QuoteWhat have you been playing?

In April I've mostly been playing Syberia 2 and Bridge Constructor Portal. I've got to the penultimate level in the latter, now. The little one's mostly been playing Dead Cells.

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Quoting: EikeI fear they've just been assimilated. Has there anything on Twitter or the like about the game?

Not as far as I know; the band got split up for HL:A, and then not much. But I think the game would be really good, and super sweet on the Deck, so I'm holding out hope that they get round to it one day.

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QuotePerhaps finally Half-Life 3 (yeah likely not but I can dream).

HL3 couldn't be anything but disappointing. In The Valley Of Gods is what I'm dreaming of. Of course that probably wouldn't need aggressive driver performance optimisations.

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QuoteFixed video playback speed issues in METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN.

FINALLY. It never should have had the green tick before they'd done that.

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Quoting: scaineTo be honest, I'm not sure this will lead to native anything. I think all they're trying to do here is make their stuff run better on the Deck.

The thing with Proton and the Deck is that if you really want your game to work (rather than having it work by accident and maybe break by accident) then you need a Linux testing pipeline even without a Linux build. Valve have provided debugging tools to help with that part. The making of a Linux build is much less work than setting up the Linux testing pipeline, and makes it much easier to fix should the game accidentally break. How many developers do the first part, and how many go on to do the second part, time will tell.

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It's a pretty terrible name, and Ubisoft have historically been not good to work for, but this

QuoteWork with the rest of the engineering staff to help them expand their cross-platform mindset

is how all developers should be thinking.

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Quoting: F.UltraThe most likely scenario to me is that it is the very same that happened last time, aka that this is Internet Cafe data, people using a rented machine at such a Cafe would have no problems from any of my above mentioned reasons to just click OK on whatever they get since it is not their machine.

Not just "last time." There's something like 18 months of uncorrected data, which is why that had to be scrubbed from Liam's Steam tracker, and then the same thing happens every 3-4 months and does get corrected. The double-counting problem isn't an easy one to solve - you can't keep track server side because a whole bunch of machines behind one IP address is what you'd expect to see from a cafe, and you can't keep track client side because it's standard practise to roll back the machines to a standard (no malware, no cheats) image, so the client "forgets" that that machine has already participated in the survey. So every now and then we get a massive apparent spike in Chinese users and people ("Chinese is now the most used language on Steam!") pretend that the data are valid.

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Quoting: elmapulyeah, sony tried to turn playstation in an pc (remember Ps2 linux or the otherOS option on ps3?)

It wasn't just Sony; the Dreamcast also had an Internet connection (and could run Windows). And now the consoles are x86 machines, and you definitely don't need Windows to watch media, or access the Internet, or play games. And the Xbox was just after Microsoft had successfully killed Netscape (if everything is on the Internet, there's no particular reason to use Windows over some other OS) by including IE with Windows (exactly as they do with the Windows Store and the requirement to have a Microsoft account now). Exploiting dominance in one area to crush any competitors coming from a different area is a standard pattern for Microsoft, and the only times they've really failed at it - Android and Chrome - were simply because they weren't willing to outspend Google. They can outspend everyone in the gaming space, as can be seen by them being able to throw 70 billion dollars at ActiBlizzard.

Quotethey failed at it and gave up, there werent any pressure to improve windows for gaming since then.

Until Valve.

Quoteim not saying microsoft didnt had any incentive to improve directX, but to improve the windows version of it, they fought playstation with xbox instead of with windows, until valve came with steamOS, sundelly microsoft started to talk about dx12 in public, ported their xbox exclusives to windows pc and did many other moves like that.

It was DirectX 11 that got a boot up the bum from OpenGL. It had been just sitting there since 2009 till that point. Then it got a whole bunch of point updates. DirectX 12 came about because Mantle (which formed a basis for Vulkan) was clearly better, so they made a DirectX version of Mantle (DirectX 12) just like Apple made an Apple version (Metal).

Quotebut linux will never die,

Microsoft can't kill it, although they gave serious thought to how they might try (see, for example, the Halloween Documents). All they can do is try to marginalise its use and support, and keep developers dependent on Windows-only technology.

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Quoting: elmapulwhy would microsoft improve directX for windows, if they already have an monopoly on OS for desktops, and dont make money directly from games being sold for windows?

DirectX is one of the moats protecting Windows' market share and Microsoft's control of the desktop. If game developers switch to OpenGL (or Vulkan now) that moat is breached.

Quotewhy would microsoft improve DirectX for Xbox, when they DO make money on each game sold for it?

DirectX is the whole point of the Xbox. It's literally a "DirectX box." Consoles doing general computer things as well as games would mean that consumers might do all their gaming and computing on something that doesn't come from Microsoft. This is unacceptable to Microsoft, so they poured loads of money into making a console that used Windows and DirectX so that game developers and consumers couldn't ignore them. And now that they have that additional moat, they can use that to get people to use the Windows Store - Game Pass.

Quoting: elmapulthe question is:
it will run xbox and it subset of games? or it will run windows and all it games?
if it runs windows, valve still would make money since steam is king there, not to mention they would incentive their own audience to use other stores by doing that.

on the other hand if they try to lock it to xbox games, then steamOS will still have more games (not that the ammount is more important than the names involved)

To protect their monopoly it would run almost all games from all generations of Xbox (Xbox games run in a VM already, so the hardware is abstracted), and all games from the Windows Store, and have access to Game Pass. Then they'd flood the market, since they've got more than enough money to absorb loses from hardware costs (exactly as they've done with Xbox). Control over game developers is re-established.

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Quoting: 04ELYNo way Valve and Linux scared Microsoft to put effort, we're going good!

It's not the first time. As alluded to in the article, Microsoft had allowed DirectX to languish until Valve plugged their own game through their own DirectX to OpenGL wrapper on Linux and had it run faster than DirectX on Windows. Then suddenly DirectX was super important to Microsoft again. Liam covered that incident in his retrospective article.

For this development, should Microsoft actually follow through after all, I think it's great. The Steam Deck comes with SteamOS, and will always come with SteamOS, and normal people use the OS that a machine comes with - that's why our market share is low. Those intrepid few that do install a new OS on their machine should have the least-miserable experience possible - just like those of us that have gone out of our way to install Linux on our machines.

The actual challenge to what Valve are trying to achieve with the Deck - casually turning their customers into Linux gamers - isn't Microsoft making Windows better - just like us making Linux better isn't sufficient to lift its market share. Microsoft releasing their own (Xbox-branded) handheld hardware would be the threat; they've got stacks of spare money, a whole bunch of games studios, and an established store that they're trying to juice. That's the way that a competitor could make the same pricing and platform play as Valve have done, and Microsoft doing it would be to try to sink Valve's lifeboat.

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