Side question: It seems like Chromebooks have been selling surprisingly well lately. Is anyone writing games for them? Would such games run on normal Linux? If they don't, could a library be written to make a normal Linux run them (or vice versa, to make a Chromebook run games for SteamOS as long as they were lightweight enough for the little thing)? Would any or all of these things be useful for general Linux gaming?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeHm. We've got 25% on Steam, probably with more old than new games. 17% would, well... not be more than that.

Steam has very little presence in games outside the desktop/laptop form factor. This survey included consoles and phones, which are huge markets. So its face value before you add the needed big chunk o' salt is that if you take all the game developers on both computers (where Linux is an option) and consoles and phones (where it basically isn't), 17% of that whole field have Linux plans. Presumably if you removed the people concentrating on consoles or phones from the sample, the Linux percentage in the remaining group would be significantly higher.

Edited to add: Oh. Yeah, like JOndra91 already said.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Frontiers . . . every time someone mentions that word I get reminded of this Star Trek joke:
How many ears does Mr. Spock have?
Three. One on the left, one on the right, and the final, front ear.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

As for graphics, I suppose you could make that a stretch goal--"If I get this much money, I will find someone who can do good art and pay them to do art stuff" kind of thing.
So, does this have sort of a Redwall vibe? Except in Redwall the critters tend to fight with weapons, where here it looks like pretty much tooth, claw, webs and stuff.
I tend to agree with Tuubi, that video tells me what basic kind of game it is but gives me no real clues whether it's a good one of its type--whether the tactical possibilities are interesting, whether the story associated is any good, what they're fighting about, whether there is anything about it that says "fantasy" other than there being intelligent animals having a war (which I suppose is vaguely fantastical but doesn't scream "fantasy" as a genre), so on and so forth.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: wolfyrionBelieve it or not I bet that 98% of the people will format their Steam OS Machines and install Windows on it for the obvious reason to be able to play all the popular game titles.

No. The kind of people who might be interested in doing that will tend to be precisely the kind of people who can't hack the idea of manually installing an OS. Such people will either not buy the thing in the first place, or having bought it and finding it doesn't do what they wanted, they'll just sort of let it moulder in a closet.

QuoteAtm Valve cant do anything about it because developers,game engines, Vulkan API,drivers,Linux OS have to mature so Valve has to give them time to grow up.

The Steam Machine ecosystem does have various shortcomings right now. But Valve can do things about many of them if it chooses to spend resources. It can have people work on graphics drivers, on tools for Vulkan, on stuff for SteamOS like what Johners was talking about (streaming, multimedia etc), even on improving certain back-end features of Linux that relate to gaming performance and polish.

That Valve are choosing not to do much of this kind of stuff suggests they've got the Steam Machine, and Linux generally, on the back burner. Frankly, I think they've made their point to Microsoft now and they just want to keep those projects alive enough to restart at short notice, effectively saying to MS, "We're packing. We won't pull the trigger if you don't threaten our business model again."

There's an open source driver for the Steam Controller. I wonder whether at some point it will be worth forking SteamOS? They could call it "VaporOS" and start building in the things we wish Valve would do with SteamOS, all open source so Valve can use them if they want.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

From the article: "Someone with more needs than that will know how to build a PC and will do it cheaper and better than an OEM."

I believe this to be true, but I don't understand why. Why can OEMs with full-time professional employees whose job it is to figure out how best to put their computers together not, you know, do it better than individual hobbyists with more limited time and resources? How is it, for instance, that out of stacks of OEMs selling Steam Machines intended for gaming, and even if the message was mixed vaguely intended as a console replacement, NONE of them apparently came up with a cheap machine whose dollars were devoted to maximizing gaming capacity?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yeah, "battlestation" is a word, it's been around in SF for decades. And OK, Apple is a word too, but you can trademark "Apple" used as a reference to a computer (as opposed to a fruit). But here we're looking at someone using the word "Battlestation" in reference, near as I can make out, to there being battlestations in the game. If someone had a brand of vacuum cleaner or air conditioner or something and decided to call it "battlestation", then that would be reasonable to trademark, and then reasonably nobody else would be able to call their vacuum cleaners "Battlestation" vacuum cleaners. But a trademark able to stop people from using the word "Battlestation" for a game about battlestations seems wrong to me.
Next they'll be trademarking a brand of actual apples so nobody else can call their apples apples. Then the rest of us would have to call our apples "oranges" or something, and then how would you compare them . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: DamonLinuxPLTF2 after The Tough Break for me is unplayable.

Huh. Tough break.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LeonardKVulkan is an important part in porting but it's also low-level -- which makes it harder to use for indies that do not rely on a 3rd party engine.

Mind you, that is not the kind of game Linux is badly lacking at the moment.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I dunno. No matter the this and the that and the overall growth of Steam and the survey methodology and so on, the trend has not been great lately.
I mean, we don't know for sure but I would tend to assume that however the dang survey works, it hasn't been changing over time to be progressively worse for Linux. So even if our numbers should be higher overall, a drop is a drop. And OK, maybe Steam is growing, but a drop still means if Steam is growing, we're not.

We need the Steam Machine to do well, and we need it bad. Crossing my fingers for a renewed launch with better features this Christmas.

Thing is, I really don't understand why Linux should be dropping as a proportion of PC desktops (which is the vague implication I get from the gradual drop of Linux on the Steam survey--I realize there's a lot of caveats between the one thing and the other, but all else equal that's what you'd expect that to mean). I mean, in terms of how usable and likeable the Linux desktop and general software ecosystem (including games) is compared to Windows, we're in about the best shape we've ever been except possibly for a brief moment when everyone was ragging on Vista. And we didn't have games then. Nobody's marketing Linux on the desktop, sure, but nobody ever really was. Linux off the desktop--everywhere else in computing from tiny to huge--just keeps going from strength to 500-lb-gorilla dominance.
So what's the deal?

View this comment - View article - View full comments