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I'm all for stores being a bit more open, but stuff like this takes the biscuit and then some. It's usually £0.75, but right now it's on sale for £0.37. I know what you're thinking, and I don't expect anything really for that amount of money, but damn this is a game that's actually being sold on Steam.
Their official description of the game on Steam is just full of pictures of random people, rather than actually giving a proper description of the game itself.
I purchased it to see if maybe, just maybe, the developers were acting like children on Steam to be "edgy", but no, the game is just junk. This is the kind of thing I would expect to see fail to gain enough votes even on Greenlight, which is supposed to be Valve's way of weeding out the crap. Valve are utterly failing at any form of quality control. Sadly Greenlight is often abused by developers, giving out free keys for votes, bot voting and so on.
To make it clear: This is not an Early Access game, this is a full and complete game suggesting it should have some level of quality to it.
I'm damn sure the developer simply slapped some low resolution stock Unity assets along with some kind of FPS tutorial and called it a day. It sounds like it even rips kill announcements from Unreal Tournament.
I'm not asking for GOG-level curation here where legitimate indie games get turned down all the time, but at least a little please Valve.
Games like this flooding Steam take away some of the valuable time other new games would usually get in the newly released section, which can be a real problem for other more deserving developers who need the visibility.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
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This number inflation by "porters" will do no good. The only hope is direct personal work with (mostly indie) developers via Kickstarter or otherwise to persuade them in releasing day-1 versions and not "ports". And this will be way harder.
I don't think you quite understand what you're saying here. With the exception of OpenGL only stuff, EVERYTHING is a port with some sort of wrapping. Even Unreal Engine and Unity. As proven by the lower performance. Having an optimal solution would require a full blown rewrite, which is never going to happen for the Linux+Mac market share. Unless the Windows market share starts dropping drastically. But DX12/Vulkan will solve the problem way before that. For new stuff anyway.
0 Likes
Stop crying like a baby. Without valve and steam we probably will have nothing.ORLY?
Valve is just another name for Microsoft for all I care. Valve did not do a thing for Linux.
The recent advances in Linux gaming have begun from "Humble Indie Bundles", the first of which began on the 4th of May, 2010. These events hightlighted the viability of the Linux market.
But the true impact for Linux gaming was "Wasteland 2". Remember, when Bryan Fargo launched the campaign, he seriously underestimated backer's interest and promised Linux version before he even decided on the game engine?
At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline. We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more. We will even be able to bring Wasteland 2 to OS X and Linux!
That was March of 2012. But what happened next? After the successful conclusion of the campaign Fargo began to look for the engine. It was then when Denis Shergin proposed to use UNIGINE engine (free of charge), but (as we know) Fargo decided to stop on the Unity3D engine which did not support Linux at the time. But in order to secure the deal Unity3D developers were obliged to add Linux support in the 4.0 version in November of 2012.
We all know how big role Unity3D support played in the case of Linux gaming development. There is no need to list all the great games made with Uinty3D.
But when did Steam store came to Linux? That's right: "Open Beta" on 22nd of December, 2012. Like a scavenger Valve just came to claim all the credit without any of the work.
And what exactly Valve did to promote Linux gaming? Steam machines flop? OpenVR without Linux support? Infamous "The Withcer III" ads or "SteamOS sales"? Changing Tux icon with it's own SteamOS icon for Linux (like Valve owns Linux, no less)? Or constant removals of said icons after preorders and just before launch?
I don't think you quite understand what you're saying here. With the exception of OpenGL only stuff, EVERYTHING is a port with some sort of wrapping. Even Unreal Engine and Unity. As proven by the lower performance. Having an optimal solution would require a full blown rewrite, which is never going to happen for the Linux+Mac market share.
Objection!
