I'm going to have to give this one a test run, it is very much right up my alley.

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The long and short here, as other have suggested, is that Valve put out their card game at the worst possible time.

WotC have been heavily promoting MTGA along side the paper format and in the online space for nearly the last full year, to the point that many either plan to, or even already have, jump ship from MTGO and Magic Duels and even the active Hearthstone playerbase has, to my understanding, taken a small hit from the MTGA beta. WotC have also over the last year released sets like Dominaria and Guilds of Ravnica that have a special appeal for those of us who left the game long ago and most of the last three years of sets have had elements that hearken back to the '95 to '05 era of the game. MTG is sorta like the Coke of CCGs, and it's hard to overcome that brand loyalty especially when there's an active promotional push going.

Hearthstone eats another large portion of the potential playerbase for online CCGs. Activision Blizard don't have quite the same long running legacy as WotC in the format, but Hearthstone is the current torchbearer of the Warcraft legacy (itself dating to '94) and some of that fanbase can be legit fanatical and practically obsessive about anything associated with the property. They're kinda the Pepsi of CCGs at this time, even if not actively promoting on the level of WotC

On top of all this MTG and Hearthstone have both gotten a surge of renewed interest recently due to the announcement last summer that Fantasy Flight is no longer doing the Android Netrunner LCG due to their licensing of Netrunner from WotC having expired (in October 2018 IIRC).

Enters Valve with a CCG with a whole of just over 300 cards and a legacy of being a side project to DotA2, a game whose own history and legacy are a mixed bag in the public consciousness, and a $20 Fee-to-Pay (yes, I am indeed stealing from Jim Sterling here) format going against Hearthstone with it's five years of set releases (1183 cards in Standard) and fanatical fanbase as well as against MTGA with the full allotment of current Standard sets (1389 cards) and near three decades of history both of which are free-to-play. If they had released a year ago and dropped two to three additional sets since they might have had a chance with people having invested significant time and money, but, no matter how good their mechanics may be by comparison, they stood little chance of drawing and retaining significant interest in this environment.

Mind, I personally have no horse in this race, since I enjoy getting my CCG fix by playing MTG Puzzle Quest and have little to no interest in going back to this kind of format unless WotC ever get smart and release the older sets in an online LCG type format (I'd be happy to pay $20 per set to play in an online retro-vintage type format [all sets Alpha through Future Sight say])

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This provides some very interesting insight to how the various storefronts work and why releases on some of them are handled the way they are. Personally I'm kinda surprised none of them seem to have some standard flavor of VCS as their backend, even if it's one of the proprietary ones, rather than having their own in house solutions (Steam, itch.io, GOG) or fully manual ones (GOG on Linux, Humble).

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Quoting: ageresWhat middleware could it be if not Denuvo? If they were actually planning to support all platform, they would have chosen cross-platform tools. That means, it's either Denuvo, or they never intended to support Linux, Mac, Vita, etc. I don't know what is worse. Reading updates on Kickstarter, I always suspected Iga has been spending backers' millions on resting on a yacht with hookers and cocaine.

My operational assumption until I have more info is that they chose a piece of middleware that was promising Mac and Linux support "soon" when they chose it (probably because the dev team already knew how to work with it), and which has meanwhile failed to deliver said support or dropped it because Proton or other reasons.
Denuvo rarely goes into small project games like this because their baseline initial license fee is reportedly quite high ($15 mil USD) and one only very rarely hears of them willingly negotiating it lower (and even then not lower than $10 to $12 mil USD). Unless they've been picked up for publication by a big AAA publisher, Denuvo seems very unlikely.

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Quoting: BeamboomI'm honestly surprised at many of the responses here. It looks like you haven't really been in touch with the IT world in at least ten years?

While I agree with the underlying sentiment of your full post, some of the manner in which you put it is significantly counterproductive at the least. You don't win hearts and minds with the kind of tone you're laying down here from the first paragraph. This especially holds with the current world environment where some flavor of hyperfactionalization, with it's inherent emotional fetters on intelligent discourse, enters into nearly every facet of everyone's daily lives to some degree.

