Quoting: pbThat was not what their customers were expecting

One customer begs to differ.

I basically bought all the "good" old games when they were brand new, and the only reason to perhaps buy them a second time on GOG would be to avoid the hassle of having to dig out the disks, CDs, DVDs, manuals, code wheels and what not. But why bother if there are still good new games coming out every now and then!?

So yeah, GOG as they once were would have been next to useless to me. If they don't turn a profit by selling new stuff that's really a shame, because I'd rather continue buying from them.

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Quoting: RichardYaoRead the mythical man month. Having more engineers does not always make development faster. Sometimes, communication between larger teams just slows them down to the point where fewer engineers are more effective than more engineers.

Yeah, I'm often surprised to hear how many "developers" are supposedly working on this or that trivial seeming application. Having worked mostly in small teams (1 to 5 people) so far, it's amazing what kind of projects you can do in reasonable time when equipped with the proper tools for the job.

Judging by the talk, they came up with quite clever and efficient ways to go about whatever they did. Hard to imagine how more people could have helped significantly here. Of course, had they simply chosen to re-implement the complete Win32 API from A to Z instead, that could have been a different story.

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Quoting: Philadelphusbut it's a problem baked in to how Valve collapsed the infinite spectrum of "how games run" into just four categories

Yeah, if only we had a way of expressing a more nuanced description of the issues a game in the playable category has, to provide a bit of context to the glyph. But alas, unless clever scholars come up with a way of transcribing the hurdles Valves testers faced, so they can be related to folks that don't share the same camp fire, I fear we're out of luck.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, so in my time with Linux we've had many audio bits.
1) OSS
2) ALSA
3) Pulse
4) Pipewire.

Yeah, I was going to write something similar. Long gone are the days when I had to compile my own kernels just to get OSS working with my Soundblaster clone. ALSA made that possible (and for all I know, isn't that still what drives audio in kernel space today?).

Anyway, the major gripe I have with Pulse Audio is how esoteric or badly documented some of its features are. Hooking up my Yamaha A-U670 as an external sound card via USB required some fairly involved tweaking with little advice to go by. Even now that it works, I needed to get a Gnome plugin to easily switch between PC speakers and the external DAC, because unlike plugging in headphones it never does it automatically.

Not quite sure if the task will be less daunting with Pipewire, but I'm looking forward to trying it out when it becomes the new default on Ubuntu.

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Looks certainly promising. I'd be fine with a device that gives 30 FPS on medium settings. Though there's the question how new releases 2 or 3 years from now will play. Battery life isn't that great, but for me the use case would be sitting on the couch instead of at the desk, so it could stay plugged in while playing.

Will be interesting to see how the experience will be with non-Steam games. Like how you'd go about installing and launching them. Or whether any Deck optimizations (such as the correct controller glyphs, default settings and whatnot) will be present (up to the game devs, I guess). So hopefully some future article will shed some light on those aspects as well.

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Kinda reminds me of the Jack Keane games, but perhaps it's because of the 3D character models. Like the painted backgrounds, though. I guess I'll have to wishlist ...

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Quoting: Alm888Aww, come on! They have a point, you know. It is just your Linux-centrism that keeps you from seeing it. :)

Thanks for the added context.

I guess in GOGs defense, it's also likely a not so technically inclined PR person answered that question.

But all that said, with a thing like the Steam Deck that's all over the news and gets regular coverage by (Windows-centric) mainstream gaming press, one could perhaps assume that a business that sells games that can be potentially played on the Deck was a little more proactive and informed.

Oh well, for all I care they need do naught but provide a website to buy and download my games. The less they try to "support" me with additional crap, the less there is to go wrong. And I assume the Deck runs a browser, right!?

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One reason I never tried Crusader Kings II was that by the time I found it, the full experience would have cost hundreds of €. That's okay when spent over x years, but seems excessive as a one-time cost for a single game. In my case though, I would not have wanted a subscription model either. I like to pay to own, not to rent.

Now if they'd give you credit for your subscription fee, and allow to redeem that in their store to own however many DLCs you can buy for it, that might be something I could get behind.

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Quoting: whizseThey do have a point about the battery though. I just hate it when it is glued down.

Same here. It's a consumable, it should be user-replaceable, and preferably without tools. The rest looks pretty good though.

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I've not that many games on Steam, but judging by the list plenty of my GOG library would work fine :-).

VERIFIED: 1 games (10.0%)
PLAYABLE: 2 games (20.0%)
UNSUPPORTED: 0 games (0.0%)
UNKNOWN: 7 games (70.0%)

Also a bit surprising to see games like Haven as verified that (to the best of my knowledge) still do not work with vanilla Wine. Hopefully more and more of these Proton improvements will trickle upstream, making gaming on Linux a better experience for everyone.

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