Ah, but be careful Liam...

Quoting: Quote from liamdaweIf you refuse to use SteamWindows sadly you will be missing out on a lot of titles now and in [the] future, especially with SteamOSWindows OS, bigger devs won't use anything but SteamWindows.

;)

People are not wrong to hold Valve accountable for DRM, regardless of how good, cheap, or convenient other aspects of their service are.  Conversely, you are not wrong to support them for what you believe is a boon to Linux gaming.

I feel quite comfortable with the level to which I've supported Valve, in response to their Linux strategy (i.e., I bought a couple of games from some very committed studios to support them, and Valve, simultaneously).  At this point, it will frankly never be a big part of my future game purchase planning, and I'll work hard to support direct dev purchasing as well as DRM-free storefronts.  Others will work very hard to show that a viable Steam market exists for the first shot at Linux porting that many studios will take.

Perhaps we need both groups of people (much as, at one time, Wine was necessary to keep and hold gamers on the Linux platform at all). 

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Getting this title working correctly on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with Intel HD 4000 (Ivy Bridge) graphics was quite a challenge around release time.  They've patched it two or three times (that I'm aware of) and the Steam forums claim that stuff is working (?), but also KING Art was claiming at some point that the proper response for support would be to simply exclude 12.04 as a supported version (which was upsetting).

Aside from that, I only spent ~20 minutes validating it, and it was fun, though, I think the weak graphics adapter was the cause of some frame-drops and choppiness in the introductory cut-scene.  I'm definitely looking forward to a trouble-free experience playing it, and I love the concept.

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Best response of the day:

Quoting: Fork Parker (@ForkParker)Pretty bold move by Valve to turn Half-Life 3 into a controller.

https://twitter.com/ForkParker/statuses/383638850171465728 [External Link]

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Quoting: Quote from HamishDoes this mean they might make a proper native port of LIMBO and I can actually allow myself to play it?

Ha! That would surely be something!

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Yeah, this is a big deal.  It passes the AMD announcement in relevance by an order of magnitude, in my opinion.  Let's hope their competitors follow their lead.

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TFC19 is unleashed!!  This long-awaited edition is brought to you by Munt's blood, sweat and tears.

And... hot damn, Hyper Light Drifter looks SOOOOO good.

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Yep, they sure did promise that.  Definitely eager to check out the beta, but I doubt I'll have a minute to peek for quite a while.  I'll just have to check out a GOL cast of the beta at some point!

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Quoting: SpeedsterThe streaming thing is their alternate to wine, so it doesn't seem like Valve will be pushing wine ports. For high-end games, they want native ports for optimal performance, so I think we dodged that bullet. It all sounds promising so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Steambox offerings will be next year. 

I agree, on both counts.  Wine would definitely be a performance step backward, but I'm not sure that even the best streaming is going to be more performant, but it would probably be a superior experience.  There's no tweaking each and every game in existence, and would work with DX10/11 games, cases where Wine is not strong.

One the second count, that's a pretty big bullet to dodge, for sure!  If SteamOS is functional & speedy enough for my other games as well, I might ditch my Ubuntu LTS gaming install.  That is, as long as the Steam client can be easily shut down and such, i.e., if it's truly free, SteamOS should be a great Linux gaming distro even minus the Steam bits.

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Quoting: adolsonI also really enjoyed what I've played so far. I just have to find time to play all my games..

:D

Me too!  I never thought a time would come, as a Linux gamer, where I would have a "backlog" of awesome games.  It's a good thing that most of them are quirky indie games, because I love those.

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Quoting: scaineWell, I'm drunk and optimistic, so I'm very hopeful that Friday's announcement will involve HL3 and it being exclusive on SteamOS/Linux. Cos that would rock.

Haha, well last week, with the exception of one "hedging my bets" version of my third prediction, I've pretty much called the majority of this week's announcements.  The only prediction that hasn't been fulfilled is my HL3 prediction :)
So, there's still time for Source 2 to debut with HL3, which I don't think would be an exclusive, as that would be suicidal and not really Valve's style. I don't think they want to pit platforms against each other, and are careful not to belittle Windows gamers directly, just MS itself.  What they'll do, I think, is to optimize the game to Hades and back, and simply release the performance numbers in an understated way... which is exciting to me, since those will be kernel changes, and as such will get contributed back. hough the kernel maintainers may not accept them right away (e.g., Google's Android & wakelocks).
That said, regarding Portal, I could totally see them doing something there, since Portal came out of the Half Life universe to begin with.

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