If we look onto this game we will see that apart from the obvious OS difference its system requirements are identical. This alone proofs that Unity3D is not "port" or "wrapper". It's "*.dll"-s are managed bytecode and not wrapped Windows PE executables. But if it so not enougth to convince you than we can look into any Unity3D log file located in ~/.config/unity3d/<company_name>/<game_name>/Player.log:
Selecting FBConfig
GLX_FBCONFIG_ID=263
GLX_BUFFER_SIZE=32
GLX_DOUBLEBUFFER=1
GLX_RED_SIZE=8
GLX_GREEN_SIZE=8
GLX_BLUE_SIZE=8
GLX_ALPHA_SIZE=8
GLX_DEPTH_SIZE=24
GLX_STENCIL_SIZE=8
GLX_SAMPLES_ARB=0
GLX_SAMPLE_BUFFERS_ARB=0
GLX_CONFIG_CAVEAT=NONE
Desktop is 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz
Initialize engine version: 5.2.2p2 (67d68477bb52)
GfxDevice: creating device client; threaded=1
GPU_MEMORY_INFO_DEDICATED_VIDMEM_NVX: 1048576
OpenGL:
Version: OpenGL 4.5 [4.5.0 NVIDIA 352.63]
Renderer: GeForce GTX 650/PCIe/SSE2
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
VRAM: 1024 MB
Extensions: <lots_of_OpenGL_extensions>
See? OpenGL all right. Right there, in the engine. Sure, Unity3D is a crappy engine per se, but it is crappy on all of the supported platforms.
And this is a completely different story. Surely, you can see a difference between
AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz or ntel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghzon Windows and
1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)
DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT, nVidia 8600
Intel i3 or AMD FX-6300on "SteamOS".
4GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce 640 with 1GB of Video Memory, AMD R7 260X
Last edited by Alm888 on 9 October 2016 at 12:46 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
This turned into a decent thread. It will be interesting to see if we really do have "the year of the Linux desktop" by the second quarter of 2017.
If Linux hasn't captured a decent wedge of ports that doesn't mean it's a dead platform, 3000 games (even if 70% are guff) it's still a lot to enjoy, but the dust will have pretty much settled from 2010 to mid 2017 and everyone should have a pretty clear picture.
At 7.5 years That is getting awfully close to the '10 years to make a platform'
There is Vulkan & AMDGPU drivers here now, so im optimistic. Perhaps Linux doesnt become thee goto PC gaming platform.. shrugs, Linux has a lot more going for it than just games in this world of endless data harvesting ( stealing ) and security issues.
Last edited by on 9 October 2016 at 9:42 pm UTC
If Linux hasn't captured a decent wedge of ports that doesn't mean it's a dead platform, 3000 games (even if 70% are guff) it's still a lot to enjoy, but the dust will have pretty much settled from 2010 to mid 2017 and everyone should have a pretty clear picture.
At 7.5 years That is getting awfully close to the '10 years to make a platform'
There is Vulkan & AMDGPU drivers here now, so im optimistic. Perhaps Linux doesnt become thee goto PC gaming platform.. shrugs, Linux has a lot more going for it than just games in this world of endless data harvesting ( stealing ) and security issues.
Last edited by on 9 October 2016 at 9:42 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
Stop crying like a baby. Without valve and steam we probably will have nothing.ORLY?
Valve is just another name for Microsoft for all I care. Valve did not do a thing for Linux.
The recent advances in Linux gaming have begun from "Humble Indie Bundles", the first of which began on the 4th of May, 2010. These events hightlighted the viability of the Linux market.
But the true impact for Linux gaming was "Wasteland 2". Remember, when Bryan Fargo launched the campaign, he seriously underestimated backer's interest and promised Linux version before he even decided on the game engine?
At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline. We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more. We will even be able to bring Wasteland 2 to OS X and Linux!
That was March of 2012. But what happened next? After the successful conclusion of the campaign Fargo began to look for the engine. It was then when Denis Shergin proposed to use UNIGINE engine (free of charge), but (as we know) Fargo decided to stop on the Unity3D engine which did not support Linux at the time. But in order to secure the deal Unity3D developers were obliged to add Linux support in the 4.0 version in November of 2012.
We all know how big role Unity3D support played in the case of Linux gaming development. There is no need to list all the great games made with Uinty3D.
But when did Steam store came to Linux? That's right: "Open Beta" on 22nd of December, 2012. Like a scavenger Valve just came to claim all the credit without any of the work.
And what exactly Valve did to promote Linux gaming? Steam machines flop? OpenVR without Linux support? Infamous "The Withcer III" ads or "SteamOS sales"? Changing Tux icon with it's own SteamOS icon for Linux (like Valve owns Linux, no less)? Or constant removals of said icons after preorders and just before launch?
