As an aside, I'm delighted that the dev chose to support us because while it an absolutley superb game, if it was Windows only, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. I've still hardly spent a penny on Windows games that work through Proton and that's unlikely to change for a few years yet.

Great game. Money well spent.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Mountain ManCopyrights and IPs must be vigorously protected, or they can be forfeited by default. That's just how the law works.

Trademark on a common term shouldn't even exist in the first place. They didn't create the name, so it's not theirs to claim.

"Shouldn't" is irrelevant though. Amazon, Windows, Lynx, Apple, Jaguar... hell, even Ubuntu, or Fedora will run into this. Then there's all the brands that were uniquely worded brands and now can be found in a dictionary, like Hoover or even Google.

Band names in particular can be bad for this right enough: Nirvana, The Doors, Queen, Kiss, etc.

I'm not even sure I agree with "shouldn't". This is just how trademark or brand protection works. If it didn't, you'd be swimming in clones with the same name.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Guest

When you pick a non-Steam game on Linux, it often cuts off the full path to it so it won't launch.

Often isn't technically correct. It only cuts off if there is a space in the path or the .exe name.
Steam will place the cut off section into the "Set Launch Options" You can copy and paste that bit back into your "Target"

Isn't that essentially covered by the word "often"?? Often, as in most times, but not always??

If you don't have a space in your folder or .exe names then it would be never.
I would say "often" only fits if the reason it happens is uncertain and it happens 25% or more

It's nothing to do with certainty (when I cut a deck of cards, I often get a heart, for example). I have no idea why your claim that "often isn't technically correct" wound me up so much to be honest...

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Quoting: Guest

When you pick a non-Steam game on Linux, it often cuts off the full path to it so it won't launch.

Often isn't technically correct. It only cuts off if there is a space in the path or the .exe name.
Steam will place the cut off section into the "Set Launch Options" You can copy and paste that bit back into your "Target"

Isn't that essentially covered by the word "often"?? Often, as in most times, but not always??

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Quoting: fagnerlnThis is a REALLY nice article, congratulations!

The only point that I don't agree is about the rating in Protondb, a lot of Platinum ratings have a lot of workarounds, so I don't think that if X game has platinum rating is good to go. I suggest to study about every game that you want to play, if someone can run, so try it by yourself

Everyone's mileage will vary with this. It's still a beta and the only guarantees Valve are making currently is the official whitelisted games.

Quoting: BrisseNice guide. Small nitpick: The definition of the gold rating is "runs perfectly after tweaks", so there is a good chance these require manual intervention as well. My last gold rated report was Dark Souls Remastered which at first doesn't launch at all, but after installing vcrun2017 with winetricks works perfectly. Could be off-putting to newbies even though it's a simple tweak. Buying a gold rated game thinking it should work fine and then for it to immediately CTD at launch can be quite scary for newbies I would imagine. The ability to refund takes away some of the anxiety though.

While you're technically correct, if any winetricks/protontricks is required, I'd personally rate silver. A "tweak" in my opinion is adding one of the switches to the start up, or dealing with a weird resolution on first run. Opening a shell, installing new software, researching the command you need to run (including what the appid is of the game you're patching)...? Too much hassle. Insta-silver for me. At least I'm being more harsh instead of less harsh, since I agree that many of the platinum titles have little issues too. For example, Deep Rock Galactic is platinum and still doesn't have working voice chat - you can hear, but can't speak. Meanwhile Hellblade is gold but ran like a native game for me.

But as I say, it's beta.

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Quoting: BeamboomAre there ever any reason to run anything but the latest version of Steam Play on any game, ever?

I think there's been the odd regression, but nothing major. The only real reason I could think of is that it'll guarantee that a whitelisted game will run "as intended".

Great guide though. Thanks for this - the gifs tell the story better than words ever can. It's nice to have a guide on a Linux technology that doesn't need you to open a bash shell!

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When we're all rich and famous with our own brands, I'm sure we'll be the big person in the room who doesn't need a lawyer to prevent brand pollution/dilution/appropriation. So when an someone makes an obvious play on your brand to cash in on some free recognition on the back of your success, you won't mind at all, right? And neither will your co-founders, colleagues, stakeholders, shareholders, or publishers who rely on that brand. Superb.

GOL really needs a "roll-eyes" smiley, I swear! :D

What's really shocking is that 3D Realms are big enough and wise enough to know better.

[Edit: some really salty comments on other sites, claiming that Iron Maiden aren't relevant anymore. Sheesh. Typical concert numbers in their last 2017 tour were around 35k per show! I was lucky enough to see Bruce Dickinson at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, promoting his autobiography "What does this button do?" - lovely guy, full of funny stories of Maiden trying to make it in the early 80's after nearly self-destructing due to Di'Anno's drug problem.]

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: scaineIt's literally renting vs owning.

No, DRM is about restrictions. I.e. whether you are restricted in your usage after the purchase or not. Steam requires you to use the client to install the game. I.e. they don't sanction backups according to their terms of usage (except for using their own backup method, which again involves their client and etc.).

Whether they enforce it or not is already secondary. DRM-free store should not stop you from legally making backups. And they provide downloadable packages for such use case. DRMed stores quite explicitly avoid that, because they don't want you to back anything up.

So you're talking legal restrictions again. I had a look at the Steam Subscriber Agreement, but I'm definitely not a lawyer and couldn't find anything in there that said that un-installing Steam after installing a few DRM-free games was against the subscriber agreement.

Like, I could install Steam, buy Stellaris, un-install Steam and play Stellaris forever. Or I could buy Stellaris on SteamPowered, then use steamcmd to install it, so I don't even have to install the full steam client. No restrictions, unless you can find something in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that I missed.

[edit: I see now that you've already argued this to death with x_wing. I guess we'll disagree on this point then. No worries.]

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Quoting: einherjar

Quoting: eldakingThis is just a PR disaster. ...

Yes, a disaster that affects about 0,8% of his customers. Wow :O

Plus all the savvy dual booters, pundits, Windows users who'd like to see Linux do well, DRM-free advocates... they all know a PR disaster when they see one. Some won't care, and maybe it won't affect his bottom line. But it should have been handled trivially, instead of this absolute train wreck.

And I've just caught up with the comments. Wow. People really don't know what DRM is, huh? It's not about how easy it is to install. It's not about legality. It's not about "needing an account" to download. It's not about EULAs or the police kicking your door down.

It's literally renting vs owning. Steam's model is primarily to rent, but there's lots of stuff on Steam you can own, and the fact that Valve doesn't make it obvious that this is the case, or make it easy to take advantage of doesn't stop it being the case.

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Well, finally! Been looking forward to this one. Still ages away to be honest, but it's nice having an actual release date now, at least!! Insta-buy for me.

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