Quoting: IlyaI think a good game should either be challenging or good at telling a story (or both!) There's really easy games that I've enjoyed because they had a great story (To The Moon springs to mind), and there's really hard games with no story that I've enjoyed (Geometry Wars), but I'm not a big fan of easy games with no good story.

*nod nod* One of the best games I have played lately is Life is Strange. It's...completely not challenging, just a really well-told story. I do agree that games need to be entertaining, otherwise we wouldn't play them. The part that's lost on me is when "challenge" became the ONLY defining part of entertainment for a computer game.
You might be on to something about the arcade origin of modern gaming. Arcade games were designed to be more or less impossible to complete to keep people inserting coins. They also inflicted boss fights on the world, which really have no good reason to exist other than intentionally delaying player progress with fights that are unfairly stacked against them and thus create the illusion of more content that isn't really there by forcing them to repeat it multiple times to finally overcome it. It's actually funny that players actually complain about games that try to finally rid of the archaic concept that are boss fights and replace them with something more original (I played Guild Wars 2 - the forum discussions started by so-called MMO veterans about the notable absence of raid/boss-fight content in that game were hilarious). But hey, it's what they are used to. Computer games always had boss fights after all, so that has to be the only acceptable way to design a computer game, right? :p

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Mind you I haven't tried the game, but personally "it's too easy" isn't what I'd consider a con argument against a video game. I don't get the "games need to be hard" attitude, personally. Watching a movie isn't hard. Listening to music isn't hard. Reading a book isn't hard. And yet we tend to do all of these things. Why? Because they are entertaining. I don't know why gamers tend to confuse "fun" with "frustrating", but as a longtime MMO player I find this strange attitude particularly prevalent in that particular genre. Apparently a MMO isn't a proper MMO unless it involves bashing your collective heads against a boss fight you will have to start over 20 times after watching a YouTube guide for another 45 mins explaining the exact step-by-step recipe how to beat it - for it derives its so-called "difficulty" from requiring a dozen people executing moves completely counterintuitive to the rest of the game's mechanics inside a 0.000001% margin of error, or die in the process. Maybe I am just a strange person, but I have yet to see a well designed boss fight in my life. They are either boring (boss has a lot of health and you need to spend an hour of your life whacking it dead, one health point at a time) or stupid (execute aforementioned counterintuitive steps that would never happen in a realistic battle to perfection and don't forget not to stand in the fire! Or in the red circles that kill you for...reasons. Or whatnot.)

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Theoretically it would be a great way to get funding for ports of games whose makers have no own interest in doing the port and take all the risk off them.
The problem is that the developers we'd most likely target with these campaigns (which is the bigger ones, as most smaller/medium studios DO support us already) have THAT little interest in Linux that they might not even give permission to run the campaign in the first place. I am not sure who in the community would even be able to get face time with somebody high-ranking enough in these publishers to be able to make such a decision.

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Don't get your hopes up. We got a LOT of truly awesome games lately, but they are almost exclusively coming from smaller and medium sized developers. The heavy weights have shown almost zero interest in Linux support so far. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Rockstar and Bethesda seem to be perfectly happy with Windows and the consoles at least. Their announcement of tying their games to yet another stupid DRM platform probably doesn't help, because not only would they have to port the game, but the stupid DRM platform on top of it.
Would I love to see FO4 on Linux happen? Hell, yes. Do I believe it will happen? Not until the moment they officially announce it.

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Is this a pure first person game? Please tell me it's not. This is the first survival game that interests me (I am SO not into zombies!), but 1st person games make me seasick. :S

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I wouldn't have bought it anyway (I tend not to buy games that force a male player character down my throat). But I have played plenty of games in the past that officially didn't support my graphics chard and ran just fine, so that wouldn't have stopped me. I did switch to Nvidia after my last AMD card gave up, so there is that. I had AMD cards for many years and was always happy with them, but their complete absence of interest to properly Linux got me in the end.

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I never had any interest in a console and never owned one...but the Steam Machines are tempting me. What's not to like about a console that can run the games I already own and runs an open OS on top of it? That being said, I don't think I am going to preorder. It will make a nice x-mas gift for my wishlist, so hubs can buy this geek girl something nice! :D

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Question 3 - Did you use a Windows partition for gaming last month?

QuoteI’m still pretty shocked this hasn’t really changed since the survey began. After all the crazy and unexpected ports we’ve had since then, I really expected at least a 5% decrease over this period and probably more. Maybe I’m just overly optimistic with this, but with all the releases which should be coming out from now until October, I still remain optimistic. Though if that kind of change doesn’t happen by then, I will be incredibly disappointed. It’s no secret that this is the figure where I really do care about seeing changes on a monthly basis.

It takes only -one- game for people they really want to play to keep around Windows. In my case that's MMOs (and Skyrim). There is none as in not one decent MMO available for Linux right now. Not. One. Don't over interpret that, though. It doesn't mean that I am not committed to Linux and most of the games I am playing I play in the OS I actually want to use (which...isn't Windows, trust me!). It just means I have enough hard drive space that I don't care about a couple hundred MB to be used for a Windows installation if I can play my MMOs for the time being. And don't ask me why MMOs are the -only- genre that doesn't seem to get any Linux love whatsoever, despite the many awesome other games we have been getting as of late.

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I get the idea that Valve needed to brand SteamOS. But at least they could have given SteamOS a logo that's not virtually identical with Steam as in the gaming platform. People seeing that will think "Ok, that's a game for Steam". A tux holding the Steam logo would have been nice. Or something that indicates that this is an actual platform. Oh well....

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Great to see this project growing!

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