Decided to download and try it out for myself. It worked easily enough. I was actually quite looking forward to trying this properly... BUT.... that mouse weapon control scheme is horrible. I would have a hard time bringing myself to play this unless they completely change the weapon control. UGHHH with all caps!

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The IGN take-over hasn't affected my Humble purchasing. I picked up the BTA of this new Down Under Bundle. In fact I was very happy to see how many games were for Linux ("ALL" the games, although Hurtworld isn't advertised as supporting Linux) and also very pleased with the number of DRM Free Downloads in the bundle too. Had I been really keen on Armello, I might have got the full Bundle, but I wasn't that bothered about it and the Lowest tier + BTA tier is fantastic.

I haven't changed the default sliders in my purchase either. I guess my primary concern with IGN is whether the Linux titles in future bundles or store sales will suffer. As long as Humble continues to operate similar to how it does now, I'll be happy to keep on purchasing, same as I've been doing the last few years.

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Just out of interest, does changing the file in the Windows version mess up the Windows version?

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Not available when Liam wrote the article, but available today... Friday 13th :)

Kingdom: New Lands [External Link] is at 75% discount on Bundlestars. Possibly the lowest I've ever seen it. Great game, already own it. The offer doesn't last long, if you decide to grab it.

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Quoting: SLGamesStudioMost big engines claim support for Linux but lowball it. Last time I tried either Unity or Unreal on Linux they didn't really work and were full of bugs. There's always Godot though, which works flawlessly on Linux

Don't worry... Unity runs like s**t on all platforms. ;)

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Quoting: gort818

there's much more demand for a MacOS editor

I wonder how they are gauging demand, who is demanding?

Game companies have staff who use Macs by preference. For instance, Server Engineers who like working on a slick Unix-like when they're setting up game back-end servers. Artists who favour using Photoshop on Mac. Producers who like pretty, stylish laptops that they can take into meetings. Macs are seen as luxury items with slick interfaces, and they're easy and pleasant to use too.

Also, if you are coding mobile games for iPhones or iPads - you're forced to use a Mac to create builds.

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I feel like having a bit of a rant about "Rust" - the latest Early Access version which is available.

First, I'll say some good things...

For me, it has great graphics, it runs without crashing, it's pretty fun, I've put in over 80 hours of play.

But, they changed how it works. I spent ~ 40 hours playing on the previous version. Now I've been playing 40 hours on the new version.

The new version requires you to learn Blue-Prints for all but the most basic of items. Without studying a Blue-Print, you can't repair any of your damaged gear.

You need to do loads of "boring" grinding to gather "scrap" in order to unlock Blue-Prints. For instance the Hoodie Top - In order to learn to make or repair your own - You need to gather 250 Scrap, you need to build a Research table, research a Hoodie Top that you already own (losing it in the process), and also have Work Bench Level 1 and Work Bench Level 2 - before you're able to make one out of cloth.

The Hoodie Top is just an example item. You need to do similar for ALL the other items in the game. It can easily take 20 or more minutes of scavenging to collect up scrap and items (and then visit a recycler) for 250 scrap, which you then use up in research.

The barrels and boxes in the game which provide access to the many items in the game - Well, someone can be lucky and get just what they want (and then that can turn out to be a major advantage for the rest of the game) and others (like me) can just keep on going back to boxes and barrels again and again, and never find any decent items.

As it currently stands with the recent change, I don't think the balance is good. You get frustrated with the game. Scavenging is just too grindy. The knock-on effect is that your very few semi-decent items, you are worried about going into combat, because there's a good chance you'll lose them and then many hours of scavenging later, you might not have a replacement. In the current (40 hour+) game I haven't had a decent gun or C4 or Armored doors or Rocket launcher... you get the picture.

EDIT:

In the short time since I wrote this there has been a tiny bit of game re-balancing. I now have found 1x C4 and a couple of decent guns. But I'm not planning to wander around the map with them, they're still too precious / difficult to replace / easy to lose.

Meanwhile a little gang invaded the GOL Rust server, and have been going after people "as a gang". Initially I was a little irritated about this, but I actually had quite an exciting session as a result of them camping outside one of my bases (and blowing up walls trying to get to 'whatever' was inside). At one point I was lurking outside at night, gun at the ready, waiting to snipe at them when daylight returned. Well, I wasn't fancying my chances - 1 vs 3 or 4 - but if I remained hidden I might be able to take a couple of them out.

