I picked up Civ V at 75% off. Playing it, I couldn't get over the simple fact that I was in a position to play it on Linux at all. We've gotten used to it pretty fast, but it was only a couple-three years ago that there just weren't any games like that out natively for Linux.

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He's certainly less well known than Yahtzee, but Shamus Young of Twentysided and things also has a lot of respect for Spec Ops: The Line, and he's no fan of brainless shooters.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=16818

From this article (he did a couple others on the game):
"Some games are famous for their gameplay. Or their artwork. Or a big plot twist. This game might be the first one where the big selling point is the theme. Spec Ops asks the question: What would happen if your typical action-game badass lived in a world with consequences?"

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For the record, I don't dual boot at the moment. I have a Windows partition which came with my computer but which I've never yet booted into. I might someday though.
The problem of overcoming dual-booting is kind of multifaceted IMO. It's a bit like optimizing a complex program for performance (not that I'm a programmer): There are lots of bottlenecks all over the place and it's going to be a pain to get all of them.
But there are certain low-hanging fruit. Easier fixes or places where one fix would yield a big-ish speedup.

So for dual-booting, I suspect there are myriad reasons people do it, just because Windows has been so widely used for so long and so there has been so much software written for it, some very popular, some not so much, and other related parts of the computer ecosystem have been oriented around it for so long (hardware drivers and such).

For instance, Microsoft Office is a big barrier. LibreOffice/OpenOffice is making strides, as are cloud thingies like Google Docs. For my particular case LibreOffice is as good as MS Office and doesn't have the &$#! ribbon. But for many use cases it seems MS Office still has features other office suites lack, or they haven't managed to dig past its file format obfuscation enough to round-trip documents well. The good news is people seem to be working hard on this one.
For instance, Photoshop is a barrier. Again, the GIMP is very good but by many accounts there are things about Photoshop which the GIMP doesn't do as well. The reverse may also be true but that doesn't matter as much when Photoshop is the default that professionals build their workflow around. Also being worked on.
Actually, anything related to Adobe is a barrier, from Photoshop to Acrobat to Flash to whatever else they touch. If we could engineer the ouster of Adobe's upper management and replace them with people who didn't apparently hate Linux it would be a major victory.
For example, Visual Studio is a barrier. I don't know anything about that end of stuff but I hear it's the case.
Tax software is maybe a barrier; this is becoming less true because people are just doing their taxes on the web so the Windows-only purchased software of yesteryear is not such a thing.
And then there's all the little programs that are used by a few people each which nobody's ever written something that does that in Linux because it's a marginal thing and there aren't enough people using Linux for it to result in enough users to make it worth while. This is something that only goes away with time and increased user base and things getting more web-centric.

And then there's the gaming side of things. It's the same in spades. The big bottlenecks are the Very Popular Games, plus graphics driver problems. The little bottlenecks are all that mass of old games that will probably never get ported and aren't popular enough for anyone to have made sure they work well in Wine. I have a few of those; so far my solution has been to not play those games, which is annoying. I keep hoping Wine will get good enough that they'll start working.
The Very Popular Games will come if Steam Machines get a solid user base. So will the graphics drivers. And a lot of the Very Popular Games run very well in Wine because there are a lot of people who have worked to make that happen because they're Very Popular. Which is still annoying for the latest and greatest games, but older ones are fine, so at least there isn't a long tail of Very Popular Games which will haunt our efforts to dump the dual boot even after Linux is a popular enough gaming platform for the likes of Blizzard to target their releases on it.

Overall, overcoming the irritants which cause people to dual-boot is an incremental project. And in many cases a chicken-egg exercise (nobody will do it until Linux is more popular, Linux won't be more popular until someone does it). But one with plenty of hope; I thought the biggest barrier on the chicken-and-egg side was games, and yet here we are. I still say we could see regression unless the Steam Machine or something like it succeeds and creates the market share that the money boys need in order to continue targeting Linux as a platform. The current combination of fashion and prodding by Valve will not keep the momentum going forever IMO.

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Here's a marketing trick: Someone should offer a Steam Machine for, like, $100 . . . plus a $10/month fee for nothing in particular that goes for 4 years. That is, $580, but it looks cheap.

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Quoting: maodzedunI'm plenty pissed at Valve for holding the controller YET AGAIN. They promised us to have it for sure by the end of this month. The only reason we've not getting it is because somebody said: "Hey let's sell a glorified antenna for 50 bucks, but hold the controller for 7 more months or nobody would actually bother to buy the Steam Link". This is bullshit.

The odd thing is, wouldn't the Steam Link be a lot more useful with the controller? As things stand, you got a thing that will push PC games to your TV, but nothing that lets you play PC games while in front of your TV, no?
(I'm not so incensed about the delay as such. Whatever, it's ready when it's ready. Although missing this date would lose another Christmas window. A spring launch, not so awesome so whatever, if they can use the time to get their supply ducks in a row and co-ordinate well with the Steam Machine producers November is fine)

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Quoting: PsycropticJust because of this, I'm going to watch Mad Max tonight. I will buy the game of course too!

