The Steam Machine release is underwhelming and the jury remains out about how Steam Machines will end up selling, whether they will surprise us with their speed, whether they will be a steady thing which gradually works its way into the ecosystem, whether they will be a damp squib that fails.
But leave the controller out of that equation. I've looked at a lot of reviews of the Steam controller and I think it's actually quite a triumph. It's managed to get mixed-but-generally-positive reviews from the kind of people least able to like it. That is, the kind of people who review game controllers are generally long term, hardcore twitch gamers, with lots of built-in muscle memory reflexes, habits and familiarities and comfort zones ingrained deep. Throw a very different controller at them and with the best will in the world, they cannot rapidly bring themselves up to the speed with this new interface that they had with the old, and with the best will in the world they cannot make themselves feel intuitively comfortable with it. And yet despite all that, these people have overall had to admit that it's pretty impressive. And it seems to be very successful at the basic task it's meant for: Allowing people to play mouse-and-keyboard games in the living room which could never be played there before. Just that is something of a revolution.
The problem is that many reviews have concluded that while the controller is great, the Steam Machine and in particular Steam OS don't add anything. I want both to succeed, but there's something to that view. On the other hand, there are whole categories of games that a Steam Machine can now play in the living room that you can't really play with normal consoles. Take strategy games of the relatively complicated variety. We don't think of that as living room fare, but they're great for that--you can stop playing, chat with the family, leaf through a magazine, check your phone messages, all while playing some Civ V; it's turn-based not real-time, so it doesn't care.

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Quoting: tuxisagamer

Quoting: KelsAh, I'd entered without noticing the restriction (prior to seeing this article). Pity they probably wouldn't consider Canada an honourary UK member.

Isn't Canada more of the US's weird step-brother?

No. And if we were it would be rude to say so. Most of us cling grimly to our delusions of not being much like the US.

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I'm going to be really happy after Christmas to see some sales figures, if only so people will be able to argue endlessly about the significance of them instead of about whether there can be any. The whole question of whether Steam Machines will sell is starting to really feel sterile to me; we've thrashed it to death pretty thoroughly and I'm getting to where I just wish it would go away.
The other thing I've been wondering about is, what about the other machines? When I look up steam machines on Steam, I get a long list from various different manufacturers. Most of them are bloody expensive high-end things, but there are a few affordable ones. Any reviews of them, or comparisons between them and the Alienware? Not so far that I'm aware of.

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Quoting: LXeyrc1Hmm, disappointed about the performance issues, it's still early access though so I suppose it's to be expected somewhat.

Yeah, I think a lot of programmers optimize fairly late. They start with basic solid routines that will get the job done and are easy to put in and understand. Then when they're finished putting in and ripping out most of the stuff, they look and see where in the code the execution ends up spending most of its time and make that stuff faster. So no surprise if something is slow in the early going.

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Quoting: Farmboy0Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think anyone had suggested malice in this case. What would that mean--they deliberately announced and withheld Linux just because they hate Linux users and wanted to yank our collective chains? Yeah, that makes no sense. I buy Tuubi's "indifference" more, although it does seem like there's a certain lack of competence (and I don't mean, lack of experience--I've never developed anything and even I would have seen when planning the development that I should, you know, look at what it is that I've promised to do and, like, investigate how I would need to approach things in order to do what I promised. And there's enough helpful stuff out there; I could google variations on "Cross-platform development" for half an hour and come up with a better approach than they seem to have used. So, incompetence).

In general, though, I think this saying is invoked far too often. There is, in fact, quite a lot of malice in the world--and even more aggressive action designed to do harm that's "Nuttin' personal, just business". Relying on that slogan leaves you blind to, and potentially defenceless against, a lot of stuff that's going on.

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Shouldn't this have, like, a crossover with Prison Architect? Multiplayer with one player architecting the hell out of the prison and other players trying to escape it.

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Good to hear. With a little luck that fix will propagate over to Mint soon as well! (I'm sort of assuming the original problem would also have existed on Mint)

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Quoting: KeyrockThe game has potential and I especially liked playing a pirate who was like a real pirate (an ***hole) rather than the bogus romanticized pirates we usually get in games (rough around the edges but with a heart of gold).

I appreciate this, but I'd also like to claim that historical pirates weren't necessarily all that bad.
What we need to remember is the context, the "legitimate" maritime shipping industry. This was basically seagoing sweatshop labour with the rich systematically ripping off the poor. Horrible, dangerous working conditions, practically no pay, punishment that involved beatings and sometimes killings, with a good chance of getting laid off at any time and left to rot on some random shore with no money and no prospects; meanwhile, this was the engine by which many of the wealthiest men on the planet got that way.
So, some of them got sick of it--often after they'd been laid off as described above. I find it hard to blame them. Piracy was also one of the few ways people born behind the eight ball could get ahead--blacks, for example, such as escaped slaves.
Meanwhile, commonly pirates remembered where they came from and weren't really interested in hurting common sailors, and were also practical in wanting not to fight if it wasn't necessary. So the most typical approach to taking prizes was no violence to the crew unless the target fought back, and no violence to anyone unless the crew complained that their captain and/or officers were bastards, in which case things might get sticky for them. Often the heist would finish with an offer to the prize's crew to quit their crap jobs and take up the pirating life, with more freedom, better pay and more grog. All this is just a typical case. There was plenty of violence and some pirates were cruel as hell, but there was room for a pretty wide variety of personalities.

What's almost, although not completely, bogus is the impression we have of pirate captains; in fiction they always seem to be ruling the roost with an iron fist and stuff. But in real life this kind of captain was the exception. The most widespread case on the Spanish Main was weird proto-democracies. Not only did they elect the captain and sometimes change their minds and elect someone else, the captain was only powerful when an actual fight was going on--his word was law from a prize being sighted to after it was taken, but not the rest of the time. Plus, they also elected a quartermaster, who was in charge of supply issues and division of spoils--not subordinate to the captain, but with separate responsibilities.

(Asian and Mediterranean piracy may have been completely different; I don't know much about them)

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"We build the application with static libraries as much as possible with the hope that the Linux version can run on all kinds of distros and setups."
This. This is what I've been saying people should do. Compared to all the reams of stuff in a game, particularly video and whatnot, a couple of static libraries nowadays take up negligible space, so building that way is well worth it for the robustness and durability and general independence from the specifics of distros. Impressed by the Magicka 2 people.

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The Christmas season will tell us much. Come February or so we'll be in a position for an initial assessment of how the whole Steam Machine thing is working out. If it sells well or at least steadily, that will increase the percentage of Linux users on Steam enough for the rationale for Linux ports and cross-platform development to creep up the food chain an "A" worth or so. This in turn will mean that more and more, if someone thinking of trying Linux asks "But can I play my games?" the answer will be "Yes!", continuing to ease desktop transition. For Steam Machines, success will also feed on itself; the more they sell, the more games will be made for Linux and the more it will be worth improving drivers and etc.; the more games are available for Linux and the better they run due to improved drivers etc., the more Steam Machines will sell. If Valve manage a good start on those things, Linux could soon have a bigger percentage than Mac, at which point release of games on Linux will be practically a given except maybe for Blizzard.

If the Steam Machines don't sell, we'll need to think of something else. As to whether they will . . . the more people wrangle about that, the more I conclude that I have no idea what will happen. What works in marketing is not, near as I can make out, that closely related to what untutored intelligent people imagine should work, and there's a lot of luck too.

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