Then there was an air-drop and they decided to run off towards it. I took the opportunity to leg it carefully to the base, and repair all the broken walls (before they came back). Enjoy wasting the explosives again, suckers!

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My Steam account is correctly linked to my GOG account. I visited www.gog.com/connect/ and the two Steam Torchlights were available. I clicked and added them both to my GOG account.

Like someone else has already mentioned, I deliberately bought "Torchlight" from Humble store to get the LINUX DRM-Free download version that is hosted there. They don't like making it available because I believe it is buggy and they don't like dealing with Linux support calls. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

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Quoting: Linas

Quoting: g000h... Here are my figures ...

This is very interesting. If you would care to make it into an full blown article, I would love to see more.

Well, it requires 3 things...

- A lot of effort to go through the data (Either manual effort, or coding effort to scrape the data).

- Collecting the data for as many bundles as possible, noting that I do not personally purchase every Humble Bundle released each month.

- Good statistical and data science skills

The more bundles analysed, the better the quality of the results (More statistically significant, heh).

EDIT:

One more thing to note with this Humble Bundle method for examining Linux gamer market share - Unfortunately the data is relatively inaccurate due to rounding errors. It is one reason why you want to do the calculations on a larger number of bundles, so that the disparities average out.

The statistics give percentage Windows, Mac, Linux rounded to the nearest percent. So, the percentage in a particular bundle might be given as 3% (let's say), but the accurate value could be 2.51%, or 3.49% (assuming that they actually bother to perform correct mathematical rounding).

Of course, Humble themselves have this data in fully accurate form. Oh, to be a Humble Data Analyst / Scientist ;)

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Although this article is more than a week old now, and the results that were mentioned seem to have been somewhat flawed - It would seem that talking about Linux usage statistics and whether they are rising or falling is a very popular subject on this Linux-oriented website.

I was captivated by the Humble Bundle statistics about an hour ago. Every bundle (once you buy it) shows a statistic page of bundles purchased and the ratio of Mac, Windows, Linux purchasers. This made me think - Wouldn't it be great if we could access ALL the bundle statistics going back for the past X months (e.g. Oct 2017 --> Jan 2010, month by month) and analyse the data statistically and get insights into Linux usage.

I notice that Cheeseness has already been doing this and publishing data on his website:
http://cheesetalks.net/humble/ [External Link]

But, Cheese's data is from early 2016, and doesn't show the progress over the past 1.5 years.

So, I have contributed some effort into examining this (not a great deal, but it is fairly promising):

I took a not entirely random selection of Humble Bundles which I purchased during Aug 2017 and Sep 2017, and put the purchase data into a spreadsheet. Noting that my selection of 7 bundles - 3 bundles had 50% or more Linux games, 3 bundles had less than 50% Linux games, and 1 bundle (Stardock) had 0 Linux games.

A bit surprisingly, the Stardock bundle still had 2% purchasing by Linux people.

Then what I did to get an overall percentage of Linux gamers in the gaming population (thanks to sampling):

Each bundle, take the proportion of Linux buyers (e.g. 0.02) and multiply by the count of buyers (46250 people).
Then sum up the Linux buyers versus the Total buyers across all those bundles. Simply divide Linux buyer total by (sum of total buyers) and multiply by 100 to give percentage:

Here are my figures (for a snapshot in time of those 7 bundles):

Linux buyer count 30007.61 / Total buyer count 799985 * 100 = 3.751%

Those are recent bundles (Aug - Sep 2017) and we are getting 3.75% Linux gamer buyer purchases.

For me, a statistic like THIS ^ is much more representative of the Linux gamer community than the other mechanisms being mentioned.

It would be great to perform the same operation on a monthly basis, and also see the effect of percentage Linux games per bundle (on the Linux proportion of buyers).

EDIT:

There are flaws with any mechanism of sampling. But I feel this Humble method combines the willingness of Linux people to purchase games, with the amount of people in the Linux community who still dual-boot and play their games on a different platform (because the specific game they want isn't on their platform).

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