Slashman wrote on May 7, 2016, 14:14:
I really wish people would just stick to facts here.

1) Every developer has complete control over the forums for their own game on Steam. They can moderate and ban people who violate their rules as they like. I've seen this done many times to many an idiot.

Stem has always had the policy of giving the developers the tools and letting them do things their own way. I'd be very surprised if they ever personally tried to moderate a developer's forum unless things were way out of hand or violating a law.

2) Developers have no control over user reviews on Steam. This is as it should be and it would be bad IMO if they ever did. Now this is where Steam CAN, to a certain extent try to stop the more vitriolic/offensive type of posts in reviews.

But if Steam does take an active hand in moderating reviews, it needs to be very carefully balanced. I'm all for squelching racial slurs, attacks based on religion, sexuality etc. But you cannot, and should not, be banning or deleting reviews which are simply about someone's opinion of a game. It is a fine line to walk and I'm guessing would take a ridiculous amount of effort based on the sheer number of reviews that both already exist and get added every day.

3) Anybody who truly believes that Steam has not been the strongest force in ensuring the continuing health of PC gaming over the past decade is in complete denial. And pretty much every single indie developer and several of the larger dev studios will tell you as much. Bury your head in the sand if you want to feel cool for opposing 'The Man' but facts are facts.

Bluesnews comments don't have up-votes. If they did, I'd give this '+5 Informative.' Great post.

NKD wrote on Jan 15, 2016, 15:34:
Should you cut yourself off from the majority of recently released games, after already choosing to cut your performance to a third? Tough question. I'll have to think about that one for a while.

At least the Linux fanboys quoted in the article talk some sense: dual boot at most.

some games yes, some games work fine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in a bubble about Linux, but the gains achieved since Valve got involved are immense, and goes to show what happens when heavyweight industry support happens. That's not discounting Unity, SDL and other great tech enabling development outside of windows.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 15, 2016, 14:53:
Only if you want to spend the rest of your life searching for driver workarounds while not being able to play games.
And the games you want to play won't be available, ever, on linux.

Antiquated advice.

perhaps I should update my sig.

Ant wrote on May 16, 2015, 17:45:

ASeven wrote on May 16, 2015, 17:41:
MAME has come a long, long way. A great emulator that allowed me to relive a lot of my arcade life years, here's to more years of MAME.

Yep. I remember discovering emulators, like MAME, back in in college (mid (19)90s).

For me, I read about MAME in the back of a PC Format mag, when it was then supporting a whopping 9 games. Crazy.

Sho wrote on Mar 30, 2015, 22:20:
That's great. Game development is the last large software industry that generally doesn't open source very much (there's the odd engine here and there nowadays, EA has thrown some of its libs over the fence in an ungraceful fashion, and Valve has gotten into open dev tools for SteamOS/Linux), but stands to benefit a lot from collaborating on infrastructure that it's a very suitable dev methodology for.

I think, although I'm not 100%, that all that 3rd party middleware doesn't help the open sourcing much. Tim Sweeney says as much here,

If we can get to a point where all of that can be convinced to open up ancient, legacy versions of their middleware, it might convince pubs/devs to do that same. Unlikely, but anyway.

It's a shame, as if we could get to a point where open-sourcing was seen as a natural part of the life cycle of a game, then we could also get to a point where your old games on Steam, GOG, Origin, whatever, continue to get updates, ports and fixes long into the future; running a legacy games catalogue becomes about cherry picking patches contributed to the repo.

Sho wrote on Mar 30, 2015, 22:20:
That said, the hard work only starts after you open up a codebase. Open source projects rise and fall mainly with their approach to community and governance.

Quite.

Jerykk wrote on Feb 22, 2015, 17:33:
They really need to put The Dark Mod on Steam with Workshop support.

was thinking the same thing the other day.

Any reason why Alien Isolation gets no nods at all?

Sho wrote on Dec 7, 2014, 15:59:

Clever Caviar wrote on Dec 7, 2014, 15:53:
Just remember, if you are a penguin powered gamer, and you want your money to go to the Linux devs, you need to buy it when the Linux version is out (assuming you don't have it already). You might be able to buy it now, not install it at all, and then fire it up when the Linux version ships, but I'm not 100% on that.

What's the basis for that? Do you have any hard knowledge that the porting houses sign contracts that scale their pay with number of licenses sold for the platform? I find that unlikely.

True, Aspyr could just be working to a flat fee, port it, and then job done. tbh, I'd find that unlikely, as that would be a fairly limited rev stream for a company like Aspyr, or Feral.
However, if it's a case of Aspyr get a cut of each Linux or Mac edition sold, how I've read it works (I think it was either Feral, or Aspyr explaining how it works*), the alt platform dev gets paid based on the number of activations. So, worst case scenario: all Linux gamers buy the game, fire it up on their Windows box, and then eventually play it on their Linux boxes.

*http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1644567 but I think I read similar, elsewhere. That's also from 2010, and the whole process is kinda opaque, so it may have changed since then.

Just remember, if you are a penguin powered gamer, and you want your money to go to the Linux devs, you need to buy it when the Linux version is out (assuming you don't have it already). You might be able to buy it now, not install it at all, and then fire it up when the Linux version ships, but I'm not 100% on that. (see Kristian Joensen's link further down. Linux gaming friends don't let Linux gaming friends buy games before they have a Linux port!)

