Gaming with Wine was decidedly far worse before Valve started pumping money into it. Back before Proton was officially announced, there was a silent acceleration in Wine compatibility, getting better a rate we weren't used to, and it's in large part due to Valve partnering with CodeWeavers.

Maybe a few more ads in the middle of the thing I'm trying to watch, with no way to pause or rewind to catch what I missed, will do the trick.

Yeah, you're prone to having one of the biggest drops when you've got one of the biggest peaks. What a garbage article.

Palworld’s next update and early access roadmap are already on the cards, so it’s now up to Pocketpair to keep supporting the game and listening to players to keep them hooked.

NO IT'S NOT. The only thing it's on them to do is to finish it. They sell the game for $30, and this is not a live service game. They don't need to keep anyone hooked.

I'd be happy to shop there again if they put out Galaxy on Linux. Community launchers are cool, but I want the same support for automatic updates that their Windows customers get.

Oh of course, but I was particularly addressing "gaming with WINE was not that bad before the integration in Steam either", because it really wasn't great, as important and foundational as it was.

Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.

I'm not convinced they'll ever realize the problem with their strategy. They'll keep half-assing it every couple of years and wondering why they don't have a larger gaming audience.

Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.

30% is extremely surprising. I'd expect single digit percent gains, if any, on Linux. This 30% difference was in the opposite direction 10 years ago, when Windows had access to low-level graphics APIs and Linux was only on OpenGL. I wouldn't expect there to be 30% worth of frames per second to be tied to Windows bloat.

Please give us Galaxy on Linux, GOG, so I can shop with you over Steam.

No need to go down fighting. Valve is a private company. They can just say no.

Maybe if emulating the game wasn't often better than playing it on the only hardware the game is made for...

EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".

I'd say if you're buying it now, you should be doing so based on what it is as though it never gets another patch, because sometimes they don't.

The one that tons of people are enjoying?

Play Baldur's Gate 3, one of the two newest Zelda games, or Elden Ring without a walkthrough. You can still get this feeling, but due to economics, you're unlikely to find it in big expensive games anywhere near as often anymore. Smaller indie games can experiment more with this sort of thing. But basically, it's still out there.

We've seen games sold on Epic for less, and people wait to buy them until they're on Steam. I do it myself, even.

It's hard for me to take it that way when the author is citing player count numbers in the headline as though that matters at all in a game with finite content and a low cost of entry. Even you using the word "engagement" in what's meant to be an innocent way just has me thinking about how live service games have poisoned the way people speak and think about video games.

No, three years ago they contemplated buying Nintendo or Valve. Activision happened because those two didn't.

"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.

This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.

The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.