I say this tongue-in-cheek so don't flame me, but perhaps Ubuntu would like to deprecate support for OpenGL as well; after all, Apple is deprecating OpenGL support :P

Even if the Ubuntu engineering team did an about-face, and even if Plagman's aforementioned tweet is to be considered as wholly unofficial, I think Valve is still likely to proceed with dropping official support for Ubuntu, given the way this has been handled in Ubuntu.

I wish Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, and Ubuntu could all be officially supported in some fashion (I realize this short list of six leaves out the perennial Slackware, as well as many favorites like Clear Linux, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Solus, Void Linux, etc, but I still think it is a reasonable short list), but Valve isn't going to support that many distributions. Given that, my preference would be the current level of official support, i.e. SteamOS (primarily targeting dedicated gaming computers), plus one recommended Linux distribution (for multipurpose computers), unless Valve is going to invest in expanding the SteamOS desktop experience.

I would understand if Valve decided to only support SteamOS, although, as mentioned, I would prefer they also support (at least) one other distribution. The easy choice would be Debian, given Valve's experience with it, but I hope Valve staff won't rush to a decision. It sounds like Plagman, for one, isn't wholly content with any Linux distributions as desktop OSes (https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142245249521078272 [External Link], but this may be a situation of choosing the least bad option, one that hopefully shows signs of making the kind of improvements Valve values, and I hope those inside Valve who will be making the call will give the matter their full consideration. If they choose Debian, I hope it is because organizationally, the Debian Project is perceived as being the best potential partner (i.e. because there are productive communication channels and because Valve's needs are taken into consideration), and because release cadence-wise and support lifecyle-wise Debian is the best fit for Valve, and not because Debian was the path of least resistance in the short term.

I believe this change could be as much of an opportunity for Valve as it is a headache.

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Tangential: I wish Valve would work on improving personalized recommendations. The game recommendations I get are often laughably bad and get in the way of promotion of games I would actually be interested in, despite my having added several hundred games to my ignore list and having excluded a handful of tags. I find that user-generated tags are pretty generic / are not very fine-grained, but I don't feel it is my place to create tags for games I don't own and haven't played (even if I have a pretty good idea what the games are about).

A while back, I bought Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders, Aragami, OneShot, Septerra Core, and Sumoman (as part of larger orders), which are all tagged "anime", and as a result I was served a heavy dose of erogesque recommendations (because they are also tagged "anime") for a few months after that, despite my never having bought or searched for anything similar to eroge (e.g. no visual novels, no dating sims, etc.), and despite the fact that most of the games I purchased during that time were not tagged "anime" and most of the games I played during that time were not tagged "anime". I ended up adding "visual novel", "dating sim", and "NSFW" to my list of excluded tags, which helped some, but didn't stem the flow to a completely satisfactory degree (ultimately, I had to individually add a lot of games to my ignore list), but I am not willing to exclude the "anime", "mature", "nudity", "romance", or "sexual content" tags, because that could affect recommendations of games similar to ATOM RPG, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Beat Cop, CrossCode, Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh, HITMAN, Lamplight City, Metro 2033 Redux, Metro: Last Light Redux, >observer_, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Spec Ops: The Line, State of Mind, and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, just to a name a few games that share one or more of those tags.

Similarly, I don't care for multiplayer-only games (which also show up in my recommendations fairly consistently), but I am concerned that if I add "multiplayer" to my list of excluded tags, that will affect the recommendations of games that have both single-player and multi-player modes, as these games are usually tagged "multiplayer". Excluding the "massively multiplayer" tag runs the same risk due to how the tag has been applied. All I can really do is individually add multiplayer-only games to my ignore list, which doesn't stop other multiplayer-only games from being recommended.

My experience with Steam's recommendations is that they often end up being little better than a Web recommendation that states, "If you've ever visited github and fosshub, we think you'd also be interested in biblehub, grubhub, lithub, pornhub, and stubhub, because these are websites whose names also contain the suffix 'hub'."

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Reminds me a little bit of 2010 IGF Student Showcase Winner Continuity [External Link] (sadly, Flash-based). I'll check it out.

