Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: finaldestI think it clear at this point that native builds on Linux are over.

Well, except the percentages of native games are fairly steady. And may start to rise if Godot continues to take off, as Linux is very much a first class citizen in Godot. Note this article from a day ago, where a commenter notes that more than half of the Godot demo reel of games is native Linux.

Every time a game comes out where it mentions not running Linux natively, someone says this. The plural of anecdote is data, but it usually has to be a really big plural. Remembering the last couple of times you saw an article about a game with no native Linux does not qualify.

I would think the original statement was more aimed at the number of native AAA titles being down. Since the exit of Feral and Aspyr from the market, I can not name you a large studio still releasing native ports, with the sole exception of Paradox (which also has limited native Linux support to their core games). You'd be correct about Indie games, though. I can't see a change there, either.

As for the engines, the commercially/freely available ones all have Linux support, not only Godot. That's not even the problem. The problem was and still is that you can't design and implement a game on Windows, using Windows-only expertise, Windows tools, Windows middle-ware, and Windows testing - and at the end of development hit an Export button and expect the output to magically run on Linux. That's not how that works. If you want to export to a platform, you have to make that platform part of your development process from the get-go. The vast majority of medium/larger studios never did that, and unless our platform market share goes up in a very dramatic fashion, I don't expect them ever to. We have to be happy for them having a look at Steam Deck "support".

Judging from the Godot Discord, Godot games seem to be (as of now) disproportionately developed on Linux by people having Linux experience and are generally smaller-than-average scale (e.g. using fewer 3rd party components), so that's IMO why it suffers less from the problem than other engines.

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Quoting: alka.setzerProton, gave us emulated Windows games (mostly under Steam), took from us Native games (under our distro/platform of choice).

It was inevitable. Still, looking at the sheer mass of Windows games we can now seamlessly play in Linux, compared to the relatively small amount of native ports when got back then during porting heyday...it was still a VERY good deal.

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Quoting: KoopacabrasPink slips being delivered like hot pancakes, meanwhile prices keep rising and rising, something doesn't add up 🤔🤔
I mean, if they are selling less, maybe they could try lowering prices.

Games actually got (relatively) cheaper compared with what they used to cost 20 years ago, while the costs for making them have exploded over the same period. The problem is more the opposite of what you suggested - it's rock hard to deliver the quality people want for the price they're willing to pay.

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Quoting: TiZNot even one? I have an easy one. First, Steam is proprietary. Valve does do a lot of great FOSS work, and they are generally trustworthy, but Steam itself is still proprietary at the end of the day. And it has made catastrophic mistakes before. Containerizing it limits the scope of the damage it can possibly do.

That's not it, either. I have about... 800+ additional reasons, at least in my Steam library. A whole litany of proprietary, closed-source games. Only a fraction of them are native, and would have hypothetically unfettered access to the whole filesystem when unsandboxed, but that's enough to prefer to be safe rather than sorry. Steam does have its own container runtimes, Soldier and Sniper, but most native binaries don't use them. Proton is their main consumer, actually.

I love open source software as much as anyone, but let's be real here. There are plenty of super serious bugs in OSS applications, too. Saying that anything proprietary is untrustworthy by design is a bit over the top. With your logic, you'd need to containerize EVERYTHING, and the result of this would be a a fairly unproductive and ineffective system. I get containerization for high-risk applications (yes, like the internet browser), but locking software from trustworthy vendors inside a container is a bit much on the paranoid side.

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I am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

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These free-floating hands are weird. Otherwise, I think I will have a lot of fun with that game. :)

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Who would want to move to another planet just to live in a highrise again? :D

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Strictly spoken, any game that's developed by a studio not fully independent in their decisions is not an indie game. Which is funnily why Baldur's Gate 3 (a clear AAA title) qualifies as indie, because Larian is a fully independent studio, despite its size.

The community seems to have adopted a slightly altered definition of the term, though. An indie game seems to be anything that's a labor of love and has the "Not made by big business" vibe to it.

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Quoting: Mountain ManDoes every 4x game really have to look like Civilization clone?

This game looks way less cartoonish than Civ VI.

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I play a lot of multiplayer games (MMORPGs), yet none of them is using anti-cheat. It would seem the MMO devs are better at designing anti-cheat directly into the application, where it belongs.

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