I don't think you quite understand what you're saying here. With the exception of OpenGL only stuff, EVERYTHING is a port with some sort of wrapping. Even Unreal Engine and Unity. As proven by the lower performance. Having an optimal solution would require a full blown rewrite, which is never going to happen for the Linux+Mac market share.
Objection!
If we look onto this game we will see that apart from the obvious OS difference its system requirements are identical. This alone proofs that Unity3D is not "port" or "wrapper". It's "*.dll"-s are managed bytecode and not wrapped Windows PE executables. But if it so not enougth to convince you than we can look into any Unity3D log file located in ~/.config/unity3d/<company_name>/<game_name>/Player.log:
Selecting FBConfig
GLX_FBCONFIG_ID=263
GLX_BUFFER_SIZE=32
GLX_DOUBLEBUFFER=1
GLX_RED_SIZE=8
GLX_GREEN_SIZE=8
GLX_BLUE_SIZE=8
GLX_ALPHA_SIZE=8
GLX_DEPTH_SIZE=24
GLX_STENCIL_SIZE=8
GLX_SAMPLES_ARB=0
GLX_SAMPLE_BUFFERS_ARB=0
GLX_CONFIG_CAVEAT=NONE
Desktop is 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz
Initialize engine version: 5.2.2p2 (67d68477bb52)
GfxDevice: creating device client; threaded=1
GPU_MEMORY_INFO_DEDICATED_VIDMEM_NVX: 1048576
OpenGL:
Version: OpenGL 4.5 [4.5.0 NVIDIA 352.63]
Renderer: GeForce GTX 650/PCIe/SSE2
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
VRAM: 1024 MB
Extensions: <lots_of_OpenGL_extensions>
See? OpenGL all right. Right there, in the engine. Sure, Unity3D is a crappy engine per se, but it is crappy on all of the supported platforms.
And this is a completely different story. Surely, you can see a difference between
AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz or ntel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghzon Windows and
1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)
DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT, nVidia 8600
Intel i3 or AMD FX-6300on "SteamOS".
4GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce 640 with 1GB of Video Memory, AMD R7 260X
Strange coz I have 231 games for linux and most of them are good and they are ported because valve initiative and the only shity games that I have was from humble bundle indie initiative. Don't get me wrong I'm very gratful to humble bundle but valve is the company with power to make the difference and yes valve make money as I and You there is nothing wrong with that
0 Likes
I don't think you quite understand what you're saying here. With the exception of OpenGL only stuff, EVERYTHING is a port with some sort of wrapping. Even Unreal Engine and Unity. As proven by the lower performance. Having an optimal solution would require a full blown rewrite, which is never going to happen for the Linux+Mac market share.
Objection!
If we look onto this game we will see that apart from the obvious OS difference its system requirements are identical. This alone proofs that Unity3D is not "port" or "wrapper". It's "*.dll"-s are managed bytecode and not wrapped Windows PE executables. But if it so not enougth to convince you than we can look into any Unity3D log file located in ~/.config/unity3d/<company_name>/<game_name>/Player.log
...
Benchmark it. You'll see lower framerates on OpenGL. That's down one thing: DX11 came first and got the best optimisation, then came OpenGL layer that was suboptimal. You can call in anything you want, but the net effect is the same.
0 Likes
Stop crying like a baby.Really? You're going to bring it down to that level?
Without valve and steam we probably will have nothing. Steam is very good serves and the only one I have know to have refund.I think you will find GOG do refunds and have done so long before Steam.
Also it is not possible for valve to manage all indi entries and for that they create steam greenlight and if something bad pass the greenlight its users fault.It's not as simple as that, Greenlight is often abused quite badly by developers. Bot votes, free keys for votes and so on.
Next time bofero buy somethin watch the reviews and videos attach to the gameYou missed the entire point of the article. I did not go into it blindly expecting a miracle, I am highlighting it because it is bad.
3 Likes, Who?
Strange coz I have 231 games for linux and most of them are good and they are ported because valve initiative and the only shity games that I have was from humble bundle indie initiative. Don't get me wrong I'm very gratful to humble bundle but valve is the company with power to make the difference and yes valve make money as I and You there is nothing wrong with that
Sadly, since then Humble Inc. had strayed from the path. Yet, they port something from time to time (more correctly, they contract porters but...). Now their role is mostly over.