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Okay Internet [External Link], you've won me over. I will henceforth refer to it as Strada. :)

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Quoting: please_use_plain_text

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: please_use_plain_text"Streaming is the worst DRM ever made, you don't own your games and you're screwed if a publisher want to remove a game (music licensing issue for example)

they can replace the soundtrack, but i would hate that option too

Not sure publishers bother to spend money to replace a soundtrack on an old game which doesn't bring in much money anymore. I don't remember which games but it has happened before.

The only instance that readily comes to mind of a game being re-released which previously had licensing (expiration) issues is Mafia (aka Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven). The music that played on the car radio (https://youtu.be/HMVPexp77uk?t=182 [External Link] was at issue, and the game was re-released without it.

Usually when games run into licensing issues (e.g. Blade Runner*, The Godfather saga, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth** saga, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions***, etc.), they are lost forever in terms of being able to be acquired legally, outside of the boxed copy, merchant reseller market.

That doesn't even begin to address all the games that didn't have licensing issues, but which were abandoned without having source code escrows, and therefore also can't be obtained legally (beyond old retail copies floating around, which can have scratched discs or be overpriced, if they are available at all).

---
*Westwood Studios' Blade Runner was never was available via digital distribution, and likely never will be due to licensing issues. Excluding completed wishes, it's currently the ninth most requested title on GOG.com's community wishlist [External Link].
**Only The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II: The Rise of the Witch-king was ever available via digital distribution, but again, licensing issues will likely keep any Battle for Middle-earth games from being re-released.
***Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions was re-released on Steam, but it was pulled again after a period of two years.

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I do not know the nature of the Stadia beast, but I do have reservations. The following may be non-issues with regard to the Stadia end product.

1) I will not pay for a subscription service in order to play games. If the totality of the industry ever went that direction, I would stop playing new games. I am okay with a subscription-service option, as long as it isn't the only option (and as long as purchasing individual game licenses isn't made financially punitive). For me personally, Netflix didn't replace owning copies of films and programs, it replaced paying for subscription cable television service and physical media rental services. I still buy films I want to keep.

2) I will not tolerate advertisement overlays while gaming (e.g. banners ads while gaming) or third-party in-service ads (i.e. third-party ads displayed in the service interface). Ad proliferation has increasingly made YouTube less enjoyable to me (but YouTube is hard to avoid if looking for video clips), and I have higher expectations of a gaming service. For games developed by Stadia Games and Entertainment, unnatural in-game product placements (for a fictional example, [The Truman Show](https://youtu.be/43fqtIPGo2A)) would also be unacceptable. Ads displayed in a natural way (i.e. that seamlessly fit the world's environment, e.g. 1982's Blade Runner) would not be an absolute deal breaker.

3) Feeding more morsels to the data collection monster.

4) Any Stadia-exclusive publisher agreements.

At the moment, I am inclined to have as low an opinion of Google in the gaming space as I would Innovative Online Industries. "IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that. They would start charging a monthly fee for access to the simulation. They would plaster advertisements on every visible surface."

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Quoting: Salvatos...people complaining about how shallow and tokenized that "character" was. Seriously insulting.

Some argued that from the beginning, but most of the comments I saw at the time were of the 'stop ramming SJW crap down my throat' variety, not the 'this character rings hollow' variety. I don't like feeling like the target of proselytization, harangue, or outright demonization any more than the next person, but there are civil, mature ways people can disagree, and then there is immature reactionaryism. E.g. When Metro Exodus became a one-year Epic Store exclusive (a move which I completely disagreed with), a lot of the responses on Steam were not thoughtful or compelling, just vitriolic. I say this as someone who feels the "toxic" tag is a convenient bludgeon used way too much by some social commentators to dismiss earnest and valid qualms or criticism.

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Quoting: hummer010I know, right? The GOG forums are full of hatred towards Beamdog, and I can't quite figure it out.

• All of their games support Windows, Mac, and Linux


• All of their games are DRM free. The Steam versions don't even require the client to run.


• They've done a good job of post-release support. Lot's of bug fixes and improvements.


• They've generally done a good job of maintaining version concurrency between GOG and Steam.


• They've learned from their past mistakes. IWD, Planescape and NWN were handled much better than the BG series.

