Cool article, I really appreciate the in-depth discussion. Like you pointed, it is good for the players to be informed.

(Though I'll say even for the same depth of analysis, being more succinct could probably make the main points clearer - especially for people that haven't been following everything closely)

I also assume all of this is particularly concerning (in addition to, obviously, for porting studios/devs) for indies. For games that don't have a massive marketing budget, however Steam chooses to showcase their game is a huge deal, and adding an endorsement or disavowing the game for the deck can mean a lot. The opaqueness in the process is concerned, because it both erodes trust in the "fairness" of the platform and stops devs from taking direct meaningful action, putting them at the mercy of the "algorithm gods.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: eldakingBut the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

I'm not a fan of that approach, either, but avoiding competing with their own pasts at the cost of not keeping older works in circulation is probably more of a loss to us as consumers than to the businesses that do so, unfortunately.

Absolutely, it is stupid because they should not get away with it, but they do and it is probably profitable. They are not being stupid in a "they are losing so much money" way, just in a "they are making money by pulling an obvious scam and it is not even a cool creative scam".

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I recently played Aria of Sorrow (one of the games included) and it is absolutely a blast, probably the best Castlevania game (not that I have played most of them, of course). It was not as part of this collection, though, I had to hunt down the original game.

I think it is super cool when ROMs are sold like this. They could even be extracted/uncompressed and played on other emulators, though of course the convenience of just using the default it comes with is usually preferable - but I saw a tutorial on how to mod the ROMs (applying patches and re-compressing them), for example. But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

The scary notices that "this is not supported!" are very weird for us Linux users, used to hack everything and run it regardless of whether the devs worked on it or planned it. But for the console environment, where the norm is "no of course you can't run software I didn't sell you, and even that only at my convenience", this might look normal? Maybe they are being overcautious about support tickets, maybe they are half-testy about their games working on a handheld that they didn't specifically release them for (they could be selling a PC version and a Deck version, if it wasn't for Valve meddling too much!), maybe they didn't research and/or test it properly, or something else.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualTechnically, GOG is completely correct. Their native Linux builds don't officially support Arch Linux or the new SteamOS, which is a derivative of that distribution. They support Ubuntu. They can't guarantee support for an OS they've never tested their games for.

Whether this PR spokesperson understands this or not, I couldn't say. Clearly the diplomatic response would have been, "these games have been tested for Ubuntu officially, but they may work on the Steam Deck. We don't know; we haven't tried it."

I would agree with you, but I think they are making assumption here too, I bet they didn't test any GOG game on the Steam Deck. So they cannot guarantee something which they have not tested imho.

At the bare minimum the proper response here would be, "we tested this X numbers of GOG games and they work". "On this other ones the joystick is not detected or has X trouble".

I mean there's a couple of Linux games builds flagged as unsupported on the Steam deck too. They really expect that all of their windows GOG games to work on Steam Deck?

In that case, if in the future they get lots of refunds from Steam Deck users, it will be well deserved.

But anyway, I think that this was not a "techinical" response and they are not "guaranteeing" anything here this is just a PR bot response.

Their games don't support the Steam Deck's distro, but installing Ubuntu on the deck should still be easier than installing Windows.

They went straight for the nuclear option, that they can't even guarantee will work either.

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Dang it, that is a new low. When they prefer to tell people to install Windows than talk about the games they already have for Linux, you know things are bad.

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I am actually interested on this, as HoI4 is the Paradox game where I don't own any DLC and play only sporadically in bursts. Could make a lot more sense on the short term. But I found the subscription a tad too expensive for what it is - not out of the question, but I'm not happy about it.

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I don't much like additional platforms as stretch goals because if you use (only) that platform, backing before the goal is hit is a big risk and for most people already backing they don't particularly care. I mean, I'm happy when a platform I like is funded and included, but doesn't seem like the most effective stretch goal for crowdfunding.

On another note, the game looks pretty good. Not sure if it is a kind of gameplay that I'd enjoy but looks interesting at least.

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VERIFIED: 9 games (3.81%)
PLAYABLE: 13 games (5.51%)
UNSUPPORTED: 0 games (0.0%)
UNKNOWN: 214 games (90.68%)

Not much to be said for my library so far. The verified titles aren't bad, but the playable ones is an all-star list with many of my all time favorites. Which is... not that great, but not unexpected. I expect those to be at least playable because yeah, I play them on linux already, on much weaker hardware. But the most likely problem is controller support, as strategy games aren't usually well suited for a controller without much adaptation. Perhaps seeing text and information on the small screen is an issue for some.

I half hope that this is sorted out for at least some of those games, or that at least they work with teaks. But I don't expect my library will have a huge percentage of "verified" titles when it's all done.

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: Purple Library GuyValve is frankly a really weird company. I'm sure all the other companies look at it and think, to quote a certain Dr. from Austin Powers, "Not Evil enough".

Why would they? Valve is nowhere near the open source contributions of other closed source companies (e.g. Apple & Microsoft).

Valve has a market cap of 78 billion. Apple has the highest market cap in the world, 2.752 trillion - some 35 times the size of Valve. Microsoft has 2.211 trillion, Google 1.773 trillion. We are talking about one or two orders of magnitude of difference. Valve are a store that sells games, a super large store in its niche, but those others are world powers comparable to the richest countries in the world. And software is one of their main products, though ever more giving way to "software-as-a-service".

Edit: to make it clearer, Valve is 0.078 trillion, and less than 3% of Apple.

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This is seriously cool of them. Not like a huge thing (they have already done plenty of those), but still a display of goodwill and openness that is completely uncharacteristic for a big corp releasing their own console.

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