Quoting: Crazy Penguin

Quoting: SketchStickWas the Steam Machines even available outside of the US? I wanted to buy one but none of them appeared in Australia.

Yes, at least in Europe you could buy the ones from Alienware and the ZBox from Zotac.

And not just from Steam but through regular Zotac and Dell sales channels, which means basically all major PC shops.

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Quoting: MyeulCI hope they will sort these issues out. That's probably another reason to start with OpenGL rather than DX...

And penalise 90%+ of your clients to make life easier for the 2%? OpenGL has limitations that DX doesn't.

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Oh, no, please let me complete DoW2 and Shadow of Mordor first...

That said - awesome!

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One thing most people seem to miss is the fact that both Steam Machines and SteamOS are just brand entities. What was actually designed in the making of both?

If you talk about consoles there's hardware and software that was designed, programmed and manufactured.

Steam has the Linux Steam client that's actively developed, same with the Big Picture Mode. The base system is just Debian. "SteamOS" is just the steamcompmgr plus a couple of tweaks and scripts for autoconfiguration and autorecovery. Oh, yes, and the trick to get games output 1080p whatever their internal resolution is.

There is no such thing as "Steam Machine". The only thing companies had to do was to take a PC, usually small factor, test if it works with SteamOS and slap Steam logo on it. Zotac Nen is Zotac Magnus 970, Syber Steam Machine is Syber Vapor, Alienware Steam Machine is Alienware Alpha - ok, reportedly the last one started as a Steam Machine prototype and was repurposed as a Windows PC.

Compare it with the effort that Valve and HTC put into SteamVR.

The only elements of the "Steam Universe" that took an actual effort to design are Steam Link and Steam Controller - and, coincidentally, these are the two elements which got some popularity.

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Ok, half a year with a Steam Machine and SteamOS.

Steam Machines and SteamOS promised the best of both worlds: freedom of a PC (even freer than on Windows) and convenience of a console. So as soon as I got one, I added Debian repositories using awesome SteamOS-Tools, installed Minecraft and Kodi. Sure, I had to take a keyboard from my main PC to do some console magic, but after I installed sshd, I didn't even have to do that - remote administration FTW.

And then issues started: broken upgrades, reboot hell, Minecraft launcher didn't work with a Steam Controller virtual keyboard, so I had to attach an old USB keyboard... Kodi wasn't that accessible, as I had to fire up Steam and then to start Kodi - Chromecast is much friendlier... and cheaper. Installing games from GOG proved troublesome because of additional restrictions that Steam client puts on .desktop files...

So I restored the system partition and use it purely as a PC console: vanilla SteamOS, Steam games only. I use Chromecast for multimedia. RTS (e.g. Dawn of War 2) are barely playable, so I play them on Debian using k/m.

Would I buy one today? Probably yes, or I would get myself PS4 to play AAA games hassle free and upgraded my Debian box for PC only games available on Linux, I don't know.

That said, Train Fever or Cities:Skylines are awesome on 100'' and Shadow of Mordor is much better using a Steam Controller than either k/m or an Xbox controller. And Zotac Nen is sweet: way smaller than a console, dead quiet, fast to boot and fast to shut down.

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If we assume that Linux gamers are about 1℅ of Steam users, it means his game had twice as big market penetration on Linux than on Windows.

It partially comes from limited options, but still, if we reach 10℅ users publishers can expect sales of more than that.

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I'll be watching them closely. I have only recently started playing Train Fever and I like it in general, though there are some issues. Automagical turning of locomotives is one thing, it's a pity they haven't added turntables or loops in the new game. The other is suboptimal routing of trains - way to often I get "no path to stop" or something, even though there is clearly a path. :/

Magic transporting of goods just means that your trucks are not the only means of transport. E.g. goods are transported even if you haven't set up a route yet. Magic transport from a factory to a truck station simply means in-factory transport e.g. using forklifts.

All in all, based on your article, Transport Fever looks like an expansion of Train Fever - even the interface is basically the same, just slightly reshuffled. And despite the name, Train Fever was not just about trains: it had trucks, buses and trams too.

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Three Windows-only games out of 13 in the Featured section - and one of these three is recommended by a friend, which might override user settings. All games displayed in the special offers section support Linux. I'd say not bad.

The Featured section is basically adverts. It is possible, that publishers can pay extra to override user filter settings. Why I think so? Apart from the one game recommended by a friend, two other Windows-only games in my Featured list are Dishonored 2 and COD:IW.

Does it suck? I don't care that much, honestly. I would only like Valve to be transparent about it.

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Barely meeting minimum requirements :/ Good that I have only started playing Shadow of Mordor, so I should have enough to play on my tiny Steam Machine for next two years or so :)

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Quoting: Alm888What do you propose? To "eat what has been served", ignore sub-par quality and be thankful?

No, we shouldn't, but sub-par quality is not Feral's or Aspyr's fault. In most cases it's not "Feral's port or a game developed for Linux". In most cases it's "Feral's port or Wine or dual booting or no game".

Quoting: Alm888If you are strongly against "parasites" you can call them "middlemen", "mediators", "agents", "port providers", as I proposed. This won't change their role in the ecosystem.

We are supporting Linux gaming however we see fit. There are no enemies here, no sense in rubbing your opinion into others' minds and call them "self-righteous".

So you object to "self-righteous" and yet use "parasite"?

If Feral are parasites, then doctors are parasites, car mechanics are parasites, hell, even tailors are parasites, milking money from people's lack of experience in making clothes. All these people are "middlemen".

Feral is answering a need. Linux gamers want to play. Companies don't want to develop for Linux. Comes Feral, Linux gamers can play, companies don't have to develop for Linux, Feral makes money. Sure, if companies start developing for Linux, Feral and Aspyr will have no place in the market (or they'll be back to porting for Mac). But this will be their success, partially.

If Feral's Mad Max or Deus Ex sells despite 20% performance hit, sooner or later one or another developer studio will start developing for Linux, then another. If Feral flops, we'll be limited to playing pixelart games - not that they are bad, but in 2016 I'd expect some state-of-the-art games available for my platform of choice too. And Feral will flop if we don't buy their games because they're parasites, or because games are on Steam only, or because they use D3D->OGL translation.

Disclaimer: I don't suggest buying games to support Feral either. I am not going to buy Tomb Raider, it's not my game. If a port is truly poor, but I still want to play the game, like the Witcher 2, I'll buy it at a deeeeep discount and probably 2-3 years after release of the port. But if the game runs fine on my gear, why not buy it and thank Feral or Aspyr?

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