Actually Valve never claimed any thing, it was their users/fanbase that did.
And to date, Valve have (tried to) do more than anyone else for "gaming" on Linux, and continue to do so slowly but surely.
True :)
Some guys just love to seek Messiah. When Valve finally had risen from its throne and descended upon Linux they saw this as a sign of the New Age. Yet, so far I myself did not see anything that great happening and it seems since then Valve lost interest (provided Valve had it in the first place and not just feigned retaliation move towards Microsoft's Windows Store). The only way to shift the balance in our favor is to work harder: reach developers, persuade them, provide them any help possible. Valve will not do this for us.
Benchmark it. You'll see lower framerates on OpenGL. That's down one thing: DX11 came first and got the best optimisation, then came OpenGL layer that was suboptimal. You can call in anything you want, but the net effect is the same.
Sorry, can't do. I do not own a single Windows machine. But be assured, if the framerate is worse on Linux it is because of poor OpenGL implementation on the Unity3D side. There are (historical) reasons: before that my little fairy tale of "Wasteland 2" Unity3D crew just did not see any reason to support Linux. They only supported MacOS and since MacOS (at that time) was limited to OpenGL 2.0 they initially just slapped Linux support on top of their MacOS support. Hence, Linux OpenGL was equal to Mac's (read -- pretty poor). This has nothing to do with "ports": it's just the way Unity3D is (or was, as in their 5.0 version Unity3D devs introduced OpenGL 4.5 support).
0 Likes
I'm kind of puzzled by some of the bad reaction to this. With the "don't but it" crowd, that's kind of part of the point of this site - Liam is playing a shit game in this case so you don't have to (tm).
I also disagree with the "who cares? there's refunds" view. While refunds are a nice option, quality control is important. It's the reason Nintendo (despite what some would consider very aggressive business practices) did so well in the 90s and Atari became almost non-existent. There's plenty of other places for cheap shovleware or places for people to sell their first stab at making a game - but Steam isn't that place. I think Valve already do a pretty good job at giving very small developers a decent shot (games like Stardew Valley come to mind) but there's no need to publish stuff which borders on exploitative, all that does is crowd out the well intentioned and talented indie developers.
As for Valve doing nothing for Linux gaming... Come on guys. Say what you will about Valve, about it being a huge multinational who uses the same tax loopholes as Apple, Amazon et. al. but that kind of argument by association doesn't fly. It's a reality that we have many of the games we do because Linux is a platform on Steam (the largest digital distribution platform) and Valve pushed a lot for Vulkan development and created things like VOGL.
I also disagree with the "who cares? there's refunds" view. While refunds are a nice option, quality control is important. It's the reason Nintendo (despite what some would consider very aggressive business practices) did so well in the 90s and Atari became almost non-existent. There's plenty of other places for cheap shovleware or places for people to sell their first stab at making a game - but Steam isn't that place. I think Valve already do a pretty good job at giving very small developers a decent shot (games like Stardew Valley come to mind) but there's no need to publish stuff which borders on exploitative, all that does is crowd out the well intentioned and talented indie developers.
As for Valve doing nothing for Linux gaming... Come on guys. Say what you will about Valve, about it being a huge multinational who uses the same tax loopholes as Apple, Amazon et. al. but that kind of argument by association doesn't fly. It's a reality that we have many of the games we do because Linux is a platform on Steam (the largest digital distribution platform) and Valve pushed a lot for Vulkan development and created things like VOGL.
4 Likes, Who?
And this is a completely different story. Surely, you can see a difference between
AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz or ntel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghzon Windows and
1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)
DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT, nVidia 8600
Intel i3 or AMD FX-6300on "SteamOS".
4GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce 640 with 1GB of Video Memory, AMD R7 260X
Oh please stop this bullshit, this has been explained til death...
