I agree with you however I have one barrier to entry that others haven’t elaborated on.
Firstly, I’ll say how they could overcome some of the other challenges mentioned.
Steam would just have to add the ability for developers to upload android builds of games alongside the windows, Linux, Mac builds. All of a sudden, users would have huge, existing libraries of games. Most games built with Unity can target Android. I suspect a lot of indie developers would happily add the build.
Leaks have implied they were working on an arm emulator/translation layer but I assume this had to do with VR prototyping. Possibly the same effect as above but so many more configurations to target, they couldn’t handle it the way they do with steam deck.
Require/recommend to users to use a controller on Android
If either or both of those first 2 points succeed, Valve doesn’t need to do much more to ensure the utility of Steam games on Android. PC gamers are considered among the most willing and able to jump through hoops for a result. Going to a website to download the steam store plus a little warning on Android wouldn’t stop a reasonable percentage of them. It wouldn’t stop me.
It’s almost 0 risk to them, right? Right? I don’t think so.
Here’s the big barrier I mentioned. I assume they have a not-insignificant number of sales through the the android app. If they start allowing users to install android games, Google is going to stop them from having purchases in their play store app. And while I said that users would install their app from a website, what percentage of users would do it? How many fewer PC game sales would they make (from the Play Store app) in order to let their current users play games on Android?
Additionally, what would Steam do if they started getting android-only games being submitted. Or mobile-quality games dominating their store? Does this dilute Steam’s identity?
Additionally, it might be something they’ve discussed but they would have rather focused on steam deck-type gaming for mobile. Or perhaps an ARM-based steam OS+steamdeck approach would make more sense for them and then the difficulty/cost (and opportunity cost) increases do instead they simply don’t pursue it.
The cross-buy thing is something that Gog or Epic could do but they don’t have nearly the same “customer profile” (size, behaviour etc) so it isn’t as likely to have the same impact.
Regardless, in my view you’ve asked a great question and it’s a solid idea.
They would have to distribute it independently. Google would have no say in the matter.
That’s exactly my point. The current app lets you buy PC games despite being distributed through the store. If you can buy Android games on it, well, I doubt Google will ignore it. And even if Google was okay with it, there’s no way to easily communicate to users who start using the app there that they need to download another app from a website.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I’m just saying I think there are reasons they haven’t done it (yet?). I think they certainly must have considered it. I’ve certainly been wondering about it for a long while too.
why not both?
Sure. I would assume they would do it the same way as steam deck, where that’s the priority. The wide variety of phone specs on the market might have an impact on how they could support it etc.
That’s exactly my point. The current app lets you buy PC games despite being distributed through the store.
And they could continue doing so while also distributing a separate app independently that allows you to buy Android games.
Notice if you try to buy a movie from Amazon on Google TV they redirect you to the website. They could do the same or redirect you to the non-Google version.
I’m just saying I think there are reasons they haven’t done it (yet?)
I agree, I just find it very curious what those reasons are.
I don’t think they would get away with selling games in the app if games were playable on Android (demonstrating Android compatibility). I think they would have to do what Amazon kindle does and tell you to go buy your game somewhere else.
Now that I’m thinking about it they’d probably have to de-list those cross-platform games from the Google app or make them unavailable, which would probably lead to a lot of confusion.
What actual genre do you like to play? Might get some more relevant recommendations. Otherwise, top-down is just a POV and there are a ton of genres that have been made this way.
Factorio - Factory Building
Door Kickers - Tactical CQB
Dwarf Fortress - Roguelite Town Management
The Battle for Wesnoth - Turn-based RPG
GTA1/2/London 1969 - The best GTAs
FTL - Roguelite space adventure. Real-time with pause.
All my games run (almost) perfect and (almost) everything has been working perfectly. Overall it is much nicer than Windows and isn’t that hard getting used to.
They are on that website, not just only the activator. They are better than retail isos because they come without bloat. I use iot LTSC permactivated with HWID on all my PCs and VMs
Man, I really tried today to get Linux on my Framework laptop.
I can’t believe how goddamn frustrating the experience has been, and I’ve dabbled in Linux for decades.
I try Mint. Install as a dual boot… Installation done. Reboot. Straight into Windows. Check partitions and nothing has changed.
Try again. All seems fine. Boot. Some error screen that won’t let me get into Mint.
Do this like four more times with no luck.
Tried Ubuntu. No easy way to install as a dual boot unless I want to mess around with custom paritions. Also, GNOME sucks ass, but Ubuntu seems way more polished than Mint.
I did get mint on a mini PC I have running through my TV. But audio wasn’t working, so that took a while to sort out. And the onscreen keyboard does nothing on the lock screen. So unpolished, and I have no idea why it’s recommended “for beginners” when it feels unfinished.
With windows, there’s no messing around. Everything just works. And I fucking hate that I feel forced to choose a miserable, hacky, terminal-based experience with countless hours of installing shit through commands… Or a smooth, reliable, easy one with bloatware and spying on the backend. Goddammit!
Yeah with Linux if it doesn’t work you’re often just screwed.
I can recommend a rolling release distro, having the latest and greatest can sometimes give you bugfixes that are critical for your setup. It can also break stuff but nothing a rollback won’t fix.
Another reason to prefer rolling release is the upgrade path. For Ubuntu upgrading is just awful when you do any tinkering. I ran Kubuntu 20.04 for a while and because I had some custom package sources installed it wouldn’t let me upgrade to 24.04. Nobody could help, and the package manager is awful it doesn’t let you trace which packages are blocking the upgrade.