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Quoting: SamsaiA command parser and a game-specific data fixing algorithm? Yay... This is just about the most useless stuff they could have open sourced and will pretty much not benefit the modding community or anyone else.

To be perfectly fair, they could FOSS the entire game and it would do little to benefit the modding community anyway since they have just allowed MCP and Forge to exist for eons now anyway.

Quoting: MayeulCIt is more akin to Garry's mod. The base game is pretty vanilla/bland (though they're working on it), but Minetest is also a game engine, for which you can make games and mods very easily in LUA.

How is the mod scene for Minetest these days? Last I gave it a spin, there wasn't yet anything even close to the late-alpha/early-beta era of Minecraft in terms of added content nor creativity of the content from mods and for me that's the place something like this should really shine since it's fully open source.

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Say what you wish to of Ballmer or Gates, and I could in theory write a book on the two of them and just their negative impacts on the tech community and tech sector, but everything I've heard or seen involving Nadella, both of his time at Sun and at MS, suggests he truly is on board with the kind of thing this move, on it's face, suggests.
The bigger question here is going to be in terms of the MS board and the general corporate culture of the company, both of which, to my understanding, maintain a general strong distrust of FOSS, Linux, the GPL, et al (at least as strong as our own community's distrust of their company). That in turn is a major standing part of Gates' legacy (among those of others) which is itself ultimately just the festering residual fallout of the Altair BASIC fiasco some forty years ago. It'll likely take another forty years of leadership in line with Nadella's and several further unbreakable corporate commitments in this vein to dissolve that bitter history into dust on the wind both in their halls and in our community. I truly hope this is the path we're all now pointed down, even if history has shown me not to hold my breath in that regard.

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Quoting: jarhead_hAll I've been seeing over on overclock.net are people cheering about being able to ditch Windows.

That made me grin way more than anything else related to Proton has thus far.

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Quoting: tuubiTaking these into account, here's what works for me:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/compatdata/[AppID]/pfx" "$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/common/Proton 3.7 Beta/dist/bin/wine" winecfg

Proton doesn't package winetricks, but if you've got it installed locally, you can use it with Proton's wine executable by pointing the WINE environment variable to the right place, like this:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/compatdata/[AppID]/pfx" WINE="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/common/Proton 3.7 Beta/dist/bin/wine" winetricks

Thank you. I haven't had time to play around with any of this as yet, so not having to figure the part about the "/pfx" on the end is a real nicety.

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Quoting: WendigoYou can see on first sight that the product the people got delivered is defective and just should be replaced but they write a bad review anyway. We can't do anything about it.

Yeah, that is a thing on every storefront that has ratings and/or reviews. From an end user standpoint the ideal choice would be to have an option to see how often a given product is delivered defective. From a supply end business standpoint, you'd never want that as there will always be at least some defective product shipped and at the least it'd require more QA to lower meaning more costs per unit and thereby a higher price leading to more complaints to field about that. For the store, caught in the middle of these two opposing forces, it's less of a problem to deal with to just let people use such review and ratings systems in such a way even if we all know it's stupid.

Anyway, after testing a handful of older indie games (so far only one of the four didn't at least play) and not a one having any audio, I did some digging online and came across someone having found terminal commands for Proton's included winecfg. Proton apparently uses some sort of dummy prefix that has the config data in it. I have to be at work in about four hours so don't have time to really play with all that just now to see if I can fix my issues, but wanted to share what I found.
WINEPREFIX=[your home directory]/.steam/root/steamapps/compatdata/[App ID of the game]/ ~/.steam/root/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7/dist/bin/wine winecfg
I don't remember seeing this mentioned upthread, but I also didn't read every comment. The first part of that is likely the most important, seeing as you should be able to use any winecfg or winetricks once you know the prefix to dither about with.

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