From what I saw, some GOG users were salty that the old versions were no longer available for sale. E.g. Baldur's Gate II Complete was $9.99 (and dirt cheap during sales), whereas Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition is $19.99 (and it used to be priced at $24.99). The fact that the enhanced editions include keys for the originals didn't address the price changes. Don't get me wrong, $10-$15 isn't a big deal to me, but it is to some people. Whether you feel an enhanced edition provides $10-$15 more value versus an original with free mods is a matter of personal preference.

For the record, I am not anti-Overhaul Games/Beamdog. I had already purchased the original Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and Planescape Torment on GOG years before Beamdog released the enhanced editions on GOG; when Beamdog released the enhanced editions on GOG, I bought the enhanced editions as well, including all the various expansions and soundtracks. In favor of the enhanced editions, specifically the Baldur's Gate saga and Neverwinter Nights enhanced editions, I will say that GOG or Beamdog or both in concert with each other had very reasonable promotions when these three enhanced editions were launched on GOG. For the Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II enhanced editions, they were launched at 50% off for the first three days ($9.99 and $12.49, respectively). Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition was launched at 25% off for the first seven days, plus an additional 25% off for those of us who already owned Neverwinter Nights Diamond (I bought the deluxe edition of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, which actually ended up being 60% off). And some people did express gratitude for those discounts in the GOG forums.

And I saw far more trolling and backlash on Steam than GOG with regard to Mizehna of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear being a trans character.

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Looks like GOG is faced with the reality that being passionate about gaming isn't enough to sustain (and grow) a business; you have to make financially sound choices, and compensating for the regional price differences out of its own revenues isn't sound. It is incumbent upon publishers to set fair regional pricing for games.

I am not worried; it would be hyperbole to say that the recent announcements seem egregiously dire. GOG is having to adjust to changing market forces. Maybe it succeeds in lasting for decades to come, maybe it fails. If it fails, I back up my games regularly, so it would not be disastrous. I would be sad to see GOG go, but at least I wouldn't lose my games. I have far more games on Steam, but I have several hundred on GOG.

Some people were angered against GOG due to the social media bombs by ex-employee Sean Halliday, some dismiss GOG for not having a Linux launcher, some people seem genuinely unhappy for any distribution platform to exist other than Steam (by all means, appreciate Valve when it makes positive contributions and enjoy Steam as a feature-rich store, buy all of your games there if you prefer, but I don't understand the there-can-be-only-one mentality), etc. Given the work GOG has often put into older games to ensure better compatibility "out of the box" than those games receive at other stores, its DRM-free stance, and its generally pro-gamer culture, I will continue to appreciate and buy from that store. That isn't the only store I buy from, but I value its existence.

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Over the coming weeks a number of non-gaming videos will be retired and will no longer be available for purchase.

I am of the opinion that removing non-gaming-related video and non-gaming-related software from Steam would be a good move.

I have bought and plan on continuing to buy gaming-related video from GOG.com and Steam (e.g. I just recently purchased Fechtbuch: The Real Swordfighting behind Kingdom Come on GOG.com), and I prefer that gaming-related films and series remain available for purchase, as usually gaming-related films and series are a lower priority than actual games on my wishlists, so I don't purchase these videos as quickly, but I do purchase them eventually. My reading of this announcement is that, indeed, gaming-related films (e.g. Indie Game: The Movie) and series (e.g. Amnesia Fortnight) will remain available for purchase on Steam.

My question is, where is the cutoff exactly in terms of what is considered gaming-related and what isn't? Would Dead Space: Downfall and Dead Space: Aftermath (distributed by Lionsgate) be considered gaming-related videos? They are not documentaries, they are companion stories to the Dead Space games that flesh out the games' universe. If Lionsgate's non-gaming-related catalog (e.g. John Wick, The Walking Dead, etc.) is removed from Steam, would these Dead Space titles be lost as well?

The Dead Space films are just examples, there are several titles I am wondering about. Will Valve give sufficient (preferably at least a week) notice for titles it will be removing (specifically naming the titles to be removed), or is this the extent of the notice? If I know some of the gaming-related films I want to buy are going to be removed, I will buy them now; however, if I know they will be available indefinitely, then I can prioritize my purchases accordingly.

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