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This is quite interesting, it seems Valve are actually doing some more curating on their store now ahead of the SteamOS launch.

A user on reddit posted about ~35 titles having their SteamOS icons vanish. To quote the user:
QuoteMy last three data points are:
25/09/15 - 1521 games
09/10/15 - 1555 games
16/10/15 - 1535 games


I've checked myself, and I can see that Ticket to Ride, Anodyne, Lume, WAKFU, Starbound, Evoland, Oniken, StarMade and Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten have had their icons removed. I'm not sure what other games have seen the change, as that's a lot of games to go through to find out.

I spoke with the developer of StarMade who said this:

@gamingonlinux It is because the game requires Java. When the new launcher comes out this should be resolved!

— StarMade (@star_made) October 17, 2015



I spoke with other developers, but some are still looking into why, and some asked me not to mention them here.

It makes perfect sense, you wouldn't want a new SteamOS user to find out a game that advertised SteamOS support needed some outside launcher/installer for something like adobe air, or flash or anything else that needs a fair bit of manual interaction not directly possible in the SteamOS interface.

I guess the minor issue for us here, is that people on desktop Linux can't get these games on Steam now, but they do still show in my library, and are installable. It's probably a good thing though, as it means any game with a SteamOS icon should install on desktop Linux without the hassle of hunting down extra's. I wonder how far this will go though? Will they remove all games that have a launcher that doesn't work in fullscreen? It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

They aren't removing the games from your library, so let's not go ringing alarm bells. However, I did say a long time ago I was worried about SteamOS becoming separated from Linux and people thought Valve wouldn't do it, I thought they wouldn't, but this could be the start for all we know. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial
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metro2033fanboy 16 Oct 2015
Thats some kind of crappy...

Steam is polishing its service, not removing games arbitraly...

Even GOG does so!

Welp, good thing we still have GOG...

Damnit Valve, you're making it very difficult for me to like you if you act up like this.


Last edited by metro2033fanboy on 16 Oct 2015 at 10:02 pm UTC
BillNyeTheBlackGuy 16 Oct 2015
Wow, Valve is actually doing some type of quality control for once. I think this is a good thing.
JoZ3 16 Oct 2015
Games from my library with the steam icon removed

- Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden
- Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers
- Always Sometimes Monsters
- Anodyne
- Delver
- Detective Grimoire
- Doom & Destiny
- Evoland
- Heroes of Steel RPG
- The Inner World
- La-Mulana
- The Last Door - Collector's Edition
- Lume
- Multiwinia
- Poof
- Retro-Pixel Castles
- Reus
- Starbound
- StarMade
- Sword of the Stars: The Pit
- Ticket to Ride
- WAKFU
- Warlock 2: The Exiled (appear movie icon only :) )
ricki42 16 Oct 2015
Gone Home still has the SteamOS icon. It never worked in fullscreen for me, camera just get's stuck, I have to go to 900p windowed to run it properly. Just checked, still same problem. That would be the first game I'd remove. Does anyone here have SteamOS installed and can check if it works?

But for example Starbound works great on desktop Linux without any configurations. Its just the launcher that requires a mouse that is the only thing i can think of as the reason for its removal.

But since the Steam controller can function as a mouse, I don't think it would make the game unplayable? I'll have to try that... But if I buy Starbound now, would it could as a Linux sale?
dubigrasu 17 Oct 2015
Gone Home still has the SteamOS icon. It never worked in fullscreen for me, camera just get's stuck, I have to go to 900p windowed to run it properly. Just checked, still same problem. That would be the first game I'd remove. Does anyone here have SteamOS installed and can check if it works?
Yep, works on SteamOS without issues other than the same crappy performance it always had.
ricki42 17 Oct 2015
@dubigrasu Thanks for checking!

Games from my library with the steam icon removed
- The Inner World
- La-Mulana

These are the only 2 I have from that list.
When starting The Inner World from BPM with Steam controller, it has a warning about not having a controller configuration. Playing it with the controller as mouse & keyboard seems to work fine though (only tried a few minutes). The game doesn't start in fullscreen, but that should be easy to fix - might already be fixed in SteamOS.
La-Mulana doesn't have any warning, but doesn't really work with the steam controller at all, at least I couldn't get it working. I ended up having to kill steam from the command line, because it didn't accept any input at all anymore. Tried changing some settings, same result. I'm still figuring out the controller though, so maybe I broke something. But it definitely didn't just work out of the box.
Turns out I didn't have all the permissions set correctly. Now it works quite nicely in La-Mulana.


