A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)
I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.
See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.
The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.
There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)
So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.
Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.
A 32 but integer can store a number up to four billion. If measuring RAM size in integer bytes, 32GB would be 0 bytes, because that integer would wrap around four times.
Assuming windows, if you right click on the executable, you may be able to choose to run it in a compatibility mode of some sort (like XP mode or something) in which case it should report smaller memory to the game, probably.
If it’s a game I’m going to get hundreds, or sometimes thousands of hours from, then I’ll pay more. If you look at price per hour spent on entertainment, it’s hard to compare. However, you often have to wade through a bunch of shitty overpriced games to find those gems.
There are some genres that were effectively created by the Japanese gaming industry (Nintendo and others). Pokemon and monster hunting/battling. Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest and JRPGs. Hell, I’d even say visual novels (like Steins;Gate and others). Japan has been hugely successful at exporting these genres that were already domestically successful. And so they became the reference standards.
But if you were to look at racing games, or flight sims, or dozens (if not hundreds) of other categories, you’d see that they’ve failed to break into these genres with any significant effect. Not because they don’t have the technical skills, but rather, they don’t fall into their niche.
Sure. Tales games tend to be high fantasy settings where each game is its own setting (much like Final Fantasy in that sense). They tend to have a lot of “war against heaven corrupted” kind of vibes. But largely there’s a lot of places to explore, NPCs to talk to, and a bunch of great little skits that trigger between your team. They tend to be lighter on graphics in exchange for length and depth of story. But it’s also somewhat linear, and carefully crafted and you can sort of lose yourself in finding the next story beat.
But they also typically have active combat systems where it’s about button mashing and combos. This is the part I don’t like :)