the fact, either in-house or by outsourcing.
</wishful thinking>

Realistically - as long as the thing runs acceptably I don't care about what makes it run. If I can install and use it just like a native application, I am good. And by that I mean that I really don't want to have to tinker with Wine, ever. I really can't be bothered going through a trial and error procedure every single time I want to get a game to run. But give me something I can toss on my hard drive and have fun with, and I will be a happy panda. :)

Btw., a badly done native port can be just as much a performance killer as any wrapper, so...

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Quoting: GuestDonate button would have been very sane, what they did is not sane; I don't think Valve can even pull this off properly.

Let's be open for a second: On the internet, the amount of people willing to come back to a page and donate for something they downloaded from there is a really good approximation to zero. I think the best approach would be a "pay what you want" button -before- downloading it, and allowing them to cancel their payment for up to a week after download in case it didn't live up to their expectations. That would be at least a nudge to make people give something to a modder for their work.

But I otherwise agree that what they did there is not sane. ;)

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Shipping a game with exactly one playable map isn't called a F2P game, it's called a "playable demo".

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I like it that developers now pick up the creative ideas that EA actually had in the past, so that we don't have to buy the garbage they are releasing these days. I am going to pick that game up for sure. Now the only thing missing is a good The Sims clone for Linux. :D

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Quoting: subEven if you get the Linux binary "for free" because your engine supports that target,
it doesn't mean you won't need to invest into additional support due to platform specific issues.
That's additional money probably not even covered by the Linux sales.

So for now it seems lots of developers are fine with 1-3 % as they might consider it
a test bed for SteamMachines and build up the required know how.
But if - for some reasons - SteamMachines/SteamOS fail, I bet most of those developers
won't still invest into Linux for 1-3 %.

A lot of devs stayed away from Linux in the past because of the thought of having to support three dozen different distros scared the hell out of them. Rightfully so. Then they apparently realized that they don't have to do that at all and officially picking the largest distro for the "token official support" is good enough. Which it is. Because most of us don't exactly need help to install the newest graphics drivers on our systems. One of the commonly accepted facts about Linux users is that they are a LOT more tech savy than the average computer user. I'd be surprised if we'd make up more than our fair share of the 3% of revenue in terms of support costs. It's probably less.

Second - the point is that they don't have to invest anything if the engine they're using deploys on Linux with basically one mouse-click. To the devs it's not an investment in this case, it's deploying on another platform for basically free and earn a bit more money doing so.
The question is a completely different one when considering a port of a game that can't be deployed on Linux just like that. Porting costs money and you won't do that unless it's somehow profitable. But if multi-platform deployment and cross-platform APIs like Vulkan become the new norm anyway, the need for ports might be largely a thing of the past soon. At this point I might point out that the re-branded Linux that is Android is actually the market leader in the mobile devices segment, so the industry -will- have to support multiple platforms at least for any game supposed to run on mobile devices. The days where you could develop for Windows only and be done are already over for all practical purposes.

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Quoting: PitWould be interesting to see if there is any systematic difference between Steam-only titles and those also available DRM-free outside Steam.

My guess would be no. The issue with DRM is that it's really hard to avoid even in the Windows world, but we're still not exactly graced with an oversupply of AAA titles (all of which seem to be Steam-only on Linux), so I'd guess most people chose supporting Linux conversions at all over making a DRM statement and maybe convince the publishers that supporting Linux isn't worthwhile (that would be shooting ourselves in the foot, no). Boycotting high-profile games on Linux over DRM doesn't seem to be the smartest choice right now. That being said, I would still not buy titles from companies that put an intrusive DRM on top of the one Steam already provides. Anything made by Ubisoft and Rockstar is thus out of the question, but neither publisher seems to be keen on releasing on Linux anyway, so it's all good.

In general - I think the greatest thing that happened to us in the past few years isn't even Steam coming to Linux (although that was of course a great thing), but the fact that now every major engine can deploy on Linux with relative ease (not sure what part Valve played in that, perhaps they pushed that part a bit, too?). Which makes it a no-brainer for devs to support the platform. Getting 3% more sales for almost 0% additional costs - why would anyone pass on free money? In the end, the multi-platform support of engines has considerably eased the stranglehold Microsoft had on games development, which is THE most important factor we had to overcome, in my opinion.

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