GTA III & Vice City reverse-engineered code taken down on GitHub again by Take-Two DMCA

software running in WINE/Proton isn't worth the hassle.

Really? ... Have you tried?

For a vast amount of titles it literary is the exact same procedure as on Windows. Click install, "play" and off you go.

Yeah, agreed. Strange take... unless they mean, I don't know, like ideologically?

And thanks to FSR, while it's not as simple as "click play", I can run some Windows games much better than Windows can. My YT video on Cyberpunk in another thread demonstrates that - if I were playing on Windows, I'd be suffering sub-60fps at 1080p. On Linux, with the FSR fullscreen "hack" on ProtonGE, I'm getting 60fps at 4K. Absolutely immense.

It's not quite click & play for everyone. When it works, seems to work great. When it doesn't, it's just a massive hassle that would make one think to why even bother.

I'm in the latter category; I recognise most are not.
"Proton" has never worked very well for me, if at all. Driving Steam through system wine directly has been fine on the other hand (which is handy for the modified DXVK I now require to have that not segfault on me). So obviously for some people it can be a hassle.

(I mean only to state recognition that "Proton" is really problematic for some people in a technical sense, even while admitting that it's certainly not an issue for the majority.)

I was willing to bet you weren't running a mainstream Ubuntu derivative then, because across multiple PCs with multiple installs of Ubuntu, Mint and most recently Pop, it's pretty much hassle free.

Most people who have such issues are not Valve's target audience, tbh. Nothing wrong with Arch, Fedora or, in your case, Gentoo, but these are problems of your own making, imo.

So, you accept DRM and find it a normal/good way (maybe the only way?) to defend their intellectual property?

Yeah, the reality being as it is, I support DRM 110%. Of course I do. Especially as a software developer myself for many many years I can *totally* relate to the challenge it must be for the company to suffer a grand scale theft of their hard work and investments.

I do not know your age but you may not have been around back then, but around the turn of the century piracy was well on the way of destroying the entire PC platform as a gaming platform. It was so bad that the developers only had a window of a few days of sales after release before it *completely* died out due to piracy. Dead. What the shops didn't sell the first couple of weeks would very likely be a loss, collect dust.

Back then, when you entered a game store, it was all about consoles. The practically piracy-free platforms completely covered the walls, from floor to roof. A corner deep down in the store there was some top selling PC titles. The rest of the shelves were consoles, consoles, consoles.

Valve pretty much single handedly, via Steam, saved the PC platform as a viable market for games.

You accept a system that restrict your freedom of what you buy only because it protect corporations and give them more power?

I experience ZERO restrictions on Steam. Zero. Never ever in my 16 years on Steam have I experienced any kind of hindrance. I play anytime anywhere on whatever computer I may have had over the course of these years.
Quite the contrary, what I experience is a free cloud save of all my savegames forever, and a free storage of my entire library of games, ready and available to be installed on new machines whenever, wherever. This service is something I'd PAY for, gladly.

We gotta stop being so damn anal about reasonable DRM systems. It's just fanatic.

If it's any consolation, the huge majority of those pirates probably never actually played those games, and just did it for the thrill and 'because they can'.

There are a few reasons why piracy exists;
1) Price (debatable if this is actually the top reason; sure when you were a jobless teenager, going to the store to buy software was probably a lot more impossible than getting some floppy disks from your buddies).
2) Availability (for something like the Atari 8bit and 16bit platforms in the US, there was definitely a shortage of actual availability. It was easier to find the software on BBSes than to find them in a store.)
3) Thrill / Collection. Already mentioned.
4) And this is very important... sometimes the pirated version works better due to the DRM (like CD Checks that break some things, or rootkits you get from the software are worse than taking your luck on the high seas.).

But we shouldn't be talking about Piracy. This is not what this is. This is a company that was planning on doing a remake, and don't want this project to cut into their sales of that. Why sell a 5 dollar old game (assuming people don't already have the game SOMEWHERE already) when they can sell the 60 dollar remake? Look at Diablo 2. They're charging full price for a game where they just smoothed out the graphics and made it more modern! If there were an open source engine for it, how would that not cut into sales of that, when you could just reskin it yourself?

software running in WINE/Proton isn't worth the hassle.

Really? ... Have you tried?

For a vast amount of titles it literary is the exact same procedure as on Windows. Click install, "play" and off you go.

Yeah, agreed. Strange take... unless they mean, I don't know, like ideologically?

And thanks to FSR, while it's not as simple as "click play", I can run some Windows games much better than Windows can. My YT video on Cyberpunk in another thread demonstrates that - if I were playing on Windows, I'd be suffering sub-60fps at 1080p. On Linux, with the FSR fullscreen "hack" on ProtonGE, I'm getting 60fps at 4K. Absolutely immense.

It's not quite click & play for everyone. When it works, seems to work great. When it doesn't, it's just a massive hassle that would make one think to why even bother.

I'm in the latter category; I recognise most are not.
"Proton" has never worked very well for me, if at all. Driving Steam through system wine directly has been fine on the other hand (which is handy for the modified DXVK I now require to have that not segfault on me). So obviously for some people it can be a hassle.

(I mean only to state recognition that "Proton" is really problematic for some people in a technical sense, even while admitting that it's certainly not an issue for the majority.)

I was willing to bet you weren't running a mainstream Ubuntu derivative then, because across multiple PCs with multiple installs of Ubuntu, Mint and most recently Pop, it's pretty much hassle free.

Most people who have such issues are not Valve's target audience, tbh. Nothing wrong with Arch, Fedora or, in your case, Gentoo, but these are problems of your own making, imo.

True, I use Gentoo, and am not surprised when something proprietary doesn't work the greatest (ironically fglrx always ran fine for me!) but equally isn't it a bit against one of the whole points of GNU/Linux to say "use what we say or go away"? Probably sounds harsh what said alound, so I'll try put it another way: it's not a problem of my own making, it's a limitation of (in this case) "Proton" (specifically as bundled with Steam). Such limitations prevents opportunities in growing GNU/Linux because it's going to otherwise become (and apologies to Liam for abusing the site name in such a way) Steam on Ubuntu rather than Gaming on Linux.

I'm not trying to encourage a monopoly... but this has always been Linux's biggest problem. It constantly tries to boil the ocean - so much freedom, so much variety, there's nothing for creatives to "target" and it causes constant, tedious tribal divisions.

So I'm pretty delighted that Valve is doing this - creating a targetable standard and setting the line in the sand. And they're doing it right, using open, collaborative methods.

No one is saying use this or go away. But if I showed up to a bike track on a unicycle, it's a bit rich to complain it's a hassle to use. I chose the unicycle.

(not a great metaphor - I'm not suggesting that anything that isn't Ubuntu is a unicycle... but it's late, I'm tired and I think it gets my point across)

you appear to suggest that essentially their product not working properly is my fault and it's up to me to change my system to suit that product. That's obviously quite silly, and yet it's how I see the conversation going.

Ah, no. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. My point is that Valves work on this target is open. You can alter your system to make it work if you choose, but that is indeed a hassle and my point is that you don't then get to complain that it's a hassle. That's like complaining that nautilus doesn't work on KDE without the "hassle" of adding about 200 KDE libraries to your system.

I was talking about people complaining of the hassle. Not attacking your right to chose your own O/S or distro.