Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: gradyvuckovicFor Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

The Valve servers would have to run on Windows, though and I highly doubt Valve would want to pay for those licenses.

No they wouldn't, not with Steam Play once it's mature enough.

I suspect SteamStreaming, or SteamCloud (who knows how they will call that), might happen the day SteamPlay/Proton leaves beta and become official. Simultaneous announcements is my guess.

Edit: It can't be too far away, because Valve risks long term damages, if they let users get accustomed to the competitions' solutions (Xcloud or Stadia).

I wonder if Valve is legally allowed to offer everything in your library as a streaming service just like this. I could imagine that existing contracts would need at least some review. This might also be the reason that official Steam Play whitelisting isn't happen that often, even for games that work perfectly well (e.g. TW3). I'm just speculating here though.

They sure can. Services like Geforce Now and Shadow already do that. You just rent a remote computer with those and access your Steam library from there.

The list of supported games on Geforce Now is very very small: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/supported-games/ [External Link] or am I missing something obvious here? Looking over the Geforece Now site tells me that it works just how Jens wondered, aka they must license each game from the publisher before they can add support for it on their platform.

Shadow I have no idea how they work since they don't offer their service in my country and consequently don't want to shed much information either.

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Quoting: Arehandoro

Quoting: liamdaweThe thing to remember about Stadia is that games do have to run on Linux. It's literally Debian under the hood. However, most AAA titles have high levels of abstraction for APIs, since they often run on Windows, PS4, Xbox, Switch and some on Mac, so getting it on Linux with Vulkan for bigger studios isn't going to be a lot of trouble.

PlayStation OSes run on a variant of BSD and that didn't bring us more games from their platform. My opinion is that Stadia running on Debian is more a fun fact that an actual game changer or factor to take into account.

Vulkan, however, might be a better indicative for our interests.

Not really comparable. Playstation used BSD way down below but that was AFAIK not what you developed for when developing games for PS4, instead you developed against a complete Sony API for input, output, disk, network, display and so on. With Stadia they have one closed component but all the rest is pure Linux.

Which is not to say that the studios will release the Linux version ever, what they technically can do and what they will do is two different things.

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[quote=14]

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: WorMzyI don't think we will see Microsoft actively push software for Linux any time soon.

If we're talking about games, agree. The fact that Visual Studio Code works well on a Linux desktop tells me they are at least trying to support as many people as possible creating things on their cloud platforms, and that means developer tools and frameworks like WSL as you mentioned, Code, and .NET Core.

But what is my opinion of MS? Well... let's just say I've been considering moving to a different part of the U.S. because the tech industry in my area is too entrenched in MS and other old-fashioned vendor relationships for my style.

That they released Visual Studio Code and .NET Core is because they know that they have lost the server developers to Linux but desperately want to still make their technology relevant.

WSL is kind of like Phase #2 in that respect since that is a way for them to say "hey there Linux server developers, you don't need to run a Linux desktop anymore when developing Linux server software". I mean we don't want developers to start getting used to a Linux desktop now are we.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Guest... we need to make sure they know they won't get our support until they support Linux in return. ...

And therein lies the rub, we simply are not in a position where "they" (except a minority of devs) care if we support them or not.

If our numbers aren't big enough to fund Linux support, then our numbers need to get bigger first, obviously. Although I will add that there is corruption/bribery from Microsoft, too, so it's not always a clear cut case of work being funded. Like take DOOM 2016 for example, very popular title, already running on Vulkan, supposedly even had an internal Linux build, but regardless it could have easily gotten enough funding for Linux support in my opinion but didn't, so asking why not is a good question, but that's off topic-ish...

Quoting: F.UltraAnd if we would have been in such a position to begin with then Steam Play / Proton would not have been created either so while the one is due to the other I do think that you have that order in reverse in your argument.

Not understanding what you mean. Regardless, of course I hope Proton/Wine is helping us and getting us more titles with Linux support rather than hurting us, but so far I'm not seeing it. I just hope it's not hurting us at the very least.

Regarding DOOM it indeed would be interesting to hear the real story. I've speculated before that it was never released due to AAA studios always wanting to not just sell a few copies but also make a huge PR event out of it so that they can increase their sales on all platforms. That is why they release it on Switch since Nintendo gives them such an event, exposure on CES and so on which is something that we never can do since we don't have a single controlling entity. Also AAA houses typically only perform releases when they expect millions of sold copies, just a few 100k sales is chump chance for those guys and "not worth it" so to speak.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Avehicle7887

Quoting: F.UltraHowever 0.84% vs 3.26% of Steams 90M users results in 756000 vs 2934000 potential customers and close to 3M potential new users is probably above some threshold for publishing houses to plan to put resources into support. Where exactly that threshold is I don't know but so far it seams to be above 0.84% for at least Linux.

I always found those percentages to be a bit misleading, primarily because Linux is a much better gaming OS than Mac. It is quite obvious why Mac appears more popular since the OS is sold with the hardware and Linux is not as widely marketed. For every new Linux user, you get 10 more Apples right off the shelf and the % starts going higher right away.

Quoting: F.UltraSo I would still argue that with or without hype we are still a bit too few for game publishers to care.

