Category: Editorial

With competition everywhere, Valve still manages to keep on growing at a rapid pace with the new yearly review up.

John Carmack's generosity in releasing his older source code resulted in a proliferation of free first person shooters in the 2000s, but Dutch programmer Wouter van Oortmerssen rejected this path to forge Cube based in the same "just for fun" spirit with which Linus Torvalds first began work on the Linux kernel.

Software developer and game porter Ethan Lee gives his thoughts on the Steam Deck and the Deck Verified program.

Linux and audio have never entirely gotten along well together, when PulseAudio came along it actually solved a lot of problems but it's PipeWire that's the real future.

One of the selling points of Unreal Tournament pitched to the modding scene by Epic Games was its ability to load assets from the original Unreal into the new engine. After a few years this snowballed into a concerted community effort to make the entire Unreal single player mode playable from within its own sequel.

You have your shiny new Steam Deck, which I’ve gone over in an initial look on — but what about desktop mode apps and other stores? I’ve also been testing that with the Epic Games Store.

It is rare for Linux to see support from both sides of an industry battle, but that is exactly where we were with the release of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both games aiming to package the full breadth of the online multiplayer shooter experience into a standalone title, the competition between the two was fierce.

Can you actually believe that the Vulkan API has just crossed over the 6 year mark? Sometimes it feels like it was only yesterday. It truly has helped to create some amazing stuff.

In 1998 developer Raven Software acquired the rights to Soldier of Fortune to make a video game inspired by the mercenary magazine of the same name. The plan was the make a realistic tactical shooter, with consultant John Mullins brought in to add both his insights and likeness to the project.

One of the big topics of discourse in the Linux gaming sphere recently has been Tim Sweeney's statement on porting Fortnite to the Steam Deck, where Sweeney argues that Linux would be too difficult of a target and the market not big enough to warrant the amount of resources it would take to bring all of Fortnite on the platform.

Were you hoping to easily play Fortnite on the upcoming Steam Deck? Well, Tim Sweeney the Epic Games CEO has made it clear that it's not going to happen officially.

Almost from the very start Raven Software and id Software had a symbiotic relationship. Given the Linux friendly atmosphere at id, it is no surprise that some of that would start to rub off on Raven, culminating in Loki Software negotiating to make a port of Heretic II.

Not only has Valve banned NFT games from Steam but another store has come out clearly against them, with the official itch.io Twitter account releasing a very clear statement.

A new report from Business Insider has highlighted some continuing changes for Google's cloud gaming service Stadia, and it doesn't exactly sound good - but it's also something that was mostly already announced.

At heart XEvil is a basic deathmatch, but it is the anarchic elements that keep it entertaining. There is no reason XEvil has to die a death, other than its modern obscurity. Another with the talent could revive XEvil and bring all of its features back home again.

Sometimes it feels like I've somehow fallen through the multiverse into a very different and thoroughly weird world.

The annual game developer survey from GDC is out now for 2022 and it has some interesting insights as usual. That includes thoughts on the upcoming Steam Deck, with it clearly not selling everyone.

After the demise of Loki Software, one of their former employees found himself forced to work behind a cash register for a living. Desperate to get back to porting games, he found the email address of an artist working for the Croatian developer Croteam, creators of the game Serious Sam.

After completing all of the boxed Quake games for Linux, I was left with indecision. So if I could not settle on a single game to play, why not try one hundred? Made for a time of slow internet speeds and limited storage, these kinds of retail collections allowed users to explore hundreds of freeware and shareware titles from the comfort of a single CD-ROM.

To begin 2022, let's take a fresh look at the current top 100 Steam games and see how well (or not) the run on Linux.