Quoting: TheBossShould we go for categories based on genre, or should we do things like best gameplay, best graphics, best story?

I'd say the latter, mostly because some genres will have much stiffer competition than others. Maybe you could do best singleplayer, best multiplayer (which can be split into co-op pve and pvp as well)

Quoting: TheBossShould we have a "Worst game of the year?" category, or do you think that's too aggressive? Honest opinions needed here.

No. It's quite hard to dish out any awards fairly, let alone something like this. What exactly constitutes a 'worst game'? A game that doesn't run at all, a game that crashes all the time, or a game that works ok, but is just horribly boring? The randomness makes this too harsh imo.

Quoting: TheBossEarly Access games will have their own category, to completely stop any arguments on them being/not being included. It still has to be a game released into EA in 2015 though.

Good, but do you intend to split each category into 'full release' and 'EA'? Or just one single Early Access? Early Access is so commonplace that that would be a very large category - but then again, it really shouldn't be that common.

Quoting: TheBossShould we limit it to one vote per-category, or a top three? I think three is more than enough per-category if we go for multiple.

I'd personally rather have just one.

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Quoting: morbiusWhat I would like to know is weather SteamOS has a desktop-like interface and wealth of different purpose software in the repositories, so it can replace me Ubuntu on the desktop.

Using SteamOS for your desktop needs was never Valve's purpose. Although a SteamMachine should be capable of more (audio/video playback/streaming is obvious) than just gaming.

And on the hardware survey, it has popped up a very few times for me, mostly just after a fresh install. Which shouldn't be intended.

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'Either drivers or Unity is to blame, but not me!'
Drivers and Unity have issues on Linux, but there's still games out there that work better. May be that the drivers/Unity make it harder for him to resolve this, though.

He doesn't sound too serious/willing about looking into it, tbh.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: subEven worse, it feels like they want to prove that Steam Machines with SteamOS are crap. And they're doing a damn fine job at this.

Yes, there does seem to be a pattern in the broader gaming press of protecting Windows from the unsavory horde of competition, from gleeful reports about Steam Survey results to disparaging comments about the lack of games compared to Windows to the recent articles about performance disparity. We can't deny the facts, of course, but so many of these articles seem to be written with a condescending smirk and a wink to the Microsoft faithful, and that really bothers me. It's like they're trying to kill SteamOS before it even has a chance.

Except that I don't really think it's about protecting Windows, or holding a particular grudge against SteamOS, but rather a closedmindedness, and maybe a preconception about Linux being less professional or something?
Now, I need only blink in the direction of scientific communities to debunk that preconception, but most people have a tendency to protect their preconceptions and grope at things that affirm them.

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Quoting: subHowever, much responsibility and control is transferred to the application developers.

But that is exactly what the AAA-Million-Dollar-Blockbuster-Developers were asking for.
Maybe not so much your creative indie buddy - but they can still use OpenGL.

It's going to be more like engine devs having that responsibility and control over performance and stability. Some engines are built for some games specifically, while others (unity, unreal, what have you will have to work on vulkan though) will be a great help for 'your creative indie buddy'. Which could mean specific engine optimisations will become more important, and drivers could become less important.

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Quoting: DrMcCoyYou know, coming back to your earlier post, there are certain people in my country who do claim that the political journals are conspiring to keep the current politicians in power, and to deceive the white German public. They call themselves "PEGIDA", the patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident.

Just to show how completely off-topic you are: Left-wing activists (and they needn't be extremists in my opinion) also argue that journalists are failing in showing the faults in current political systems. Let's please focus on the windows-vs-linux performance situation.

And to that: Yes, the performance of many games on Linux is lower, we know that and it should come as no surprise to any half-respectable game/technology-website. Yet it should also come as no surprise to them that that situation isn't due to the OS itself, perse. Indeed, Phoronix has benchmarks to prove that things can run just as well under Linux as they do under Windows*, but those benchmarks also point to one more thing: It all depends on optimisation. Linux, I suppose, has more room for that, but Windows has the lead. Mainly because of the history of optimising games/graphical applications under Windows, so I suppose that's a real chicken-and-egg situation.

*when using proprietary drivers, though I am quite happy that AMD open-source drivers appear to be making decent progress.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere's no compelling reason from the consumer perspective why the thing should be running SteamOS rather than Windows, and significant reasons in the other direction.

I'd say consumers have plenty of reasons to ditch Windows, but I'm sure most consumers agree with the above sentiment. (even though you personally mightn't)

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Nice to see, although the first ~18 minutes was basically about the hardware and the controller and wasn't very insightful. It did give a nice peek into Alienware's philosophy regarding Steam Machines though.
The latter part, where he talked a bit about what's coming software-wise was nice. Sounds like things will keep moving forward!

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Quoting: HoriThe only downside of the game is the hunger system... the character simply wants to eat too much. Sometimes it seems like he is eating more than an average healthy person in our real world... In a survival situation a man can go without food for days without too much trouble... and in extreme situations it can go more than a month before he dies. In this game you pretty much have to eat two or three steaks a night... A NIGHT. Yeah, you have to sleep 3 hours, eat, sleep again, eat, and continue sleeping. I don't know about others but I never eat and never even feel hungry at night, even if I am awake and working... This is however not a very big deal, but an issue nontheless. At least it is an incentive to hunt more, which is fun.

While this sounds like it overshot the target, a few things you have to take into account. In a frozen wasteland (I don't know where you sleep in this game, but probably not in a warm cosy place) your body uses much more energy than in our real world. So yeah the character will want to eat more than normal.
Also, I have been known to wake up in the middle of the night because of hunger... from time to time...
But like I said, this sounds like the game has gone too far.

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Quoting: FredOOff topic, but I just got a Steam Client update which finally sorts the Big Picture mode Store for my platform - namely Linux. Now that is leaving things to the last minute...!

Yeah I noticed this one in the patch notes, though I didn't check it, because I never use Big Picture mode.

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