Pretty much meaningless after TLOUP1 launched as “Steam Deck Playable” and was nowhere near that. I don’t expect FromSoft to screw it up, but the label has been shown to not be a guarantee.
I don't think it's particularly controversial these days to say that Linux gaming is way ahead of Mac gaming, so I'm not sure that part is suprising, beyond the notion that in other metrics the OS split for those is more like 15% to 5%.
I mean, the Mac side was celebrating this month that Cyberpunk finally runs natively on it, and it is borderline unplayable on most of the hardware out there, gets comparable to what? A 5060? on the very top end.
I read in that two missed opportunities: One, Mac gaming should get so much better. Two, somebody on the Linux side should really start taking non-gaming compatibility seriously.
The Mac thing is two-fold. Apple moved to new architecture before it was primed and ready for gaming, and Valve has been slow to adapt Steam to it. Apple’s solution, which will not work, because Valve tried the same thing a decade ago, is to juice the market by funding ports. Apple’s putting far more money into it, because it’s such small potatoes on their balance sheet, but the result will be much the same. This isn’t a situation where getting a few heavy hitters will solve their library problem and get everyone else to fall in line. The problem is Apple and its platform are hostile to getting this sort of game on it.
It's genuinely more complicated than that, honestly. Apple did a great job of pretending these ARM devices were on par with desktop PC hardware when they... kind of aren't, in absolute terms. I wonder how much of an incentive they have to keep doing this if the result is their top of the line five grand devices start to look like mid-range PCs and the bullshit way their naming conventions are designed starts getting exposed by widespread FPS counts on tentpole game releases. I genuinely don't think Apple wants to have that conversation.
So if anything it seems weird to me that they are focusing on this. Honestly, getting triple-A releases ported to phones and tablets seems like a much safer bet. I guess it's just hard to leave the laptop and desktop users entirely out of the loop for no good reason, but they have a lot of experience doing just that, so who knows.
It seems pretty obvious that unifying the software is the next step for them after unifying a lot of the hardware. what that means for gaming on their devices is anybody's guess.
And of course I don't particularly care because... I mean, macs.
The newer macs are also relatively in a state of flux with apple figuring out what works and what they want to invest in. Brew didn't work well for a good year after the M1 made its debut. I remember trying to get things working and it was a nightmare. It's still somewhat difficult to program for. And game devs often will do whatever it takes to release a game...which can include some strange code that only works on a blue moon or s very specific.net version.
It's getting better each year or so but I can't blame valve wanting to just skip all the ballony untl it's in a better place.
You're not wrong, but I don't know if it should be a Valve thing anyway. For one thing, I am not comfortable with Valve owning all of PC gaming in the first place.
But from their perspective, it's one thing to own compatibility in a system they don't pay anything for and effectively can own and another to go do work for a bigger fish. If Apple wants big PC games to run on their hardware Apple can make it happen, presumably. I mean, Meta is keeping the VR market afloat single-handedly, and there's a chance you could actually make money with this stuff on Mac.
I do think it makes more sense for them to do that if and when all their hardware is running the same OS, or at least the same software. They don't seem to have made up their mind on whether that should be a thing, even though it's very clear it should be a thing.
Agreed, I dont think its a good idea to have ANY company own near 100% of the market with PC gaming. Can you imagine the DRM and copyright protections shenanigans you could pull if you were the only effective player? Valve is mostly benevolent....but theres always a chance it goes downhill with just one asshole.
I dont claim to be in the video game industry only a dev. And macs can be easy or VERY hard to develop under depending on the underlining tools. If they dont have them....you basically have to build them from scratch (like Expo/mobile development, brew custom mac specific libraries, gnu tools that use a language not supported, etc... etc... ). If they have the libraries already installed, and is supported by apple, it becomes a breeze and, best yet, they are better than windows at less breaking changes. Not security mind, but breaking program changes. Or at least it seems like it last 10 years or so.
The M1 Arch was a departure but not from their own tooling, just everyone elses. That from what I understand a lot of games stopped working right when the M1-3 became a thing in steam. But again someone else can correct me if im wrong. I saw the effects from a friend trying to get steam working on a newer macbook pro but I am again not an expert when it comes to the gaming industry.
An interesting fact: English-language adoption of Linux on Steam is over 2x the overall, all-language adoption. This mostly cuts out Chinese (25% of users), Russian (8% of users), and Spanish (5% of users). Seems America and Europe is adopting at record pace while China isn’t.
and I’m so amazed how well it just works with proton.
Yeah dude!
I’m relatively new to Linux, so I don’t really have any experience pre-proton. But I get the feeling that there are TONS of people who haven’t tried it in years, that truly do not understand how far it has come. I’m sure they’ve heard that before, etc., but I can say that it’s 100% true this time.
If you haven’t tried gaming on Linux since before the Steam Deck came out, I implore you to give it another shot. Even better if you use a gaming-oriented distro (I’m on Bazzite now, and it has been wonderful).
To add to this, the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]
It should help since they’ll be able to hire more people to work on the project. Something badly needed dwith Godot is a proper testing workflow. They currently rely on the community to report bugs, and that’s just not an efficient workforce. Also doesn’t cover all the possible edge cases.
Playing devil’s advocate, I’d argue the in the wild community testing is more likely to uncover an edge case that the formal testing didn’t envisage…? 🤷🏻♂️
I’m with you on that. I feel like open source is the best possible way to security audit and test issues. As any issue will be out there to see, most proprietary code ends ups being years of duct tape which wouldn’t fly if a large community of different backgrounds took a look at the code
To be fair, every single project regardless of proprietary or open source has a backlog like that. It’s just that open source projects show the backlog and don’t have marketing people telling what is and is not in the backlog.
hmmm, should i support the studio capitulating to a fascist regime? Or should I support the studio being bought by murderous religious fundamentalists?
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