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It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

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Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#91

Post by simion314 »

nindalf wrote: post #78
debaserab2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform loyalty in gaming has always struck me as an odd phenomenon. You don't hear people raving about netflix or hulu being superior, but for some reason there is a huge fanbase for Steam itself. I mean, I don't mind steam, but I'd really prefer to have software that I purchase not check with a gate keeping entity before launching itself.

I bought several games in my childhood. Games that mean a lot to me personally because of how much I had to scrimp and save to be able to afford. It took me nearly a year to cobble enough money to buy Warcraft III. And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others. Every game I’ve purchased on Steam I can play right now with one click. Obviously others offer the same thin…

>And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others.

The disadvantage is that your game is locked now to your account, I cant just gift my games to my son. I have to make sure to keep my Steam version in Offline mode before he tries to play from his PC using my Steam Account. I wish there was a way to create family accounts and share the game or even gift them to your children, you could add some rules like you can't re-gift same game for say n years or whatever.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#92

Post by mdaniel »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #77
MaxGanzII wrote: post #10

Steam is a trap though, no? You buy software, but if you leave, you lose it all. Is that correct? there's no way to retain what you've bought?

Steam is not a subscription service so I'm not sure what you mean by "leave".

Google isn't a subscription service either, and people lose access to their Google account for completely arbitrary reasons, seemingly without recourse. I believe it's the same risk

I do make a habit out of using the Backup Games option in the Steam client, but I usually do that more as a caching strategy to save myself the 30GB download in the future than addressing the risk of my Steam account going poof

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#93

Post by bluely »

simion314 wrote: post #91
nindalf wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought several games in my childhood. Games that mean a lot to me personally because of how much I had to scrimp and save to be able to afford. It took me nearly a year to cobble enough money to buy Warcraft III. And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others. Every game I’ve purchased on Steam I can play right now with one click. Obviously others offer the same thin…

>And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others. The disadvantage is that your game is locked now to your account, I cant just gift my games to my son. I have to make sure to keep my Steam version in Offline mode before he tries to play from his PC using my Steam Account. I wish there was a way to create family accounts and share the game or even gift them to your chil…

Have you tried Steam Family Sharing? https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

It won't support every game but it should help you in your quest to share games with your son

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#94

Post by arendtio »

capableweb wrote: post #75
arendtio wrote: post #28

This past week, I witness Steam/Proton making it possible to play Age of Empires 4 just 4 days after its official release (and 2 of those days were Saturday and Sunday). That is just awesome.

A bit off topic, but what you think of the game itself? Big AoE 2 fan here, and a bit on the edge if I should try it or not.

Being a big AoE2 fan myself (pre-ordered the original version back in the day), I think you should try it.

For me, there is one major downside: The camera. I really don't like the 3D camera. I think it could be worse. So you can actually play the game without turning the camera, but what I don't like is the perspective. Sometimes you have to move to camera to another position, just to be able to click on a unit. I found that much better with the classic dimetric projection [1]. In addition, I like the art-style of AoE2 a bit better.

However, after putting these things aside, I love how they have adapted the AoE2 concepts. It still feels like an Age of Empires. But then again different enough to be AoE4. So if you like the changes from AoE1 to AoE2 then you might like AoE4 ;-)

The civilizations play more diverse than those of AoE2 so even with just 8, there is a lot to learn. The story telling of the campaigns is also a bit different, but it still has the concept of teaching some history. AoE4 actually has some nice videos about armor and weapons of the time. The fortress building in AoE4 feels a bit more like Stronghold with the ability to move units on the walls and I think that is a good thing :-)

So much after playing AoE4 for about 13 hours.

[1]: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/16757

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#95

Post by thrower123 »

squarefoot wrote: post #68
thrower123 wrote: post #29

I think it is incredible that after all these years the best target for Linux gaming is still a Windows compatibility shim.

The Windows user base is too large, and the cost of maintaining two versions is too costly for most publishers to even think of making two versions. They instead learned how to write Windows games that can be easily run under Linux with no or minimum effort. Once a significant number of people will transition to Linux because they have enough apps/games that do what they want under Linux, and the gain in stability, p…

It's just an interesting shift in the wind.

A few years ago I'd get flamed hard for suggesting that just building Wine-compatible Windows builds was smarter than trying to build native linux versions.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#96

Post by mdoms »

capableweb wrote: post #75
arendtio wrote: post #28

This past week, I witness Steam/Proton making it possible to play Age of Empires 4 just 4 days after its official release (and 2 of those days were Saturday and Sunday). That is just awesome.

A bit off topic, but what you think of the game itself? Big AoE 2 fan here, and a bit on the edge if I should try it or not.

It's more like AoE2 than 3, and in my opinion it's excellent.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#97

Post by mdoms »

MaxGanzII wrote: post #10

Steam is a trap though, no? You buy software, but if you leave, you lose it all. Is that correct? there's no way to retain what you've bought?

What you're saying is absolutely true, not sure why people are trying to bury your comment.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#98

Post by burnafter185 »

gravypod wrote: post #7
smallpipe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaching a single digit percentage larger user count in exchange for 30% of your revenue is questionable accounting

Valve does quite a bit more than just proton. 0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world. 1. They provide a community forum for your users. 2. Host downloads of games (sometimes 100s of GBs). They distribute the content all across the world and handle region specific laws about what can be sold, etc. They host content at edge so downloads are super fast. 3. Process refund requests. 4. Have one o…

They've also got a network of servers to help reduce latency in P2P games, which is actually pretty impressive to me. I don't know how effective it is, but as a GAMER any solution to latency is a great boon.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#99

Post by georgyo »

deng wrote: post #49
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with it? Having the Windows APIs turn into a portable abstraction layer is certainly amusing, but having wine sitting underneath the program is really nice (essentially for the same reason a VM is). For one thing, winedevs are way better at linux support than random gamedevs.

One has to remember what Valve tried to achieve. If I remember correctly, Microsoft back then announced that the Microsoft Store would be an integral part of the upcoming Windows 10. Seeing the huge amounts of money Apple/Google/Valve were making with their stores, they openly played with the idea to only allow application installations through the Microsoft Store, most importantly games. So Valve tried to break the…

> Fortunately, Microsoft being Microsoft, the Windows Store was (and still is) a terrible platform, so pretty much nobody is buying games there (except for Minecraft), and you can still install anything you want on Windows.

Microsoft has the disadvantage of being the biggest platform and the most scrutinized.

The Microsoft store is as good as the Apple and Android stores, but people using Microsoft are much more used to downloading something from the website they want to install something from. And developers don't have a strong incentive to send them to the Microsoft store from their website.

And Microsoft being such a big player, even time they make moves, everyone else digs in to prevent them from taking over. An example of the is steam machine.

Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta

#100

Post by labster »

speedgoose wrote: post #71
erikpukinskis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s an s-curve, then yes: it will never reach 100%. But if it’s an s-curve it will reach 70% much sooner than 891 years. In my opinion 1% of the Earth in 9 years is a triumph. Electric cars are not there yet and people are quite optimistic.

I understand your point, but I just want to say that electric cars are well beyond 1% in markets where they are for sale.

But electric cars have existed since the 1880s, so it’s still a pretty slow growth rate overall.
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