Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7528, member: 223"More seriously, I couldn't care less. Blizzard, eh? Not a cash cow, sorry. Plus they can stick their DRM where the sun doesn't shine.

What is Blizzard DRM like then? The last Blizzard title I have played is Warcraft II. :P

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For me the potential value of Steam will be demonstrated if I start seeing games that were ported to Linux for Steam become available through other services or directly from the developer. If there is one place where Humble Bundle was always a problem it was with the fact that many games disappeared after being in the Bundle; ironically enough many of these missing games may come out on Steam now. But the problem for me still persists as I want to play games on Linux and not games on Steam (which I could in theory live with) or especially Steamworks (which I can't). I have heard people assure me that this will happen and we will see something of a trickle down (to use a rather noxious metaphor) of titles appearing at other places, but 2013 will be the time to prove it.

I am glad for Liam commenting on the future of free drivers, but to be honest for me the free drivers have been fulfilling my needs for over a year. Every title I have thrown at them except Bastion (which I need to look into again) has been running great and this is all without Marek's recent awesomeness upstream or OpenGL 3. And this includes games like Trine 2, Amnesia, Torchlight, and Rochard which may not be the ultimate in graphics (well, except maybe Trine 2) but certainly are not leaving my hardware alone. For me it is Nvidia that is irrelevant, with great experiences with both my AMD hardware and my brother's Intel GMA on proper in-kernel drivers. I am certainly not interested in going back to the blobs anytime soon.

Thankfully Desura does seem to be more appealing in many ways to traditional Linux developers so it has an advantage there. It is great to see Runesoft putting in such interest for instance, and I hope that will be a relationship that developers want to continue. Desura has also not burned as many bridges as Valve has, and while Greenlight has been soothing some wounds, I do hope Desura can leverage that to keep it successful. It has certainly not been doing a bad job for itself, the need for a new proper client release aside.

We will see how many Kickstarters succeed but I honestly have no idea what will happen there. Things could go so many different ways.

So while not being all that enthused about things going in the next year, I can consider myself to be vaguely comfortable about things as matter stand.

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Quoting: "Cheeseness, post: 7456, member: 122"The thing is though, the Humble Bundle guys are probably in a prime position to assemble a translation team (in house, external, community driven, etc. - whatever method used, the ongoing/regular nature would help bring responsibility/accountability that could ensure decent translations) that they could offer/contract out to bundle participants. It would be pretty neat to see them raise the bar for indie games a bit by encouraging/requiring participants to have a minimum set of translations.

Definitely a good idea. humblebundle.fr anyone? ;)

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THIS is the main reason why the THQ bundle was such a shock, because frankly things are becoming a bit of mess, so giving people less of a reason to take us seriously is really distressing. This is not to say that we have not been given a lot, but the half-hearted here are really beginning to give the committed a bad name by association. Not all of this is Humble's fault, but if they were a school there would definitely be concerns about them sending out this amount of delinquents, to coin a phrase...

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Thanks for the stats on who ported what - most interesting there for me. :)

As for your little editorial there on the whole THQ thing, I agree with most of what you said even if I am a little less favourable of HB than you are, and I especially like the talk about how things went toxic and why. All and all a well rounded perspective.

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Mostly formatting irking me - but I think I could just be being a little pedantic here. ;)

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Quoting: "liamdawe, post: 7381, member: 1"Forgive me if this review isn't as good as Hamish's usually are, writing lots isn't a strong point of mine but I wanted to give it a go. If you have feedback go ahead...just be nice!

Well, as a suggestion, you could get me to look over it as an editor. I always get mine checked over by someone else and you are always surprised about all the small little problems another pair of eyes can find.

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Quoting: "berarma, post: 7396, member: 131"It seems they didn't hire any GNU/Linux experts, or they aren't hearing what they might have to say.

I agree with much of what you are saying, but they actually have quite qualified hands on their team such as Sam Lantinga and Forest Hale.

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Quoting: "mirv, post: 7371, member: 214"You can set an environment variable to have TF2 use something other than pulseaudio. I can't remember what exactly - on holidays and can't check right now - but you should be able to google it, check the steam forums, or something.

Do you mean something game specific or just an SDL command such as "export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa"?

Not using Steam or anything, but just though I might save some of you some time.

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I personally feel that package managers should only be left to system packages and free software programs. I find that commercial software tends to muddle things.

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