Quoting: fabertaweIt must be an age thing but I can't see the obsession with having to have all the latest so called "AAA games". How much does this cost to buy all these new releases at full price?!

I've got over 400 Linux games :O and have played a fraction of them to completion. If I never buy another game I will still never play all the GOOD games I haven't yet touched.

Quoting: wolfyrion3. No gamer will want to play a game after 1 or 2 years if it will be ported.

I will and do ^_^ I actually prefer this as all the bug fixes and DLC are included and it's cheaper!

Apparently you and I aren't gamers, nevermind the ludicrous amount of hours Guild Wars 2's /age command shows me or how many times I've beaten Borderlands 1 & 2, or the fact that I'm more familiar with the lore of the Forgotten Realms than the history of my country.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyLinux should, however, improve support for Chinese typing if it's bad. Fundamentally I think open source should be just as good for Asians as for everyone else; piracy only solves one problem with Windows. It would be nice to see them turning on to the advantages of Free Software.

Unfortunately, these being community-based projects, you need skilled and knowledgeable people who care about that issue to work on it. The people who already work on Linux OSes but know nothing about Chinese can't do much about it themselves; and if Linux isn't already attractive for Asians, there's little incentive for Asians to work on developing it further. It's a vicious circle that would be hard to break without someone deciding to hire the right people to contribute open code to the projects. But between non-Asians and Asians who (hypothetically) have little reason to care about Linux, who will want to put that kind of money forward?

Quoting: mylkasince google is now "Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation", supports VULKAN and also planing a console do you think it is going to be a linux based console? like the steam machine?

From what little I've seen about that, it looks like Google would approach that from a game streaming angle, so while I imagine the client computer could be Linux-based, the game-running servers would probably use Windows to have the most attractive library possible. So not very different from other such services that have popped up in the past couple years, but with a bigger name and more solid infrastructure behind it.

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Quoting: BeamboomIf they need to heavily rewrite their own inhouse engine to make it work, that's an entirely different ballpark of course. But do that even happen, ever?

I'm not the right person to ask that kind of question, but one example I can think of as far as in-house engines are concerned is Carmageddon: Reincarnation; which, as we know, is unlikely to ever get ported as initially promised.

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Quoting: STiATThe only two companies who managed to make their games non-steam and have their own launcher and are not selling on steam are Activision/Blizzard with Battle.net and EA with Origin.

And a plethora of MMOs.

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Installing and running launchers from every publisher I buy from is pretty much the opposite of what I want, but nonetheless this is welcome news as it shows that they take their Linux playerbase seriously and are willing to invest in that segment of the market. I hope it does well :)

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Quoting: BeamboomI think it is so odd that a port is dependent on the sales on another platform. I see this often so I guess there is a reason for this, but how come?
I mean, I would have thought it was the opposite: If my sales of a release flopped, I would be desperate to port it to other platforms/markets to at least squeeze SOME more money out of it, while if it became a hit I'd be having my hands full handling the support and planning expansions on that one platform.

Isn't that more logical?

In addition to what Eike already pointed out, I think a lot of companies prefer to cut their losses and try something new when a product isn't making enough profit, rather than drain their resources further trying to salvage it. Since there is a cost to porting and they can't just "turn it on" to squeeze more money out of it, it wouldn't make sense to incur more cost than what they expect to make in return (statistically if nothing else); i.e. they might make more sales but actually lose money getting those sales. If they're running out of cash and have employees to pay, they'll wager on something completely new rather than a losing horse.

I think your perspective makes more sense at the opposite end of the development process: if you're going to make a game, you might as well build it with cross-compatibility in mind from the start to have a bigger audience for only a little more effort (compared to finding out post-release how many of your components have to be replaced completely, redoing a lot of the dev work and ending up with multiple versions to maintain and support).

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*Galaxy ;)

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Quoting: antisol(snip)

Post of the year? Post of the year.

Quoting: GustyGhostWhy might individuals strongly aligned with software freedom be interested in the trends of proprietary game software? More food for thought.

Easy to answer as far as I'm concerned. I don't need nor want to see the internal workings of the video games I play. Those companies and creators sell experiences. I buy the experience, enjoy it and move along. I don't care how it runs and I don't need to tweak it, unlike a browser or an e-mail client or an operating system. Same as I don't care for source files for the music I listen to or the books I read, or the recipes for the food I eat in restaurants. I'm interested in the finished product, bundled up and ready to consume in a specific form.

I find it amazing that people like the 0 A.D. crowd have been making an entirely open game and are actually getting somewhere with it. But at the end of the day I'm never going to actually look at the sources and it's completely irrelevant to my enjoyment of the product.

Quoting: elmapul" Perhaps only 100 Linux sales of an indie game are enough to make that version worthwhile financially, compared to the 10 thousand or so Windows purchases needed"

i dont get this sentence

I think the reasoning is that the devs are going to make the game for Windows primarily and it will require a very large investment -- and a proportionally large number of sales to break even. Provided that they are doing this step no matter what, the extra work to port to Linux represents only a fraction of the cost, and therefore doesn't require nearly as many sales to be lucrative in itself.

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Pretty much everything on my wishlist is on sale, but I'm not playing anything lately so I guess I'll wait until next year. Thanks for the Shadowrun tip, though, I wasn't sure I wanted to buy into that franchise and now I don't have to take a gamble on it ^^

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Owlboy still to expensive for my tastes but good game none the less.

I'd say it's worth it at the current price. Very comfy game :)

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Quoting: denyasisps- I still have my original 15+ year old txt files that I would type the commands into to save them along with my notes of what they did/fixed. I still do that to this day, although more and more of them are hyperlinks to the ARCH wiki and other places.

I can relate. Not with the first part since I could always reboot on Windows or use my laptop to look things up, thankfully, but I still have a "linux instructions" file tucked away for various fixes and tweaks ranging from printer drivers to Gnome or GTK tweaks, how to get MIDI to work (I still have trouble with that one) or useful ImageMagick commands for when I have some batch processing to do. Which reminds me I should look into fixing my scrollbars again.

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