Many indie games on Steam are developed as hobby projects, and only a few actually make a profit on their games. I can't blame anyone for taking an opportunity such as this when one arises, even though in this case, it sucks for us.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Happy new year! :D

Here's to more user submitted articles in the new year! ;)

...and surprise ports of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Beyond Good and Evil, Alice: Madness Returns, the LEGO games, Mirror's Edge and Deathspank.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I really appreciate his work for Linux. So many great games. Eversion got full controller support a few weeks ago, by the way, but I forgot to write about it/wasn't sure if that was something people would be interested in. Anyway, it goes to show how much care he puts into his ports, even long after he's finished porting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I have been hoping for a Linux version of Ori, but even though I'm disappointed that it probably won't happen, I can't blame the developers for signing a publishing deal with Microsoft. There's not as much money in crowdfunding as many still seem to believe, and most developers have to ask for much less than the actual costs of developing their game if they're to have any hope of reaching their funding goals. Polygon posted an article about the problem in May. If Ori hadn't been published by Microsoft, it might not even have been made.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: HamishSorry for turning this into a mere back and forth between me and Cheese flesk.

I think it's good to have a discussion about what itch.io has to offer, so I don't mind. Like I said before, I don't think it needs to curate content like other distribution platforms to be a good option for customers, since that role can be filled by specialist sites like http://buysomeindiegames.com and http://metroidvanias.com, and maintainers of itch collections. Like Cheeseness mentioned though, it's unfortunate that you can't filter by the state of games, since it's needlessly difficult to find complete games, and the popularity of a free game isn't necessarily comparable to that of a paid game if it's only a comparison of number of downloads over a certain period. A

Quoting: HamishSorry for turning this into a mere back and forth between me and Cheese flesk.

I think it's good to have a discussion about what itch.io has to offer, so I don't mind. Like I said before, I don't think it needs to curate content like other distribution platforms to be a good option for customers, since that role can be filled by specialist sites like http://buysomeindiegames.com and http://metroidvanias.com, and maintainers of itch collections. It's needlessly difficult to find complete games though, and I suspect their popularity filter is just based on downloads over a certain period of time, which gives free games of all types an unfair advantage, and drowns the good paid content.

Another issue, which isn't itch's fault, is that I've seen at least a couple of developers completely abandon itch.io and their only DRM free option once they get on Steam.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I loved RA2 back in the day. Will definitely give this a shot once that's supported.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yeah, I think it's more important that itch.io gives creators the means to distribute and promote their games and provide the tools to make it an interesting place to find and play games for users. We already have several good curated DRM free stores, like GOG, FireFlower Games and IndieGameStand, and itch.io is a more democratic approach that I think fills its own niche.

Browsing the store front for games for a user who expects to find games of the same quality as on other store fronts is less than ideal though, and even after they made it possible to combine platform filters with tags and other filters, I still find it difficult to find anything I want to play there. Even though I knew that both Blocks that Matter and Tetrobot and Co., neither showed up even after spending well over an hour looking through the most popular Linux games from top to bottom.

I don't want to limit the collection to my own taste, and I figure if at least one person can say that they enjoyed a game, it's worth adding, even if it doesn't have a high Metascore or user ratings on other distribution platforms.

Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: Robert

Quoting: fleskThanks. :) I have a couple of of those in my "staging" collection of games I haven't checked out properly yet...

You can safely move the Zork series out of staging, they were one of the best-selling games of their time, but I wonder if they're legit...

I seem to recall that for some bizarre reason, Activision chose to renew the copyright on Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but not the Zork series.

Yeah, the reason why it's in "staging" is because I couldn't figure out if it's legit.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Robert

Quoting: flesk...if you have a favorite game on itch.io which isn't in my collection, please tell me about it in the comments.

Some games came to my mind:
Retro-Pixel Castles
Sky Rogue
Crystal Picnic
Sage Fusion
Detective Chirpums

Thanks. :) I have a couple of of those in my "staging" collection of games I haven't checked out properly yet. If you or anyone else wants to contribute to the collection, and eventually write short blurbs for each game, just give me your itch.io user name and I'll add you.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yeah, the search function doesn't replace spaces with wildcards. I often google "site:gamingonlinux.com search term" if I can't find what I'm looking for, or if I can only remember parts of the content, but not the title of the article.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's been a while since I played it, but as far as I can recall, it was interesting enough that I played through most of it in one sitting. Took me 1.3 hours according to Steam. Gameplay consists mostly of exploring scenes to learn information that opens up different dialogue options that you use to progress, plus a few puzzles. I'm not the biggest fan of choice driven games, but I think choices have their appeal when they're as clear-cut as in this game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments