It's not a new business pattern. Corporations don't want to compete (that's for the labor force), so they are trying to monopolize entire industries (not sure why the name Facebook came to my mind now), or when they can't, at least their own market. Like Disney pulling their stuff from Netflix to set up their own little streaming monopoly for their productions you won't get anywhere else. Or grocery chains buying other stores just to close them down, so people don't have a choice where to shop anymore. I could go on all day long. Baseline is that all sufficiently large business is evil. Which is why we'd need regulations against such practices, but they keep telling gullible people that regulations are bad, so what can I say?

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I haven't deleted my Win partition yet, so I am technically not Windows free. But no, I am not really using it anymore.

On topic: THAT's a feature I wanted Lutris to have for ages. Glad that they added it! :)

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So they made a game for an already over-saturated market (how many card games did we see the past 2 years or so?), compete against a firmly entrenched product (Magic The Gathering), and in a genre they have no experience with, while about 90% of their fan-base was hoping for something completely else (HL3)...and somehow thought that would go well?

I call that optimism!

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In contrast to real life wine, this particular kind of wine is better consumed fresh rather than old, so I guess most of us are using dev builds anyway. But it's great to see that the stable version is out now, so they can once again go to work on new features and improvements! I am really curious to see what they can come up with in the 4.x series, after the giant leaps made in 3.x! :)

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoBut that is the main problem with the gaming on Linux: We need true game developers and not just porters...
Porters are a second class citizens in the development world because they don't create any content, they just adapt content created by others.... Is like to compare a translator with the original writer..

Maybe, someday, Valve will pay Feral for to make a game.

I quite honestly prefer Feral porting somebody else's AAA games instead of trying to add to the pile of low-budget games we already have thousands of, like Aspyr.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2B

Quoting: KimyrielleIf I remember right, Valve already hired the person behind DXVK, so it's not that they aren't getting compensated for their work.

Literally me. That's why I mentioned it ;)

Haha, I had no idea! I guess I didn't exactly tell you news then!!! :D

Thanks for your hard work!!!

Quote

QuoteOpenGL is still fine for low graphics titles but for intensive games Vulkan is a must.

That's something you might want to tell VP.

Then again, if they are stuck porting terrible games with terrible sales expectations I can't really blame them either.

Seriously, most of the stuff they're porting I've never heard of before. I keep forgetting that there even -is- a company left porting games to Linux other than Feral. On their website they list ARMA III as their only game in development right now - and if my memory doesn't totally betray me, Liam reported a while back that the Linux port of that game will no longer be actively worked on.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2B

Quoting: tuxintuxedoOn the other hand, people who work on Wine and components (or simply Proton) will never see that money while doing the work itself.

Well, it does give Valve more money to throw at the parties involved in Proton development.

If I remember right, Valve already hired the person behind DXVK, so it's not that they aren't getting compensated for their work.

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Quoting: tuxintuxedo

Quotewithout the developer of these games even have to support or cooperate with us

That's quite risky. You pay for a game, but the devs basically give you no guarantee it will work. On the other hand, people who work on Wine and components (or simply Proton) will never see that money while doing the work itself.
Remember, a simple update can change many things in a game. And Proton needs to deal with it somehow. It would be more than necessary to have the developers in the back giving a helping hand.

I covered that aspect in my post already, so I will just say that I take a 5% chance for the game eventually stopping to work on Proton over NOT having Proton and the game never running on Linux in the first place.

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I have very pragmatic view about this: If the game runs on Linux in a way that's indistinguishable from running it on Windows, I don't care if it's a native port or a compatibility layer that makes it run. What matters is that it runs. These tests show that SteamPlay is on par with native ports in performance even now, and it didn't even leave beta yet. At the very least it will give us solid gaming options, without the developer of these games even have to support or cooperate with us. That's at the very least a solid Plan B - maybe even the key to solving gaming on Linux.
I like native ports too, but Linux gaming is currently largely based on the goodwill of exactly two major publishers that support us: Paradox and Square Enix. Take 2 has the odd Linux port, but the vast majority of their games doesn't get ported, so I don't consider them overall Linux friendly. NONE of the other big players do. No EA, no Ubisoft, no Bethesda, no Blizzard, no Warner. And chances for world peace are probably higher than any of these suddenly developing an affection for penguins.

Yes, there are drawbacks. A game that runs flawlessly in WINE/Proton might stop doing so with the next update. That actually happened to The Sims 4 last fall. And since the developer officially doesn't have to care, they don't care. Some intrusive DRM and anti-cheat software doesn't run at all, and due to its nature probably never will.

On the other hand, how many native ports did get launched by developers just pressing the "Export to Linux" button and never testing it on an actual Linux machine even once? I have had a few of these. Also, remember when Loki's native ports stopped working on newer Linux machines because of library updates and distro changes? Native ports aren't the perfect solution either, honestly.

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Quoting: DuncYep. The trouble with this sort of thing, even sprinkled with magical machine-learning pixie dust, is that it only knows what you already own or have on your wishlist. With the limited selection of native Linux games (and my own limited finances), I know that my Steam library doesn't really match my tastes in gaming very well. It's getting closer all the time, to be sure, but there are still major titles that I'd like to play but, for various reasons, can't. At least not yet. Valve's big machine brain doesn't know that, and never can.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that sometimes you want something completely un-like anything you've played before. Human minds aren't machines.

Don't underestimate machine learning. That the algorithm can make deductions from factors OTHER than just what's in your own library or wishlist is the very point of it. E.g. it can it will take Windows users into consideration that might have libraries just like yours, only sans these games not available for Linux. It's not too hard to guess why you didn't buy these games, then.

The filter-bubble issue is real, but honestly, if you have 250+ games in your library, it's not all THAT likely that there are still lots of genres left you'd like but never tried yet. At least I like to think if I remotely liked car racing games, I'd have bought one by now. The sheer mass of the libraries Steam users tend to accumulate because of all these sales gives them a lot of data to work with, so I expect their AI to make pretty good suggestions.

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