Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: denyasisI'm a little sad GOG is struggling, but their business model failed and they seem to be struggling with what to do next.

Which is a problem when your business model is to be the anti-Steam and in the process, Steam becomes a near Monopoly.

I'm the end, turns out people are really more ok with DRM and a nice, albeit mandatory, client than they bet on.

How do you retake market space without alienating uses that bought in on those founding principles?

Perhaps the bigger problem is that they had principles in the first place.

I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. I don't think the principles involved hurt them. Certainly not around here, where everyone basically says "I like their principles, if only they didn't suck in other ways". The Linux crowd is perhaps unusual there, but I think GoG's problem is that while their no-DRM idea was good and by and large helped them, it wasn't enough to beat a competitor which was superior in some other ways and had big network effects.

It may be that GoG tried to grow too big. Sometimes you have a small but profitable business, you decide to expand, you spend a bunch of money to expand, and it turns out the additional revenue isn't enough to make up for all the new expenses.

Actually their principles and possibly falsely reading the market might have caused this situation.

Attracting users with Good Old Games repacked in a form that works on modern systems is a niche market.

What glorifies a store is mostly AAA's because mainstream user base wants to play them. DRM is a norm in AAA market so GOG's Drm Free policy is not in their favor here due to it essentially blocking them from that store.

So in a way GOG is in a weird spot where it is niche due to reasons above but likely has more expenses/operation costs compared to other niche stores such as itch. So self sustaining is probably hard.

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Quoting: elmapulreally bad timing for then, steam deck will make linxu somewhat relevant and they will missing the hype train.

Nope.

If there is one thing Steam Deck does now, it is glorifying Steam itself.

Surely they are not limiting device in any way to handle other stores, you can even install Windows but since that is a console and most people will be opted to where out of box experience is good; it is Steam and Proton.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Leopard

Quoting: MohandevirDid they revamp the Feral launcher for better Steam Deck integration?

On Deck Feral titles are usually defaulted to Windows builds.

As most Deck users are normally Windows users and save file incompat, multiplayer incompat is not so desirable.

That sounds sloppy. Seems to me that Feral's ports (especially for AMD users) have performed better than Windows+Proton?

Save game compatibility shouldn't be an issue at all, though it always seemed like sloppy coding to not have compatible multiplayer. Though most of that is version drift, but I've seen otherwise in other games. "Those filthy neckbeards don't get to play with the rest of the world!"

For the record; I don't think I've seen anything on the Deck that uses native over proton yet, though I have not looked at all the games I've installed.

Not really, some Feral games such as Rise of Tomb Raider and Shadow of Tomb Raider works great but for the most ports of them ( especially OpenGL ones ) , you will have better perf with Proton. Dirt Rally might be the exception of that rule.

Save games can be an issue, it was an issue on some ports back in the day ; not sure about current state.

Lots of games on Deck uses native actually, but lots of them are also defaulted to Proton.

Criteria for Deck about native titles:

- They should be able to run with Steam Linux Runtime ( it is a newer one compared to current default one )

- Experience must be the same as Windows build. Such as; no missing graphical features, gamepad support ( many older native ports lacks in that department ) , saves and mp portion of the game must be compatible with Windows.

- Performance difference should be acceptable as in there isn't a big loss against Proton.

You can see which games are defaulted to Proton and which ones are using native on Deck.

https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList%5Boslist%5D%5B0%5D=Steam%20Deck%20Verified [External Link]

Stardew Valley for example:

https://steamdb.info/app/413150/info/ [External Link]

> recommended_runtime: native

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Quoting: MohandevirDid they revamp the Feral launcher for better Steam Deck integration?

On Deck Feral titles are usually defaulted to Windows builds.

As most Deck users are normally Windows users and save file incompat, multiplayer incompat is not so desirable.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyFeels kind of strange to hear that the NVidia driver has a Vulkan feature before the open source AMD driver. Maybe this is more common than I realize, but I'd gotten the impression that other than for their own in-house stuff the NVidia Linux drivers tended to lag.

Nope, Nvidia is/was always the first vendor that supports new ext's at day 1.

Vulkan developer driver is available for Windows and Linux.

https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver [External Link]

March 29th, 2022 - Windows 473.33, Linux 470.62.26

New:
VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library
VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query

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Quoting: EikeIs the Windows version using the Vulkan renderer? (I guess not.)

You can use it with -vulkan as launch option but by default Windows build uses D3D11.

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Hopefully at some point it won't be needed, if Square Enix can look at the issues with their official launcher

It works just fine on their targeted platform (Windows), why they should have?

Thing is; they announced they will be switching to new launcher for good like 1.5 years ago.

So if one party should be blamed here; i would say Wine/Proton.

Square Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.

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Quoting: BoldosWould be curious to see the numbers of how many will actually use it...

I would expect a significant portion of users due to Gamepass and tons of non Steam launcher stuff.

Sadly; non Steam launcher situation on Steam Deck is pretty shitty due to how updates are handled and Flatpak is the only viable way for that and decent sources like Lutris doesn't have working Flatpak packages.

Windows should be fine on Deck, devices like Aya Neo were offering FSR option similar to Gamescope already so it should be covered as well by the community.

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Using Pipewire like two months now. Not only that it is just works, switching from Pulse was also seamless.

I don't have a complicated audio setup nor i use any extra features that Pipewire might bring to table but even with just switching change was noticable.

I was in need of using `PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60` on Pulse for some games, lately on God Of War ( lip sync issue(. With Pipewire it is not needed anymore, works out of the box without issues.

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Quoting: Essem

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: EssemI'm kind of confused in regards to how it was verified when the game doesn't seem to work out of the box.

Verified for Deck, which is different to all the distros on desktop.

That's fair, I do wonder what they've done differently on the Deck to make it run however.

Shipping one set of hw and most importantly SW.

Some users doesn't get that EAC error on Linux desktop without doing anything; some does.

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