I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
I think maybe I'm spoiled by the movies, but... I kind of hate it? I hate all the ways they had to cherry pick Dune stuff to turn it into a survival crafting MMO like Conan, especially in the parts where the lore fits worse than Conan. And the story is extremely videogamey. I think the new films are already a bit overly literal when it comes to choosing between the politics and the psychedelia, but man, does Dune Awakening do videogame-ass videogame dream sequences.
The disconnected, patchy reality of the original Cryo Dune got to the right feel accidentally, but there's something to seeing the setting reduced to a skin over Conan Exiles that seriously rubs me the wrong way.
That may be legitimate if the Windows settings are the factory settings. That's why I was pointing at memory management, because if you have a 32 GB device and you're assigning 3GB to VRam while the SteamOS version does something different things may get funky results in some games, especially running at higher resolutions and so on.
So it's entirely possible that the out-of-the-box setup of these machines on Windows and SteamOS are legitimately that different but that a better Windows config would mitigate it, which is still bad for something sold with a preinstalled Windows image, for the record. Or maybe the overhead of Win11 is just that big, I don't know. Would certainly love to see someone look into it.
I can tell you that bumping the default VRAM allocation on Windows handhelds has taken some AAA games from unplayable to quite solid in my experimentation, but I'm not gonna sit here swapping OSs and games back and forth for benchmarks. At least not for free.
Whenever I hear the Ubisoft narrative I feel nothing but boiling wrath for all the people who chose to not play the two Prince of Persia 2D platformers they made. I am thoroughly bored of their open world fare, but it's astonishing how reliably their most creative, better games are their worst performers.
Narratively it goes off the rails and it has some pacing and balance issues as well, but it's still a great game.
And how refreshing is it to see a great looking RPG that doesn't feel the need to be an action game? Maybe they can convince Square to stop making crappy button mashers and go back to making good to great turn based games for all those cool combat animations.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don't know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they're both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn't great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren't distracted right now, because there's an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.
That is a bit surprising, because I have used a Legion Go (non S) with both Windows and Bazzite and performance seemed pretty comparable across both. I certainly didn't notice double the battery life at any point. Maybe I just didn't bench the same set of games, this seems very specifically to yield best results on CDPR games. Or maybe it's because these benches are just for the Z2 and not the Z1 Extreme version, and this is very specific to that chip.
It could also be the memory management/config is different on the SteamOS side and some games are getting different amounts of VRAM across OSs? How do these stack up to Bazzite on the same hardware? Is there an advantage to brand name SteamOS?
I want to see more benchmarks from more people with more configs. Everybody in the tech industry is busy fawning over overengineered fans over in Computex and this actually interesting release isn't getting the right amount of coverage.
Well, for one thing the "GoG doesn't support Linux" narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.
For another, GoG doesn't get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn't get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.
Ubisoft's platform does get the hate, though. And EA's. And Acti/Blizzard's. And Microsoft's. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.
So after some soul searching I'm going to say I absolutely don't have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that'd be a very confused boner anyway).
I'm not "defending" anybody. I'm not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.
I don't know what percentage of the Epic Store's funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that's because it'd be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don't know how much funding that leaves for client development.
Like I said, I'd probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I'll also acknowledge they probably wouldn't see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don't give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they've actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.
Hell, if you look at it objectively they'd probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn't. Maybe there's a path forward there. I don't have enough of an inside view to know.
To be clear, I'd agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.
Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.
Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it's a leap of faith.
Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I'd have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I'd have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn't have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it's their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren't elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.
But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.
Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.
Yep. As I understand it it's via affiliate links, so if you buy GOG games through the storefront in the Heroic UI they get a small cut, but the Heroic devs say they have spoken to GOG reps and they are broadly supportive, so unless that changes I don't think their ability to support GOG features would be compromised any time soon.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
While I'd like to see more advanced features in other launchers (or, ideally, at the OS level in both Windows and Linux), I don't think it's realistic to expect new competitors to get to that level of support with 80% of the market fossilized around Steam.
They have a twenty year head start and a ridiculously dominant position. You're not going to get a proprietary controller translation layer or a full on video capture software right off the bat. It makes sense to focus investment on getting content first, since Steam gets all content by default by having an iron grip on the marketplace, and for business reasons other launchers prioritize multiplayer features first.
I don't root for any rich guy over another, but I do think competition is the best way you're going to keep them in check for a commodity market with little regulation, at least.
On that front the cultish adoration of Newell and all the actively rooting for a Steam PC gaming monopoly is... worrying.