Looks like they're trying to spur people on to buy their games, and they're doing it in that oh so internet way by guilt tripping and shaming everyone. More power to them. They're hardly the first to try it, and maybe they'll be among the fortunate few it works for.

But their biggest problem, at least from my perspective, is this:

I have Revenge of the Titans. I bought it before I got slightly burnt out on tower defense games, and loved it. Thought it was great. But up until this moment, I had never really thought of Puppy Games. If you were to run up to me tomorrow and tell me they're releasing a new game, I'd be like "who?". You'd have to tell me they're the Revenge of the Titans people before I'd be like "oh, yeah. That was a fun game. I'll bet their next game will be fun, too". Hell, I didn't know they made anything besides Revenge of the Titans up until now.

And that's their problem. They're not doing enough to make themselves a well known brand. They've got the talent, but they're not playing the media game nearly enough. Tasteless though it can be sometimes, it's a dirty necessity if you want your brand to become well know.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Unlike most of you here, my migration to Linux wasn't love at first sight, and actually happened slowly over the course of a few years.

My first experience with Linux was through Ubuntu 9.04. I've heard people extolling its virtues for a good while, and I figured I'd give it a roll. I wasn't too particularly fed with Windows by that point, I was doing it merely out of pure geeky curiosity. I made a disc, gave it its own little partition, and gave it a roll.

I'll be honest with you all, my first impressions weren't all that pleasant. In fact, I kinda hated it. The UI was terrible, and didn't feel cohesive, it seemed needlessly complicated for the simple sake of being needlessly complicated, and it threw all kinds of goofy random bugs at me for no apparent reason. Don't even get me started on the hell I had to go through to get sound to work consistently. I scrapped the partition a couple days later, and thought never again.

Well...semi-never again. I always kept an occasional eye on the Linux scene to see what was going on, and how things were turning out. Even though I hated it at the time, it was still interested in Linux in theory. It wasn't something I checked out constantly, but from those occasional glances, it seemed to be improving bit by bit. Getting more software support, improving performance, feeling more like the developers were guiding themselves more towards a designed, user friendly environment, rather than a frankenstein of cool features from the other OSes. I started feeling passively interested again. Not enough that I wanted to take the plunge again anytime soon, but enough that I might consider it again at some point.

Cut a long story short, and fast forward to now. Just about every game I want to play is either already available, or coming soon. The vast majority of my other software is here (minus Photoshop, which I miss). I think why not. I'm in Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, and I'm finding the experience to be night and day in comparison to what I went through with 9.04. Other than having to install proprietary drivers (which was easy), everything worked perfectly right out of the box. The install was simple, the UI is surprisingly near OSX quality in look and cohesiveness (yeah, I'm one of the apparent few who really likes Gnome 3), it's fast, stable, and overall easy to use.

It's not perfect. I still don't think Linux has reached the point where I can recommend it to a complete computer newbie. But it's close. Closer than it's ever been.

So why do I use Linux? Simple. Cuz I like it, and I'd love to see more developer support for it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Quote from CheesenessWithout knowing how they're performing sampling, we can only guess at whether there are issues at work - we do know that there was a fairly lengthy period where a sampling bug where only a small group of people were getting prompted to participate, but that's apparently been fixed for some time.

Well, it's obviously not polling every single person who regularly uses Steam, but it does seems to be polling roughly the same amount of people per month. Thing is, considering the rather sizable disparity among all the platforms, if Valve were to send out, say, 500,000 surveys at random, they could very easily land themselves in a situation where they only poll Windows users in one survey sweep, giving Macs and Linux a 0% userbase for that month. This obviously isn't happening, considering the numbers tend to stay the same from month to month, with only a few tiny fluctuations here and there.

Obviously, I have no idea what they're doing, but all things considered, I'm gonna guess that no, they're not 100% accurate, but they're probably close enough to give Valve a good idea of how everything lies.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Quote from asdfYeah.. the survey must be broken. I got survey popups two times in the last 3 months with the steam linux beta client. And I never got a survey question in windows for over a year.

It's the opposite for me. I've been using Linux for roughly 4-5 months now, and I've yet to see the survey pop up.

Then again, I've been using Steam since Half-Life 2 came out all those years ago, and I've only seen it pop up in Windows once or twice in all that time. Maybe Valve just doesn't like me or something...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Unless Firaxis is being a really mean tease about this, it coming to Linux is about as close to a sure thing as we can get without direct confirmation.

The only thing that's really on the hook at the moment is if they include Enemy Within alongside it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

"keep in mind that it hasn't been officially announced on Linux and it could take monthes before it's available"

This is true. Though in the past, when something first pops up in the SteamDB, it's usually only a short matter of time before it makes its way over in earnest. I'm wiling to bet we'll see it before the big Christmas sale starts up.

Also, XCOMs release will mark the occasion when I've got exactly 50% of my Steam library available to me across both platforms. I have exactly 120 games altogether, 59 of which are available to me in Linux. That's a massive change from when I first started considering Linux earlier this year, and only had access to about 20. Looks like I picked the right time to make the move.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

What HadBabits said. This game looks every bit of amazing, but that 2015 release date...

...I'll be old then. :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Quote from manny
You should start wishlisting the games you want, that way you'll get notify when they have a discounted sale. Also the big winter sale is coming soon.

Anyway if you really like the game and its developer gives good support, then you shouldn't be very regretful of having paid a few extra bucks. :)

I'm not really. RL is worth every cent of the $15 I paid for it, and I'm more than happy to support the developers with that extra bit of change.

But, you know, when you find out something you bought not even 15 minutes previously is on sale elsewhere for half price, you can't help but feel a little gut punched. :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Gaw! And I just bought Rogue Legacy for $15 off Steam!

...sometimes Life is just unbearably cruel.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If it's got fjords in it, I'm there.

View this comment - View article - View full comments