Quoting: The_Aquabatit's better to run ARK on proton.. it's that bad seriously

Yep, the graphical fidelity under Linux is appalling. They must be running this under Proton on the Stadia farms. Unless they pulled a full douche manoeuvrer and developed an upgraded rendered for Linux... but only for Stadia. Wouldn't put it past them.

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Wow, August shot past! I think I ended up playing games more than talking about games this month, which is a nice reversal. Also, debunking all the terrible Steam Deck articles in the wider press - always fun.

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I have to admit, I bought this years ago, played it for 15 minutes, couldn't understand a thing that was happening and never went back to it. But it gets rave reviews. Not sure what I was missing. I didn't even understand the symbols, their meaning... nothing. Does it have a tutorial now? Or was I just being thick that day?? :grin:

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Quoting: OsrandilI replied to CatKiller who apparently believes that unconditional refunds are a great solution, while I and others expect that such rules would scare developers away from Linux.

Yep, and I replied to you because I don't think CatKiller was suggesting any such thing, and I wanted to clarify that there's a big difference between demanding unconditional refunds years later, and demanding unconditional refunds when your platform is withdrawn.

Valve's refund system isn't perfect - indeed, a developer has recently very publicly left the scene [External Link] because their sub-2-hour game was consistently refunded after completion (despite positive ratings). That's definitely not cool.

Not sure what the answer is, but given the scale Valve operate at, case-by-case analysis probably isn't on the cards here.

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You know, thinking about this, it often gives the lie to how small a platform we are. You often hear "Linux isn't worth the trouble", or "Linux users cost too much in support given their size".

If that were true though, ditching the platform like this should be a trivial business. Offer refunds. We're so tiny, why not? Get rid of us - not worth the trouble and so on.

If you take, say, £50K sales, and assume we're 1%... that's £500. Sure, that's a chunk of money to an individual, but c'mon. If you run your studio like a business, and your experiment with Linux didn't yield results - pony up the five hundred quid. Take the hit and move on. I mean, another argument is that not everyone will refund anyway, because dual-booters still able to play the game on their Windows partition, right?

(just ignore the bit about dual-booters dual-booting because they've had enough of MS's shit and would prefer to ditch that partition at some point in the future...)

So which is it? Are we tiny minority that doesn't matter, in which case pony up. Or are we actually often a reasonable portion of sales and the dev outfit just can't handle the support burden?

Or third option... are they buying into Valve's "don't do native, we'll cover it with Proton" narrative, and realising that it's an easy out for them, since they don't have to do any Q&A on the "Linux build".

I hope it's not the latter.

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Quoting: Osrandil

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: ShabbyXIf a developer supports Linux, I buy and play the game to the end, with no intention of replaying it, then they remove Linux support, should they give a full refund?

Yes.

They've had an interest-free loan from all their affected customers, and they get to not be dicks. Easy choice.

So at the end of the day/year/decade, all games will be free on every platform, because no developer will be able support them forever.

But I agree: easy choice. Even though I develop on Linux, publishing for Linux is probably not worse the trouble.

I get your point... but they're still developing the other platforms. That's the problem here. Not that "after an arbitrary length of time passing, all games must therefore be free because we want a refund".

They chose to simply ditch a platform. The people on that platform have been shafted, treated like second-class citizens. Of course they have a right to demand their money back.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusAfter growing up exclusively with Windows (never even used a Mac), I discovered when I started my astronomy degree that no one in astronomy uses Windows (it's all Linux or macOS). I remember being a bit weirded out and repulsed when I first installed Ubuntu and tried to use it back in 2010 (I've just discovered I even wrote a very angry blog post [External Link] about it :whistle:). However, through exposure to it at work and the help of a very knowledgeable good friend, by 2014 when I built my first gaming desktop I put Linux Mint Debian Edition on it and haven't looked back since. Other than a switch to Debian and a graphics card upgrade from my brother I'm still typing on that very desktop (ok, I also had to replace a RAM module that failed), though I'm hoping to finally do some major upgrades next year. I also just discovered that I wrote a blog post [External Link] five years ago for Linux's 25th birthday complaining about using Windows 8 at work (which I genuinely do not remember using at this point), so how the tables have turned!

(Look forward to my upcoming blog post, "MacOS, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…" :grin:)

Well, that first blog post didn't age well! But back in 2010, Linux was a very different beast. It was around then that I started dual-booting though, having only run Linux on a spare laptop until then, from around 2005. But it took me another 3 and a half years before I felt that Linux (Ubuntu back then) had matured to the point that I could make the jump full time.

Then Steam launched, and I just bit the bullet. Haven't looked back, nor will I ever.

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: NociferWhich means that they've intentionally used tech that they know is neither portable to Linux and Mac (i.e. they'll need to replace all the WMF stuff in their code before they even think of porting) nor possible to be used with Proton in the meantime, which of course means no playing this on the Steam Deck. If this isn't a deliberate act of sabotaging a competitor, I don't know what it is.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be surprised if this was anything but the usual short shortsightedness that's ubiquitous in game development.

Usually, I'd agree. But as has been already pointed out in these comments, DoubleFine have various titles out with full Linux support. They knew what they were doing, then got bought by MS, and I suggest they were simply told to do it this way instead. Or lose their jobs.

Tim (Schafer) seems like a nice dude, but he's always had one eye on the money. First with Fig, then with MS. I suspect the latter has now bitten us. You know, probably because they love us so much...

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Quoting: AnzaI guess two parties can play this game too. My plan of buying of Psychonauts 2 has been delayed :tongue:

If it never actually gets ported I can always pretend that they never made any sequels (https://xkcd.com/566/ [External Link]

Loved Alien, and its sequel was AMAZING. Too bad they didn't make any more after that epic film. Game over man. Game over.

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Linux is speed and convenience for me. It's been the year of the Linux desktop in my whole house since 2013. I still use Windows daily as part of my job and the difference in speed and convenience is simply staggering.

Windows-only users are used to double-clicking on a word document and waiting multiple seconds for anything to happen. Then a banner. Then a couple of plug-ins, perhaps. You can actually see what it's doing, it's so slow. Meanwhile, a reasonably complex ODF document on my main PC - I see a flicker of a banner, then I'm in. It's next to instant. PDFs? Instant - none of this Adobe loading screen. Once you get used to that, using Windows becomes utterly tedious. I picked on Word there, but Outlook? God - may as well go make a cuppa while that loads up. At least Outlook can claim some client/server interactions to slow it down, but even there, I used to use Thunderbird with Exquilla in the same environment and it was lightning (geddit?) quick. I genuinely have no idea how an O/S can be so slow. This on a heavily specced Dell 9510 laptop - top of the range, really.

So yeah. No going back for me. Linux was and still is the ray of computing light that kept up my interest in tech just at a time when I was cynically turning my back on it.

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