Latest Comments by Kimyrielle
Changes to our Survey are coming, hopefully to make it easier and better
9 May 2016 at 2:56 pm UTC

If I may suggest - I would also think about dropping some of the questions from the monthly survey that won't ever see much change from one month to the next. Like what distro or GPU people are using. I...don't think people change these things all that often (and we see indeed very little change in the data). So I would rather ask these things like once in six months to identify longterm trends in these areas, and instead go for things more volatile than that for the monthly surveys. Say, which game(s) out of a list of 10 upcoming releases people are looking forward to most, or what games and/or genres are they playing right now, or what they see as the most pressing issues in gaming for the next 3 months.

Just an idea. :)

Parkitect theme park building sim now in Steam Early Access
6 May 2016 at 2:07 am UTC

Looks very interesting! I love business simulation games. :)

Feral Interactive are teasing yet another Linux & Mac port on their radar
3 May 2016 at 2:54 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: VlozThat's sounds ugly, but I personally prefer a lot of rushed ports with bad perf than a few optimized ones.
I mean, if your current pc isn't strong enough to play TR, at least your next pc will. I dont think that comparing windows/linux framerate is the priority right now when i see the tons of games i m awaiting on linux.

-Personally- I totally agree with you. I couldn't care less if a game only runs with 50 FPS in Linux but would run with 100 FPS in Windows. What matters to me is that it runs in Linux at all.

But this is not how a mainstream gamer thinks. These people fork out hundreds of dollars for graphics cards more expensive than the rest of their PCs just to make a game run with 110 FPS rather than 100, pointless as it might be. You won't be able to convince them to switch to Linux as long as they get even minimal better performance in Windows. But if we want to see more AAA games on Linux and more developers supporting it, getting more attractive for mainstream gamers is what needs to be done.

User Editorial: A different approach to calculating the popularity of Linux gaming on Steam
2 May 2016 at 8:55 pm UTC

Looking at the data it does seem that so far Linux didn't manage to bite much into the market share of other OSes. But it's also not surprising given that we're still lacking a lot of AAA titles and also suffer from many games performing worse in Linux than Windows. My guess is that there won't be too many converts from Windows until this is sorted, and that means we're likely stuck with the 1% share for a while. The good news is that the absolute growth we are seeing might convince more publishers to invest into porting their games, which (together with Vulkan) might help sorting the two obstacles over time.

PS: I never got the survey for Linux either. I am often getting it for Windows when I boot that to play MMOs (most of which don't even use Steam)...

Beat Cop is a rather unusual looking 80's inspired pixel art style adventure & time-management game
30 April 2016 at 11:05 pm UTC

I have to admit I one of these people who tend to dismiss the flood of "retro" pixel art in recent games as "Ok, you guys were just to cheap to hire a 3D artist", but I have to admit that in the case, it fits the theme well. Looks interesting.

Kerbal Space Program 1.1 released, updated to Unity5, new interface, new tutorials and more
24 April 2016 at 3:05 pm UTC

That game teaches one that rocket science is in fact, complicated. :D

But really, I love it.

Paradox posts pictures of Hearts of Iron IV development on Linux
17 April 2016 at 6:07 pm UTC Likes: 3

Paradox might be my overall #1 favorite publisher. Not only because they have shown us great support, but it's also one of the few ones you can blindly buy games from and know they are good.

RuneScape Linux-native NXT client available to pre-load, they also have a trailer
17 April 2016 at 3:39 pm UTC

Quoting: fingers
Quoting: Kimyrielle
Quoting: fagnerlnThis will calm down MMORPG's orphans? :P

I am afraid not. Runescape -is- the closest thing to a mainstream MMO Linux has available, but this just shows how desperately Linux needs more MMOs. It's not anywhere near being a major title, even with the most generous of imaginations.
What makes a game "a major title"? RS reaches 100k simultaneous players daily and probably many times that active players. At the moment Twitch says that there are 12k viewers watching Runescape streams, contrast that with 10k watching WoW. Yeah, I know that arguments that can be made that it's still not a major title.. However, I'd say it's much bigger than many people realize.

I think the current top MMO titles by size of playerbase are

- WoW
- Guild Wars 2
- FF XIV
- Elder Scrolls Online
- Star Wars The Old Republic

A game not in that list is not a major title in my book, because these 5 games each represent a market share vastly greater than anything else has got (as in order of magnitudes greater). This is not saying that smaller games aren't successful. EvE Online is laughably smaller than any of these games but still successful. One of my personal favourites (Skyforge) is also not going to be a Top 5 title anytime soon, either. But I cannot name you -any- genre other than MMOs that does not have any of its landmark representatives ported to Linux.

RuneScape Linux-native NXT client available to pre-load, they also have a trailer
16 April 2016 at 11:30 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: fagnerlnThis will calm down MMORPG's orphans? :P

I am afraid not. Runescape -is- the closest thing to a mainstream MMO Linux has available, but this just shows how desperately Linux needs more MMOs. It's not anywhere near being a major title, even with the most generous of imaginations.