Depending on what you mean by casual, I consider Dead Cells a casual game, because whenever I’m bored I pick it up and play for a while, but it’s one of the hardest games I’ve played, however because it’s rogue like it doesn’t matter if you die a lot. Another similar example would be Factorio with enemies turned off, just go there, fix something, add something new and quit the game near the next thing you want to do so you remember it next time.
If you’re looking for a more traditional definition of casual games I tend to play those in the phone, I really like mini metro and super hexagon (although again, this one might not fit your definition of casual)
Steam also offers DRM-free games, and they don’t hide them behind a closed installer. I don’t like installers since they’re yet another moving part that can break, e.g. an installer built for windows 95 might not work even though if you were to extract the game binary from it it would work, so having an installer could make a game less compatible.
The ideal form of distributing games is compressed folders, I recognize this is less user friendly, but it is the format that most preservation effort uses (e.g. zip of a ROM, instead of an installer that installs the emulator+ROM like what GOG is doing).
I’m also not shitting on GOG, I believe they’re a good company, although I’m not their target audience since they refuse to sell me games I can play on my Linux machine. I’m all in favor of DRM-free and wished they would be more strict about it, that could convince me to buy some stuff from them. I did bought games from them in the past until I grew tired of almost no game having Linux compatibility and them not offering an official client, plus I noticed that some games had DRM and that was the last straw for me, because of I’m going to be buying maybe DRM-d games, might as well do it while giving money to a company that cares about my use-case.
I think GOG should be praised for some of what they do, particularly by their anti-DRM stance (even though they’re not 100% behind it). But what annoys me is that people seem to praise them as if they were doing this amazing work that no one else is doing, when most of the stuff people get overly excited about is just a marketing move and Steam is usually doing much better work in that regard, but is usually cited as the bad guys by the people who drank the GOG Kool-aid.
preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.
You mean software, your hardware is perfectly capable of running Linux+Wine. But again, this is a very personal response, my personal computer is Linux, therefore what GOG is doing means less to me by your own definition, which is why I don’t think it makes any sense to try to bring platform into the table. In fact, since apparently they’re responsible for the DOSBox version that a game uses, and there is a native version of DOSBox for Linux, this means that the decision of the game not being available on Linux is entirely on GOG.
Imagine Valve was financing an emulator, and GOG was compromising themselves to keep a binary updated with the latest version of that emulator whenever problems appeared on the old version, which of them is doing more for the preservation of games? The only difference is that the “emulator” Valve is financing is not the same as the one that GOG is using.
I’m not saying that there isn’t value in what GOG is doing just because it doesn’t affect me, but as is they can only help preserve DOS era games, so investing in DOSBox and hosting the ROMs would be a much more valuable approach (half of it they’re already doing, they do in fact host the ROMs, you just get 50 extra copies of DOSBox in the process). What I’m saying is that I don’t understand why everyone thinks they’re so great for doing what they’re doing, they could be investing in getting wine to run on windows which would be a much better effort for the preservation of games for your platform.
Backward compatibility in Wine is generally superior to that of Windows, as newer versions of Windows can force users to upgrade legacy Windows applications, and may break unsupported software forever as there is nobody adjusting the program for the changes in the operating system
Valve’s has been financing the development of Proton (and wine), so their efforts are to improve an open source tool that can be used and enhanced by anyone, which among other things provides excellent compatibility. That is a much better commitment to preserving games than choosing a handful of titles and updating their compatibility layer when the old one breaks. In other words, GOG is choosing a couple of games to update their emulator periodically, Valve is financing the development of an emulator for old games. The two things are not even in the same league for how much they help preservation of old games as a whole.
As for the question of windows users, I don’t think wine runs on Windows natively, but I assume one could use WSL as a stepping stone. In any case GOG’s method also doesn’t address Linux or MacOS users, so I don’t see how bringing platform into the mix makes any difference.
Yes… But actually no. For these games, sure, they’re committed to update the dosbox, but for more modern games there’s nothing that can be done on GOG since if the binary breaks for windows lack of backwards compatibility, they’re done because they don’t have access to the code. This works for these games because they’re being emulated, so they can maintain them by extracting the ROM and updating the emulator.
IMO what Valve is doing is leaps ahead, Proton can be used to maintain even broken binaries by providing compatibility with older versions of binaries from Windows. Not to mention the runtime library shipped with Steam for native titles.
It’s always mind boggling to me how GOG does something which Steam is already doing (sometimes, like this, they do a worse job at it), yet they get all of the credit as if they’re revolutionizing the way the industry works. Allowing people to download a game they bought, even if delisted, is the standard, and Proton is a much better preservation tool than whatever GOG is doing behind the stages, because it’s open source and if Steam ever goes under it will continue to exist, whereas on GOG solution you depend on GOG for it to keep working.
Yes, but if you already had it in your account you can still download it, which is the same thing GOG is doing, so not sure what all the fuzz is about.
So only games that are made from scratch can charge full price? What about reusing code? Engine? Animations? Textures? Lighting system? Rendering backend?.. Games are made of everything that came before, being angry about a game using assets that were originally developed for an older game is like being angry about a movie reusing props made for an older movie, should they burn all of the Christmas decorations between one movie and the next? Or can the studio hang the same glass ball on two different movies? Does that detract from the movie? Will you really only consider it’s worth the full price if all props were made exclusively for that movie?..
That read exactly as a footnote on a Terry Pratchett book, if you have never read Discworld you should, it has the same sense of humor that you do. For example another popular saying being bastardized:
Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life."
Wait are we arguing that the owner of something isn’t entitled more than someone who bought it?
FTFY. The problem is not with Nintendo being against emulators because of piracy, they’re against emulators even if you own the game and the hardware but want to preserve the hardware (just like they do in the museum).
And if the counter-argument is that you don’t own the game when you buy it, then by that same logic you don’t steal it when you pirate it.
With it, you can use your Xbox controller to move around the screen and type.
Does that mean you couldn’t before? Seriously people were playing around on a handheld that couldn’t even type?
Button accelerators are also available; these include the X button for backspace and the Y button for the spacebar.
WTF!? Isn’t that standard also?
For better movement patterns, the keyboard keys are aligned vertically."
Does this even make a difference?
In any case, the title is bullshit, it should be that will make windows handhelds close to typing on consoles which sucks. Typing on the Deck is a completely different experience, one that can’t be replicated in any of these handhelds because they lack the hardware to do so.
Also I forgot to reply to this on the other answer, but:
Err… You often don’t have the files drm free on Steam. Nor in an installable format (without steam).
Often you do, and an installer is nothing more than a fancy zipped folder. Also people usually like to compare Steam with GoG and claim that on GoG you get DRM free games and not on Steam, that is not true, both have either, although GoG has percentually more it’s still not 100% DRM free (nor is Steam 100% DRMd), it’s always up to the game developers.
While that may be partly true, (also likely) depending on the county you’re located, they’re not able to revoke the license though.
The same is true for Steam, laws are laws
So in this specific case you having the files makes a world of difference.
You also have the files if you downloaded them on Steam. What’s important is whether those files can be used on their own or if they’re protected by some form of DRM. If the files can be used on their own it doesn’t matter if you got them from Steam, GoG or a physical disc. If on the other hand the files are DRM protected you having them is useless, whoever controls the DRM controls your files, again regardless of where you got the files from.
No, watching a gameplay won’t give you the same experience. Keep avoiding spoilers, it is really best experienced blind, although knowing there is something to experience might weaken it.