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/life-is-strange-released-for-linux-steamos-some-thoughts-and-a-port-report-included.7682/page=15#67360
The problem here is that this Feral port requires way more hardware power to get the job done..I think we have one of these posts for every port we've done. :)
The requirements differences between Window$ and Linux (native) are huge
We only support hardware back to the hardware we could buy when we started porting. Often our games might run on older low spec hardware however we can't go an buy all the older 5+ year old hardware on eBay just so we can test the odd game on older and less popular hardware. Apart from the issues with buying second hand equipment from eBay the potential cost of buying (and then hiring more staff to test on them) isn't really feasible.
We set out our min spec hardware based on the min spec hardware targeted for the initial SteamOS boxes when we announced XCOM 1 on Linux. I hope that explains why our min spec will never drop below certain hardware (Nvidia 640, AMD R7 Series & Intel Iris Pro).
0 Likes
Oh please stop this bullshit, this has been explained til death...
Are you trying to sell me that porters do not know how much RAM or how recent GPU their port will need?
Sorry, but I do not buy this piece of... smooth talking.
It could pass as truth for "minimum" system requirements but not for recommended. Their "minimum" specs for "SteamOS" far surpass those for "recommended" on Windows.
2 Likes, Who?
Dude, be serious 2min, it's not about "knowing", it's about testing in real condition and providing support. You know, something professional. Releasing a game is not just "Hit the compile button and upload the result on Steam".
Tomb Raider runs well on Linux, even with hardware close to Windows minimum requirement.
Someone tested it with this config, and was surprised how good it works even on his crap hardware.
- OS: Linux Rosa 64 bits
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00Ghz
- GPU: NVIDIA G94 [Geforce 9600 GT]
- RAM: 4 GB
link
Last edited by Nel on 9 October 2016 at 7:22 pm UTC
Tomb Raider runs well on Linux, even with hardware close to Windows minimum requirement.
Someone tested it with this config, and was surprised how good it works even on his crap hardware.
- OS: Linux Rosa 64 bits
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00Ghz
- GPU: NVIDIA G94 [Geforce 9600 GT]
- RAM: 4 GB
link
Last edited by Nel on 9 October 2016 at 7:22 pm UTC
0 Likes
I don't actually know how this game would end up in anybody's steam game library. The only way would be to just buy some really cheap titles without looking at the store page. Just take a look at the store page. I think it is extremely clear that this is not "a polished full game". If you can't tell by the standard price, the store page should get the message across in less then 5 seconds. They even tried very hard to make it obvious that this game isn't meant seriously.
I don't understand why that would be a actual problem? Of course it's odd that those games are on steam, they don't serve any purpose except being silly. But hey, you really don't have to buy them.
Are there really that much people who are buying games without taking a look at the store page?
I don't understand why that would be a actual problem? Of course it's odd that those games are on steam, they don't serve any purpose except being silly. But hey, you really don't have to buy them.
Are there really that much people who are buying games without taking a look at the store page?
2 Likes, Who?
People sell crap because people buy crap.
Tl;dr: CAVEAT EMPTOR friends and neighbors. Caveat emptor.
Crap selling is universal. Wherever "goods" are being sold, "crap" is being sold nearby. Retail chains, grocery stores, online retailers, all of them sell crap. They sell good stuff too, but it's mixed in among all the crap.
I've never actually read [Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain), from cover to cover, but Steam's Greenlight system seems very much like it's trying to operate closer to the open-source "Bazaar" model than the closed-source "Cathedral" model.
Rather than have one person or even several people "curating" what is and is not acceptable to be sold on Steam (Cathedral), Valve is trying to apply Linus' Law:
Valve knows there will always be customers that hate this or that game no matter how well curated it might try to make the goods sold on Steam. As Aesop pointed out some 2,500 years ago, "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."
Last edited by Nanobang on 10 October 2016 at 1:52 pm UTC
Tl;dr: CAVEAT EMPTOR friends and neighbors. Caveat emptor.
Crap selling is universal. Wherever "goods" are being sold, "crap" is being sold nearby. Retail chains, grocery stores, online retailers, all of them sell crap. They sell good stuff too, but it's mixed in among all the crap.
I've never actually read [Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain), from cover to cover, but Steam's Greenlight system seems very much like it's trying to operate closer to the open-source "Bazaar" model than the closed-source "Cathedral" model.