I wonder how hard it is to get hold of a copy of Mad Max these days. It was never seen by close to as many people as Road Warrior, the sequel that made it big . . . oh, wait, we're probably talking about the new thing, aren't we.

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Here I was, hoping it was about time-travelling Shakespeare.

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Quoting: linuxgamer

Quoting: GuestThat’s a terrible name.

I totally disagree, its an epic name cause its german.

Well, sort of maybe. My money is on, it's the god Vulcan mis-spelled because the version with a "c" was already taken. That would be the Roman version of the god of the forge, whose Greek version is Hephaestus. Vulcan is associated with volcanoes because forging, fire, stuff like that. It seems likely to me that the Germans got their word for volcano from Vulcan anyhow, having been culturally influenced by the Romans and Latin since way back (I know German is, obviously, not a Romance language, but it would be far from the only non-Romance language to borrow some words).

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Quoting: abelthorneSteamOS and the Steam Machines are only a way of acquiring new customers on Steam (the console players). They're not meant at all to replace existing systems, they're here to complement them.

I'm pretty sure that Valve doesn't really care is the Steam Machines are a failure, they don't even sell them. If they fail, the loss will be on the hardware partners. they won't promote them as a way to replace Windows setups, they'll do it as a way to have a second PC for the living room. The fact that it runs Linux is really a detail.

I don't think that's true. Gabe was fairly specific about Linux being a strategic move. He said that he doesn't like where Windows is going and he prefers open platforms. It has also been speculated that Valve fears Microsoft's move towards app stores threatening Steam's business model. It seems likely that Valve would prefer to kill Windows and is committed to Linux as one of the main means to that end and to some other goals relating to gaming and the directions they want to take their business. But I'd agree that they're not willing to push that ambition hard enough to piss off their existing Windows customers. They're far better off trying to win with carrots than sticks; they don't have the leverage to do it the other way even if that were their style which I don't get the impression it is.

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A few different reactions. First, I'm confident the Steam Machines will be along. No idea how well they'll succeed, but Valve and Gabe seem to have long time horizons on their major projects; a delay is just that, a delay while they get their ducks in a row. And the negative articles don't bother me. In something like this, the old saying is true: No publicity is bad publicity. Articles that badmouth the Steam Machine sight unseen are articles that keep the Steam Machine in the public eye. No problem.

On the other hand, I'm not as confident as Mr. Dawe about the independent prospects of Linux gaming. Bottom line, the Linux desktop represents 1-2% of the desktop PC gaming market, well below Mac levels. Right now, there's Valve backing and there's a vogue for Linux ports. Is it a genuine trend or a fad? Well, in the end the question is whether ports can make money selling to Linux users. If there are zero Linux users, by definition they can't make money doing it. If there are hardly any, it boils down to costs vs. extra sales, so the costs have to be very low indeed before it's worth it. Now, game engines have moved towards porting costs being lower. But are they going to be consistently so low that 1% of the PC gaming market (not the whole gaming market, just the PC part) will really be consistently worth a port? It's iffy at best. None of this IMO has much to do with the quality of the Linux desktop itself, which by me is pretty primo; more a matter of specific historical issues relating to monopolistic practices and corporate marketing strategies.

The Humble Bundles kind of got Linux ports back on the radar a little bit, at least among indies. And the early Humble Bundles tended to sell a disproportionate amount on Linux, because Linux users were so starved for games that everyone who gamed at all on Linux leaped on them Humble Bundles like starving wolves and paid extra just to say "Thanks for thinking of us, you guys rock!" So that helped create momentum. But that effect goes away as more games get ported. I suspect there's an equilibrium level where the "Larger percentage of users buying" effect dies down enough that past that point, more ports don't get enough market share from the Linux side to make it worth while. I don't know where that level is. We may not be there yet . . . or we may be, and the only reason this many games is being ported is based on fad, developer cultural fondness for Linux, encouragement from Valve, and anticipation of a bigger Linux market soon from the Steam Machines. If some of those masking factors were to drop away, we might find the level of Linux ports would drop again to wherever that equilibrium turns out to be. And if that equilibrium is low, eventually game engines might let their support rot again, making ports pricier again and dropping the equilibrium still further.

So I think it's perhaps overoptimistic to say we don't need the Steam Machine. We need either the Steam Machine or some other source of strong Linux-as-a-PC-game-platform adoption. The iron is hot right now; Valve primarily and some other factors secondarily have nuked the chicken-and-egg problem vis-a-vis games and the Linux platform until it glows . . . for the moment. Accelerate Linux desktop adoption right now, or see successful advent of the Steam Machine as a major platform, and it could stay nuked, with larger market share leading to more ports and vice versa in a virtuous cycle. Fail to and we could end up pretty much back where we started, albeit with a nice back catalogue of games. Mind you, I could be wrong--if the cost of porting has become so cheap that doing it is a no-brainer even with very few sales. Or if the pro-Linux mindset among game developers has become so strong that it can ignore market realities on an ongoing basis.

Ultimately, sometime in the indefinite future, I do think the Linux desktop will rise no matter how this stuff works itself out right now, just as Linux has come to take over so many other spaces. And at that time the gaming issue will solve itself. But it will happen much sooner if Valve's play for a Linux gaming platform is successful.

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