This comment was edited on Dec 7, 2014, 16:28.

Prez wrote on Dec 7, 2014, 14:56:
Despite some negative reviews, I thought Origins was excellent. I think the trick for me enjoying the Batman games is letting enough time pass between playing each game, so the formula feels fresh again.

I didn't think Origin's deserved the negativity either, it was a perfectly solid presequel and I'd love to see more origins type stories/games, and also more done with that scene reconstruction mode. Even as smaller sized, DLC type addons, origins stories for the villains of Gotham would be really interesting.

As for this BatTank stuff, I think I agree with Cutter - just what is the point of this? It screams of, "we've made the world bigger! how can we fill it now?!? tanks!!!" Each one of these videos showing an armoured car blowing stuff up is a big turn off for me, and I've so far quite liked each game thus far.

emgarf wrote on Jul 3, 2014, 10:21:
The Bitmap Brothers title that I'd really like to see reissued/updated is Gods.

...and Magic Pockets.

There's a Java recreation of Gods, and Magic Pockets

Runs really well, but I'd pay money for something similar that hasn't butchered the original colour-cycled art style yet still somehow runs in HD.

No Man's Sky:

Still no clear idea of the actual gameplay. I like what I've *seen* of this game thus far, however I'm far too long in the tooth to have not seen a few smoke and mirrors demos over the years.

TangledThorns wrote on Jun 22, 2014, 13:45:
I just played all the Crysis games this year and the first Crysis still looks amazing. Crytek can develop amazing graphics, they just need a awesome story to go with it.

I've been playing through the first this year also (never played it at the time) and hats off, even considering the age of it, it's an amazing looking game to behold. I don't like saying "best ever!!!" but those jungles are pretty astonishing. Yet to try the others, but am aware of the negativity surrounding them.

SpectralMeat wrote on Jun 19, 2014, 11:03:
MGS looks pretty cool.
It is no longer platform exclusive is it?
Wish they'd have a PC version. I might actually end up getting a PS4 when that comes out.

The main man on it says he'd like a PC port. I've never really followed this series since about the first (which had a PC port I remember), but from what I've seen of this new one, I like the look of it. Kinda reminds me of a 3rd person Crysis (sans aliens.)

nin wrote on Jun 10, 2014, 08:54:

And you pc players will love it (especially the driving model, compared to 4)!

just replaying 4 now, with way more CPU and GPU power than when I bought the game many years ago. Give it enough PC grunt and the driving is a lot of fun, but it took a while to get to that stage. I hated it before, but I appreciate 4's driving model is... divisive, to put it mildly.

I bought this, my kids love VW camper vans and at the early access price it didn't seem too bad a gamble. I don't think it's the most cutting edge game ever, nor ground breaking, but racing around with your chums is fun.

However, they've been an example of how this early access thing should work: they're on the Steam forums all the time, speaking to the users, making changes based on it, plus they made it to v1 and a Mac port. If we were to take this as an example of a possible future of game development, it might not be such a bad thing.

But it's one example amongst many, and even though my personal experience was OK to good, I'm not sure it's warmed me to the whole early access model just yet.

I can understand his reasons for wanting to work on this, he's clearly deeply passionate about it, but it baffles me that supposedly smart people are happy taking a paycheck from such a scummy company.

Cutter wrote on Feb 23, 2014, 16:28:
I hope they're following up on Sleepy Dogs. I want more of it!

there's something called "Triad Wars" in the pipe, although you now know approx. as much as the rest of the internet on that.

Fantaz wrote on Feb 23, 2014, 15:32:
i just want to comment on your signature... Rockstar doesn't give a shit about PC. it's evident that they don't care such as the lack of proper optimization for the GTA4 PC port, and that they haven't even announced a GTA5 PC port yet. they don't remember that GTA was originally a PC franchise? talk about pissing off their roots... i don't care about RDR but for gods sake release GTA5 soon on PC before i stop caring about the franchise. at least Eidos guys were smart and released a Thief game for PC.

I'm no fan of R* and their efforts at community relations, but a fair few of their games I've really quite liked. Not enough to plaster over the shocking coding (console and PC), but I'd be fibbing if I said I disliked the stories and characters they've put out over the years.

That all being said, after years of their antics, I'm now at the point where if I had to choose between two on release day, based on what I know, I'd probably go with Watch_Dogs over GTA5 (assuming they both released the same time). For the simple reason I'm wary of how they shovel stuff at the PC and say nothing. Certainly I'm not busting a gut to pay premium day one rates based on their track record.

As for the quote itself, it was a response to the ungodly amounts of cash they made on GTA5 in such a short time, versus the seeming unending non-answers from them on the matter of PC RDR. I found it a bit pathetic they couldn't just say "staff were burnt out, sorry, it sucks", or "odd license clause with Capcom, sorry", or "we thought *we* wrote bad code, but no, R* San Diego took it to a whole new, lower level. No-one fancied unpicking all that inline ASM", or whatever. Just the lack of transparency irked me, from a clearly resource flush game company.