I’m kind of miffed that everyone is recommending mint as a starter distro because as soon as they start looking for guides on how to tinker there is a high chance they are going to make their system un-upgradable.
Yeah with Linux if it doesn’t work you’re often just screwed.
This has been my experience for decades. Even if it works, something will suddenly stop working and I’ll have no way to fix it without hours of research and messing around.
With windows, I can fix anything quickly through the GUI. But haven’t had to in a very, very long time.
I’m going to look at other options. I want to stick with a distro that is fully supported by my laptop to avoid even more issues. But the options are limited.
Had the completly oposite experience: mint installed in 2 hours with everything working. No bloatware, no bullshit. Biggest obstacle was, that changing the device bootorder is nog enough- uefi seetings needed some love to. I can imagine that this is not necessery if you do not use dual boot ( like win…talking about experience…)
For me everything works perfect- mint is my primary os now
After posting, and a little soul-searching, I decided to install Ubunu and give things another try.
Installation failed the first time, seemingly right at the end! Tried again, and it went through.
Set things up, and things seem to be OK. I’m only running a browser, and needed to try a paid windows program through Wine, which installed and loaded up without any real issues.
I go for a walk during lunch. Come back to the Linux login screen (expected, as I’d assume it locks like Windows). Log in… blank slate. All my work was closed, and it was like a fresh reboot. What the hell??? No error messages or anything. I literally have the browser and like a few other programs installed, so it’s not like the system is a mess from years of bad software installations.
Sigh…
Then I try another paid Windows program used to convert video files. It seems to work, but it’s not detecting my Intel graphics card. As I look for help on how to do this (officially, from my Laptop vendor), I get pages and pages of things to try… all through the terminal.
I mean, this is stuff that just works on Windows. No messing with stuff.
I really want Linux to be my daily driver, and even I type this from Ubuntu, I can’t help but feel like something is going to catastrophically self-destruct at any moment, and that kind of anxiety is never felt while using Windows.
I couldn’t imagine setting linux up for my wife, if this is the experience I’m having.
Your experience is not invalid, but It’s fucked up that you’re giving Windows credit for “just working” when Windows doesn’t even try to support dual booting. In fact the reason Linux is having so much trouble is because it has to tiptoe so that Windows doesn’t break.
If you don’t like Gnome or Mint Cinnamon, why not try KDE? Something like Kubuntu, perhaps? I use Fedora KDE myself.
From Window’s perspective, there’s no need to dual boot. But I get what you’re saying. I’m not trying to defend Microsoft, and think that they’ve been enshittifying windows for years now.
But everything works without jumping through hoops. And if it doesn’t, the fix is usually very easy and done through a GUI 99% of the time.
But you are right. There are many flavours of Linux to try. Aesthetics aren’t my priority, though. I do need things to work without spending hours trying to figure it out.
I’m at an age where messing around on my computer for days on end is long gone. 😵
Gonna be a useless recommend, but try Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora Silverblue gaming with tweaks to make it easier).
I’ve had some friends with similar complaints about Mint having one off issues with hardware, which is usually because its downstream Ubuntu which means kernel support can be all over the place.
Fedora is probably best bang for buck in latest stable release without entering the realm of unstable rolling like Arch. Really the only thing I’ve found that it lacks is more varied support for ARM boards out of box and a cross compile package for ARM from x86.
By default it does have a slightly annoying repo setup because software that isn’t FOSS ends up on RPMFusion which you have to enable as a user, which is why I suggest Bazzite, which also uses the immutable Linux design which makes it much easier to prevent from breaking or fixing by rolling back a change.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Bazzite works around the issues with american patents, if that’s the problem.
If your problem is american control over your computer, I assure you, they have extremely limited control, at best, they own the package manager, which only runs if you tell it to.
I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the “observe” console command let’s you play as a spectator, you can use the “play” command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
I’ve done this a few times in different Civilizations games to see how the computer would react to things like an abundance of gold or over powered for the current turn units.
A lot of the time it was underwhelming with them not really utilizing what was given to them or switching up their strategy. With gold they wouldn’t buy units or tiles and would still demand gold during trades or for peace for example.
Ahh good old times, jumping from building to building like hulk. It had good story too which I didn’t appreciate the first time I played cause I was young and couldn’t understand it fully.
Return to CW runs on a potato and it’s lots of fun. I know there are lots others, but just throwing that out there. I think it would be challenging to find a modern PC that couldn’t run it.
This post is pure unfiltered 100% awesome! I find I’m frequently having anxiety attacks these days because of… <gestures at everything>, but reading this massive in-depth writeup, just letting me soak in a hobby I love but don’t have much time for as I’d like, has relaxed me more than anything has in months. Thank you so much! 🙏 I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for these in the future!
This is honestly so sweet to read, thank you for making me feel like my silly little posts can make a little bit of an impact :)
And, I think everyone here - especially on Lemmy - understand that feeling of things becoming ‘too much’ lately. Heck, I just ran away to Rome to drink coffee, play chess and avoid real life because it all feels a bit much right now. So I understand completely!!!
I think the only way they can introduce a subscription without backlash is if they make it a purely community thing with a few bonuses. Give people access to special insights into their preservation efforts, special interviews, voting rights, Q&A, occasional free game, etc. If they lock features behind this like more cloud storage, or other stuff that customers simply expect with their game purchase, the press will be all negative.
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