Huh, I'm on the designer's mailing list and I had no idea they were making a digital version of it. The graphics remind me of Hand of Fate, interestingly. I haven't had a chance to try the board game yet, but I expect I will before long. Will see then how interesting the port sounds.

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Quoting: tuxdeluxIn hindsight, with the knowledge of Valve's Steam Play, this seems like a very clever marketing ploy. Six months before they release an emulator, that allows buying windows-only games, they were getting people to add windows-only games to their wishlists.

Absolutely, this is one of the first things that came to mind when they announced Steam Play's upgrade. Everything they did was for a reason, and I find it exciting to see them activating a long-term plan that seems to have been well thought out. When you put the Windows game wishlisting, the work on drivers, the continued improvements to SteamOS and the Vulkan development together on a timeline, it shows that they are working intently on a Linux-centric goal, where previously many felt that they were neglecting us after a perceived failure with Steam Machines.

I don't have any hard expectations as to what's coming exactly, but I'm content and optimistic that they're still very much an ally to Linux gaming.

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Quoting: hummer010I don't think this was as far out of reach as you think. Lutris has already made great strides in being a game client that automated installs for WINE based games. Obviously, Lutris can't have as tight an experience as Steam can for Steam games, but it's still quite good. Lutris had already given me that same experience you've just had, where you start playing games you wanted to play, because it's suddenly easy to play them.

Don't get me wrong, I think SteamPlay + Proton is a complete game changer, but I agree with mirv, we'd have got pretty close to the same experience eventually without Valve.

Having never used the former, how does Lutris differ from PlayOnLinux? Although PoL was supposed to simplify Wine, relying on a small team to prepare and update packages for every program out there still meant that a lot of the time what you were looking for wasn't in the library of preconfs or didn't work anymore. Proton being run by Valve/on Steam has the advantage of more dedicated support and a much larger audience to report issues and suggest fixes; and already it seems to run a lot of games very well out of the box, instead of holding your hand while you jump through hoops but not actually removing the hoops (like PoL).

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut the thing is, since Linux is a potential weapon specifically against Windows, it is a weapon effective in direct proportion to how well it stacks up against Windows as a (gaming) platform. Making Windows better as a gaming platform (like by making Proton work on it so Windows users can play old games), therefore, reduces the potency of the weapon. Which isn't to say they absolutely won't do it if they feel they have more to gain than to lose, but that loss is there.

I don't think they'd gain that much, either--most Windows users would just use Proton to play the back catalogue of games they already bought but can't play any more, rather than spending new money.

I see Valve as mostly a "good guy" when it comes to companies, so I would generally expect them to extend the tool to Windows just because they can and it's good for their users. Even if commercially the only benefit is goodwill. You do bring an excellent point with that last remark, though. Proton on Linux is quite likely to drive sales, whereas on Windows the impact will likely be much less noticeable. Although, I reckon even a much smaller percentage of increased sales on Windows would easily outshine Linux sales in absolute value no matter how much the latter grow. I guess it could go both ways depending on how hard Valve wants to push Linux.

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Quoting: baccilusWhy are so many people testing games on older drivers?

I, for one, started avoiding driver updates when they broke my entire system. Since I needed a specific version to achieve a playable state with one particular game, and that driver didn't break anything, I never updated again since setting that up.

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Quoting: PatolaIt generates false sales data. You get "money", pay your expenses, then you have to return the money. That can be a disaster, since that's what developers live by. It might well be in the customer's rights to do that, but it does not change the fact that impacts developers a lot. If the amount of people doing refunds is small, it's tolerable and can be compensated by other means. If it's large, in a barely profitable game which seems to be the majority of titles lately, it might lead to bankrupcy in the worst case.

Of course, you might not consider it "abuse" since each individual is acting in his/her own right. Maybe we can get a better word for it? "Overuse" does not communicate the idea that the developer is being harmed.

Well I don't know, considering the 2-week limit on no-questions-asked refunds, I'm tempted to say that 1) the devs might not even have received the money from that sale in that time (I don't know how they get their cut from Valve but presumably it's not transferred to their bank account on a per-sale basis), and 2) it's on them if they spend money that they know is still under the refund period.

I would expect Valve has ways to minimize this. Making too many payments would tank everyone's profits in transfer fees, and I wouldn't be surprised if sales amounts were frozen for 2 weeks so that Valve can handle the majority of refunds on its own without money going back and forth between accounts (Customer -> Valve -> Publisher -> Valve -> Customer would dilute so much of the amount in transfer fees that it would be outright dumb not to prevent it). By using an electronic wallet for both customers and third parties, they can essentially handle the majority of payment operations on their own without fees, excepting only the initial purchase and the actual money transfer to the devs, no matter what happens in between.

So I get your point, but Valve really needs to get a new accountant if that stuff hasn't already been straightened out.

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Funny - I was hoping the video in the article would show Liam's issues with the game from his personal playthrough, but even the trailer's audio is so muffled that I didn't pick anything up from it while reading the comments. QED.

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Quoting: scaineBecause of the nature of Proton, I can see a lot of potential abuse of the refund system, along with bad reviews, as Wendigo suggests. Buy a game, doesn't run in proton, leave a crap review, refund game.

Reviews aside, can you elaborate on what part of this you consider abuse of the refund system? I would definitely refund a game if I buy it intending to run it via Steam Play and find out it doesn't run well enough. The 2-hour allowance is very well suited for this kind of demo/test run approach.

Quoting: GuestIf they start allowing games with native Linux ports to be run under Proton anyway - how are the Linux porters supposed to know whether that was a "real" Linux sale, or a Windows sale thats being run on Linux via Proton... in other words, how do you stop this damaging legitimate Linux sales revenue that should go to the porters like Feral, Aspyr and VP ?

Wouldn't the problem be the opposite since Proton play counts as Linux? i.e. "Bad devs" who no longer support a broken port still get a cut from Steam sales even though people are effectively forced to emulate the Windows version instead of playing their port.

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Quoting: thykr

Quotethis could be a massive push for more people to actually play their games on Linux, get more people actually install Linux and so on

Quote“if x game worked on Linux, I would be on Linux”

I really doubt this.
Those few adventurous Windows "gamers" who might have been seduced by the idea of using GNU/Linux instead of Windows, will very quickly realize that their games run like crap in Wine / Proton. They will quickly move back to Windows with their tail between their legs and probably never think about using GNU ever again.

By that logic, why are you here? Why am I here? Why didn't we all go back to Windows?

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Quoting: Wendigothe Publishers have 3 choices:

1) Do nothing and get a bad rating that affects their future sales of the game.
2) Make sure their game runs with Proton on all operating systems that Steam supports and hope that a future change in Proton doesn't break the game.
3) Do a proper cross platform port or develop future games with cross platform in mind and have control over the game's performance on Linux and OSX.

4) Demand Valve remove their game from Steam Play, or from Steam altogether if that is not an option, so they don't have to deal with the unwanted support requests and bad press.

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