Last edited by ricki42 on 17 Oct 2015 at 1:30 am UTC
dubigrasu 17 Oct 2015
Games from my library with the steam icon removed

- Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden
WTF? This game works perfectly (on Arch Linux at least) and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t use Flash… (which means I’m not sure but I really doubt it because it’s perfect.)
Well, it doesn't work with SteamOS BPM indeed, but is still working if you switch to desktop mode and start the regular desktop client.
adolson 17 Oct 2015
All of the games in the list that I'm familiar with require having external software installed or have general brokenness on Linux. It has nothing to do with launchers. Removing games with launchers would remove the vast majority of Unity games... Would be great if Valve could convince every dev to stop with the useless POS Unity launcher, though.
melkemind 17 Oct 2015
  • Supporter
I agree with a lot of the concerns about the future of Linux support on steam and also with the idea that SteamOS needs quality control. I think the one thing we need to keep in mind, however, is that the removal is probably temporary.

All those devs have to do is make sure their games are updated to meet Valve's new standards. I'm sure they've been notified. The devs that actually care about Linux and steamos sales will patch their games.
LinuxGamesTV 17 Oct 2015
Hihihi The Settlers & Anno Online are on the No-SteamOS Icon list, too.
TacoDeBoss 17 Oct 2015
So now I'm never going to know what games work for Linux and what don't? F**king superb.
psycho_driver 17 Oct 2015
I was playing these days Anodyne (on linux of course) and I was wondering why there was no steamos icon.

Anodyne plays fine on me but I remember I had to follow instructions from the arch wiki.

I've had Anodyne in my library forever and have never played it from Steam because Air won't install without gnome-keyring or kwallet on the system. Those are silly requirements to get a game running.
psycho_driver 17 Oct 2015
They also should remove System Shock 2, which has not been working for ages (detected as a virus at launch, lol...)

Just checked and it's working alright for me.
psycho_driver 17 Oct 2015
Both Evoland and Defender’s Quest are in my “doesn’t work” category on Steam… So it’s a good thing they removed the icon for them. (And I don’t use SteamOS.)
I agree with the evoland game it happen the same to me.

Evoland is also working ok for me . . . Defender's Quest does appear to be broken, but I don't have it listed in that category so it would have worked around the time I bought it.
JoZ3 17 Oct 2015
Games from my library with the steam icon removed

- Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden
WTF? This game works perfectly (on Arch Linux at least) and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t use Flash… (which means I’m not sure but I really doubt it because it’s perfect.)
Well, it doesn't work with SteamOS BPM indeed, but is still working if you switch to desktop mode and start the regular desktop client.

The game from Artifex Mundi never worked for me, always crash in start screen, I'm using Manjaro x64 with the latest catalyst drivers. I will try as you say...

Pd. the game now works, accidentally found the solution, change my sound profile 7.1 to 5.1 and now run fine


Last edited by JoZ3 on 17 Oct 2015 at 6:33 am UTC
voyageur 17 Oct 2015
I understand it for Evoland (and probably "games" like Settlers Online), it is a pure Flash game, and only works out of the box on Ubuntu systems with Google Chrome 32-bit installed.
For the others it's back to editing the configuration file to point to a (manually downloaded in some cases) 32-bit libpepflashplayer.so, so indeed not very Big Picture-user friendly! Plus I am not sure SteamOS is allowed integrate Google Chrome directly.

I'm all for quality control here from Steam, especially as we can still download and tweak and play the faulty games! I completed Evoland, but I was disappointed about its Linux "support"
Liam Dawe 17 Oct 2015
  • Admin
Updated: Added in reply from StarMade developer.
Johan Lejonborn 17 Oct 2015
This is great! Valve finally doing som quality assurance on Linux-games. I really hope they apply the same testing to new releases as it has become a necessity to check the community hub on every game on Steam before buying to see if there are any game breaking bugs for the Linux-version.

If they at least check that the game works as intended and don't require any external libraries/software that's roughly half of my problems with Steam-games gone. Would be nice if they tested that Achievements work too, had a few games that did not register achievements in Linux.

Maybe the SteamOS-icon will actually mean that the game works on Linux instead of meaning that the developer thinks it works on Linux. My guess is that they've had som seriously negative feedback with games not working on SteamOS and have finally done something about it with 4 weeks to go until Steam Machines hit retailers, users and reviewers.
tuubi 17 Oct 2015
  • Supporter Plus
Ignore this. I'm an idiot and replied to an old post.


Last edited by tuubi on 17 Oct 2015 at 10:43 am UTC
Eike 17 Oct 2015
  • Supporter Plus
Updated: Added in reply from StarMade developer.

So the developers get information from Valve what's wrong with their games so they can hopefully fix it. Quality control is a good thing IMHO - of course it should be applied earlier in future.
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