I never managed to fully get into Armello because on one hand I got bored waiting on all opponents to take their turns (even though I generally like turn-based tactics games) yet on the other hand I always felt like things were moving too fast on screen and I couldn't really keep up with every card being played and its effects. Kind of a worst of both worlds situation. Very well designed overall, though, and I would probably enjoy a tabletop version more.

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Just got an e-mail from GOG about their updated terms of use. Of particular note, they have a new third-party purchase feature coming up:

Quote6.8 We have a direct to account distribution feature (we’ll call it ‘GOG Direct to Account) where distribution platforms who partner with us would be able to sell games or other content to you, where you could choose for that game/content to be automatically activated within your GOG account, without the need to redeem any codes.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicSee this is one of those things that doesn't look "sexy" in a changelog for a distro and which most Linux distro users aren't crying out for, but look at how much it's hurting us. If Linux had great multilingual support, we could boost our numbers much higher and maybe already be at 2% on Steam. We have to address this problem somehow and make it a priority.

It's just one more area where fragmentation isn't doing us any favors. Every different desktop manager translates its own menus and configuration panels from scratch even though they all control pretty much the same settings, every take on a Bluetooth manager needs interface strings to describe essentially the same controls, every image editor needs its own documentation translated... Launchpad alleviated this problem in part by suggesting existing translations from other projects on the platform, but it has been largely unusable for years and many projects have moved out to other, more modern translation platforms. Some of those can leverage their own translation memories or pull suggestions from machine translation systems, but they're still scattered and often retranslating the same things over and over. Many smaller projects just give you a .po file to handle on your own or just expect you to search through their git repository and make pull requests for whatever language files you can find.

In many cases I've seen, joining and keeping up with a project's translation efforts is also more of a hassle than it ought to be. You have to create new accounts here or there, get approved, build a program from source (reminder: we're translators if even that, not programmers), use this or that translation tool, upload your translations as git pull requests or e-mail them as attachments to a random guy... It's a goddamn mess and more often than not you get no context for the strings you're translating (I'll never stop saying that context is *everything* in translation) and you don't have any style guide or term base/glossary to reference to ensure consistency with the rest of the project. Often as not you're not even sure whether you're supposed to escape quotes with a backslash or use HTML entities for things like non-breaking spaces. Every damn project has its own workflow and expects you to hit refresh regularly on whatever page their translations or code live on to see if there are new untranslated strings that need attention. As a result you have unfinished translations sitting idly for months just because nobody noticed that a dev added a couple lines of code and pushed a new release three months back, until one of the users notices English text in one of their apps and goes to fix it, after which it takes another six months for the localized text to make it into a release (true story).

It would be a *dream* to have a monolithic platform like Launchpad take the stage again and not only standardize the translation interface itself but really encompass and streamline the entire workflow and create an extensive, shared repository where, over time, localizers would spend more time reviewing suggestions and less time rewriting the same stuff or jumping through hoops.

Wow, I needed to vent.

Anyway, all this is to say that it would be easier to get translation workforce on board if the relevant people didn't have to go through all that, and easier to make a concerted effort (possibly via bounties or other types of crowdfunding) to enhance the Chinese corpus for example if you didn't have to settle on a limited set of distribution/desktop/programs to work on at the detriment of all others (i.e. if your contributions to one project's localization could be largely reused in several others).

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicIs there anything which could be done to make Linux more attractive to use in China?

In addition to TheSHEEEP's great answer, I've already said this on another article, but since the Linux ecosystem is largely built on free labour, you have to find people with the skills to do the job and the motivation to do it without reward. In this case, you're most likely to find Chinese speakers who could do that localization work in China, where Linux is quite unknown and poorly supported. So how many people there will have that kind of motivation? Chicken and egg problem once again.

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Quoting: liamdaweWhat the image tells us about Linux, is a similar story to Rise to Ruins, that Linux doesn't sell well in the Chinese market.

Quoting: pbI think we have enough proof now that the Linux percentage throughout Steam is held back by the rising Chinese market with their cheap OEM Windows on every device. :-(

I think it's also interesting to note that in this case, the game sold noticeably more in Japan, with even fewer Linux copies there (who is that one guy indeed :P). Even though China is a more populated market, its influence is not as weighty for this particular game.

Quoting: SpykerI think we need the equivalent of GamingOnLinux in French, to spread the word about Linux gaming here in France (u_u)

There was jeuxlinux.fr, but though it's still online it stopped updating around the time Steam for Linux came out, oddly. I don't know if it's just a coincidence or they couldn't keep up with the sudden influx and/or felt Linux gaming was now doing well enough that it didn't need extra coverage.

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Quoting: HoriNice! I like it

EDIT: But when I send comments while playing it, the page refreshes and I have to find where I left off :(( This needs fixing

Just open the download link in a new tab and continue browsing in this one :)

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Goddamn, I had to watch at 25% speed AND pause all the time to get a good look at the UI and read the text on screen. I hope they have a proper trailer coming up.

What I did see shows some promise, though. I like the idea of character skins as side quest rewards. Will keep an eye on this one.

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Quoting: pbSteam was the *only* online store I ever bought a movie from. And I bought a few dozen movies. Several reasons, but mostly fair prices and worldwide availability (there were some regional restrictions esp. on some series, but not that many).

Yeah, I was actually kind of hoping to see them expand their catalog since I don't really want to buy DVDs anymore but I'd like to show proper support to the few movies and series I watch nowadays, and every rental streaming service I've found seemed to not be Linux-compatible, be subscription-based, be more expensive than actually buying a physical medium or belong to Google and the likes.

At this rate I'll have to start walking to the store again *shudders* and hope the discs aren't borked on Linux.

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Quoting: scaineI suspect this is a (or another) reason that Steam devices didn't really take off. Playstation and Xbox both allow Netflix, Spotify and others on their consoles. Why would you buy a SteamPC that doesn't support any of that. Pretty ridiculous.

Quoting: dubigrasuGood thing I guess.
I feared at one point that Valve deliberately ignored having Netflix/Amazon/etc apps available on their SteamOS/Steam Machines because they tried to push their own movie store.

Can't people just use the web clients on SteamOS?

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QuoteThe issue we have as developers is that we are unable to finalize the Mac and Linux versions of the game and continue to simultaneously make such sweeping changes to it.

You'd think inXile would know to make their code cross-platform from the get-go by now. This ain't the first title they release on Linux.

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