Quoting: etonbearsBut this is not unequivocally a good sign. Along with all the genuine improvements that have been possible as games hardware and software technology have progressed, it has also become markedly easier to produce titles, leading to the huge number of games now being produced. The normal rules of supply and demand operate, meaning that most of these titles are low budget, low quality, and few will make any money.

I think this is a misinterpretation. As you say, it is markedly easier to produce titles. That is, it is markedly cheaper--a "low budget" gets you more game than it ever would have before. This in turn means that a simple game can break even with lower sales than ever before. It also means that a slightly more ambitious game can break even with lower sales than a game of that level of ambition could before, and that a game with sophistication equivalent to what would have been AAA a few years ago can break even with lower sales than ever before. So hobbyists can now be indies, indies can be mid-tier, mid-tier can be AAA, and AAA . . . can lard on even more graphics and celebrity voice overs?

Does that mean average quality will be lower? I don't see why. I might posit that the number of available broad genres of gaming will not grow as fast as the number of games, and furthermore time will continue to simply move forward, so more and more games will be derivative (at the dawn of computer gaming, no game could be derivative because there were none to derive from; the more games exist, the harder it is for them to be original). But the simple fact that people with less money can now make games of a given complexity level doesn't seem to me to imply those games will be worse. More uneven, maybe, but also games at any given sophistication level will have less commercial bureaucracy involved to stifle the creativity.

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Quoting: GuestAnyway, have fun Dota players with your 40+ minute games and overhyped tournaments! ;)

You know, you can buy sweet grapes for pretty cheap; they grow 'em by the megaton in California, Chile and so on.

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Quoting: OLucasZanellaIt's so funny seeing a company say that because they will use Linux for their servers they wanna do a Linux version. If it was the same with all the companies there would be no shortage of games on the OS.

I've actually wondered about that--how is it that there are apparently lots of games that use Linux servers but you can't play them on Linux?

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Quoting: zimplex1Steam has been going downhill in terms of quality for a few years now... That's why I've been trying to use GOG more and more. The lack of quality control will be Steam's downfall.

It's a tough balancing act, I reckon. They have this vision involving lots of user contribution; easy self-publishing in game-related space kind of like Amazon in the book space, except more so and with that driving the building of community and stuff. Not just selling games, but a whole gaming ecosystem with lots of participation (just incidentally leaving people attached to the platform where that all happens). If the game equivalent of, say, "The Martian" happens (or, sigh, Fifty Shades I guess), they want it to happen on Steam. This kind of stuff can be oversold, but there's some real potential to all that I'd figure.

But leaving it open like that means lots of people can publish crap, and at some point that's gonna impact people's experience of the simple "buying games" side of things. Their problem is how to have it both ways, so people who just want to buy games can still have a curated-feeling experience. A difficult problem.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MohandevirFor me it should be treated as the exception that proves the rule...

Exceptions don't prove rules. This is a popular misconception; the saying comes from a time when the meaning of "prove" was/could be different. The sense in this saying, as well as things like "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is more like "test"--thus, the saying means an exception tests a rule; if an exception comes up, you see if the rule will hold despite that.
Little pet peeve thingie.

Lol! I humbly stands corrected. I might have badly chosen my expression.

Are you linguist? Lol!

All I meant is that Feral as already eaten the biggest part of that pudding and it might be unfair to hold them responsible for that particular failure. From what I read, at that time, things out if their control forced them to come to this decision.

How badly did I want to play Batman Arkham Knight...

Even I was interested, and that's not really the kind of game I play much.
. . . Many years ago, I was an English Lit type and did some Old English and Middle English and like that.
And yeah, I'd agree that in Feral's case, the exception did not kill the rule--they have done plenty good stuff for which, much gratitude.

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Quoting: MohandevirFor me it should be treated as the exception that proves the rule...

Exceptions don't prove rules. This is a popular misconception; the saying comes from a time when the meaning of "prove" was/could be different. The sense in this saying, as well as things like "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is more like "test"--thus, the saying means an exception tests a rule; if an exception comes up, you see if the rule will hold despite that.
Little pet peeve thingie.

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Quote- Two new Lord types with deep-specialisation skill trees
- Three new Hero types with deep-specialisation skill trees

When I saw that, for a moment I thought it meant they had a skill about trees. Like, they could make them grow fast, walk around and smack people or whatever.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: sarmadI am getting lost here. SteamVR, OpenVR, OSVR, and now this!

Indeed, but that's the point of this, all the open standards should eventually combine/be replaced by this.

Should. Let's hope it works that way, and not this way.

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Seems to me that even if they are worried (whether accurately or not) about the consequences of not defending their trademark, they could say to the fanfolks "Tell you what, we'll license the trademark to you for a buck." All properly licensed, problem solved.

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I'd like to note that I run Mint 18 on both my desktop and laptop, and it behaves differently on the two of them! On one of them, hitting close just minimizes to the taskbar. On the other, hitting close "closes" it to the tray. So I'm not sure anyone can be confident that "Mint" or "Ubuntu" or whatever does a particular behaviour just because it has been their personal experience. It seems more variable and idiosyncratic than that.

When it closes to the tray it's still not really closed; in effect it's just even more minimized. Click the icon and it doesn't launch from scratch, it just pops up, and as has been mentioned if you go to shut down the computer it takes forever as the computer hesitantly shuts Steam down for real.
So I'm not totally happy with even the minimize-to-tray behaviour; call me old fashioned, but when I hit the X on a graphical application it's because I want the bloody thing to shut down.

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