Chicken and egg situation sort of, the publishers not caring is part of the reason why we're still a bit too few, how are we supposed to do that without them feeding us games? I've seen quite a few people around saying they would try Linux if game x and y ran. The situation has improved over the years, but we need a bigger push to fix those last few issues with Multiplayer anti cheat software.

Yeah it's a bothersome situation where our platform came after the market already decided that it was Windows (PC) or Mac that defined a computer (after Commodore, Atari and so on died) coupled with the anti competitive business practice by Microsoft that enabled them to take the 95% market share.

So it will be an uphill battle for many years to come and during that time we simply have no leverage to demand native games like Swiftpaw thinks that we can.

Steam Play might not be the magic bullet that helps our market share grow to the needed threshold but at least it allows us existing users to enjoy a far wider variety of modern games.

We have no leverage to demand games? Right, that's why we have thousands of games with Linux support. All those developers who made those thousands of games with Linux support are responding to a demand for that, otherwise they never would have supported Linux. So, clearly that "leverage" did work. We need more demand so that we'll have more games, and the way we get it is more Linux gamers demanding Linux support.

Sure, with very small indie developers where increasing their sales by aprox 1% it does work and that is nice and all. For anything larger however we mostly does not exist.

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Quoting: Guest... we need to make sure they know they won't get our support until they support Linux in return. ...

And therein lies the rub, we simply are not in a position where "they" (except a minority of devs) care if we support them or not. And if we would have been in such a position to begin with then Steam Play / Proton would not have been created either so while the one is due to the other I do think that you have that order in reverse in your argument.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887

Quoting: F.UltraHowever 0.84% vs 3.26% of Steams 90M users results in 756000 vs 2934000 potential customers and close to 3M potential new users is probably above some threshold for publishing houses to plan to put resources into support. Where exactly that threshold is I don't know but so far it seams to be above 0.84% for at least Linux.

I always found those percentages to be a bit misleading, primarily because Linux is a much better gaming OS than Mac. It is quite obvious why Mac appears more popular since the OS is sold with the hardware and Linux is not as widely marketed. For every new Linux user, you get 10 more Apples right off the shelf and the % starts going higher right away.

Quoting: F.UltraSo I would still argue that with or without hype we are still a bit too few for game publishers to care.

Chicken and egg situation sort of, the publishers not caring is part of the reason why we're still a bit too few, how are we supposed to do that without them feeding us games? I've seen quite a few people around saying they would try Linux if game x and y ran. The situation has improved over the years, but we need a bigger push to fix those last few issues with Multiplayer anti cheat software.

Yeah it's a bothersome situation where our platform came after the market already decided that it was Windows (PC) or Mac that defined a computer (after Commodore, Atari and so on died) coupled with the anti competitive business practice by Microsoft that enabled them to take the 95% market share.

So it will be an uphill battle for many years to come and during that time we simply have no leverage to demand native games like Swiftpaw thinks that we can.

Steam Play might not be the magic bullet that helps our market share grow to the needed threshold but at least it allows us existing users to enjoy a far wider variety of modern games.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: F.UltraYeah I'm almost 100% sure that the game developers are looking very intensively at how we 1% perform our purchases when determining their future road maps for which technology or platform to use.

And Mac's 3% sure make a big difference in their "thought train". :)
Honestly, I think it is more about perception. "MacOS" (or "OSX" or "MacOS X" or whatever) and Macs' in general are well-established products, known since the notorious "Mac vs. PC" ads and often viewed as THE "PC" (misused as the euphemism for Windows) alternative. Mac users often even refuse to call their Macs "PCs". Meanwhile Linux is not perceived as something serious in the personal computer market.

I agree that the macOS hype of course also plays a part of it all, as you write macOS is known even among non computer users while there even exists computer users that have no clue that Linux exists.

However 0.84% vs 3.26% of Steams 90M users results in 756000 vs 2934000 potential customers and close to 3M potential new users is probably above some threshold for publishing houses to plan to put resources into support. Where exactly that threshold is I don't know but so far it seams to be above 0.84% for at least Linux.

So I would still argue that with or without hype we are still a bit too few for game publishers to care.

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Quoting: GustyGhostWhenever you purchase and run a Windows game through a translation layer, you are effectively shouting from the rooftops: "I want the Win32 / DirectX formats to forever remain the dominant standards in computer games!" or "Please Microsoft, please please please keep me locked into your proprietary standards, this is my covenant with you!"

Yeah I'm almost 100% sure that the game developers are looking very intensively at how we 1% perform our purchases when determining their future road maps for which technology or platform to use.

With that I don't mean that you shouldn't vote with our wallet, just that Steam Play is currently such a small blip on the radar for the game devs that they completely ignore it. The problems that we have comes from having a 1% user base, if we where larger (like macOS) then it would be a completely different discussion to have but we don't.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887So they're willing to make a Trilogy native port for Mac because they 'feel sorry for them', but not for Linux because it runs well on Steamplay. That's more than enough reason for me to stay far far away from buying it and besides, I don't see Steamplay on GOG now do I?

As for the Bard's Tale 4, I'll be happy to buy it when it's done.

No, they are putting resources into creating native macOS ports due to macOS users having a far larger user base than Linux. That the trilogy happens to work fine with Steam Play on Linux just happens to be a happy circumstance. I'm quite sure that if Steam Play didn't work then they would still make a macOs port and just not mention Linux at all.

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