Rather than have one person or even several people "curating" what is and is not acceptable to be sold on Steam (Cathedral), Valve is trying to apply Linus' Law:
"Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone."Greenlight "test"s whether a game will sell or not (selling games being Valve's business), and voters on Greenlight are akin, then, to "beta-testers" in this analogue. It's not "perfect," but it is human, and like any human-based system of discernment, it is inherently biased. Clearly crap can get through the process, but like I said, crap selling is universal.
Valve knows there will always be customers that hate this or that game no matter how well curated it might try to make the goods sold on Steam. As Aesop pointed out some 2,500 years ago, "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."
Last edited by Nanobang on 10 October 2016 at 1:52 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
Stop crying like a baby.Really? You're going to bring it down to that level?
Without valve and steam we probably will have nothing. Steam is very good serves and the only one I have know to have refund.I think you will find GOG do refunds and have done so long before Steam.
Also it is not possible for valve to manage all indi entries and for that they create steam greenlight and if something bad pass the greenlight its users fault.It's not as simple as that, Greenlight is often abused quite badly by developers. Bot votes, free keys for votes and so on.
Next time bofero buy somethin watch the reviews and videos attach to the gameYou missed the entire point of the article. I did not go into it blindly expecting a miracle, I am highlighting it because it is bad.
You know, somehow I dont know why you make this article anyways, aside from the assets stolen from other games, this game is just bad, no reason to blame Valve for not doing their job on "quality control", since we know Valve have never done such a thing as QA. If people wants to have a store with QA, play on consoles, still you will miss good games like Unturned or No more room in Hell because those games would never pass Sony or M$ QA.
Then this become a dislike thread, dislike towards Steam and most of the games available on Linux in the Steam store, with people claiming that 70% of the games for linux are "crap". Thats a lie, and you know it but people likes to exaggerate the facts to sound more convincing. Comparing GOG to Steam is kinda ridiculous, you better know that it doesnt matter if GOG did support linux first, without Steam, Linux game list would be pretty short, and games like Rocket League would never come to the platform.
Valve said last year Greenlight devs offering keys for votes will be banned, here we have to face a sad reality, people like to vote for sh!t on Greenlight, just for trolling, thats the problem when you give people too much power, same happens on the review system.
Like it or not Valve has push Linux gaming, not good enough for many, I can agree with that, but at least we have games to play now and not only that old abandonware GOG used to sell in their store.
Dont take me wrong, nothing personal, I really enjoy reading your articles, but this time this seems to be out of place.
0 Likes
Oh please stop this bullshit, this has been explained til death...
Are you trying to sell me that porters do not know how much RAM or how recent GPU their port will need?
Sorry, but I do not buy this piece of... smooth talking.
I ported Day of the Tentacle Remastered to Linux and I couldn't tell you what graphics cards it does and doesn't run on or even what the theoretical minimum for RAM usage might be.
I removed the hard coded minimum GL check to allow people on way old hardware to at least try if they want, but like Nel says, the published system requirements we ended up going with more comes down to what we're willing to support (this is also true for the Windows system requirements - they're just what matches the lowest spec machines that happened to be laying around). If somebody has problems and it turns out that those are caused by obscure hardware that I can't get ahold of, then my options for reproducing, diagnosing and fixing those problems are significantly reduced.
That's not smooth talking. That's me being realistic about how I want to spend my own time and how much of other people's time I'm willing to waste.
I meant 'don't buy it' in response to the idea that stuff like this shouldn't be on steam. I think their user-curated Greenlight system is a good idea. Clearly some people want to pay money for this shit - let them have it I say!
This is how I feel about it. Plus, those that are pushing their way through Greenlight by means other than demonstrating an enthusiastic userbase are only making surviving on Steam harder for themselves and will wallow in obscurity, so it's not like they're getting free success.
There was an interview from a while back where Gabe had talked about his vision for Steam as an open platform where he wanted to give people the ability to create their own Steam "storefronts" (I feel like the Steam curator stuff is the first step along this path). Steam as a single monolithic storefront is becoming less and less relevant, and that's the only context where the signal to noise ratio of the quality of games really matters.
I'd much rather see individual communities highlight games that they find interesting (whether that be assessed through quality, production values, or more valuable subjective means) than have storefronts cull out ones that they think aren't.
0 Likes
See more from me